3 Target Objectives for Customer Salience Strategies

Objectives make the business world go round. Every stakeholder and team member from the very top of the C-suite to the background-working and customer-facing staff understand that they work towards achieving key strategic objectives on numerous levels. Overarching strategic objectives drive the company towards its goal, while smaller department-based objectives dictate each team’s actions as they do their part while working towards the overarching objectives.

Customer Salience is a strategy like any other in this regard, and thus requires objectives to work towards and use to indicate either success or failure. While this particular strategy is likely driven primarily by the insight or research team, or indeed a task force put together with members of different teams, there are overarching strategic objectives that are required to measure the success of your Customer Salience strategy. Each objective designed at the start of this process will be individually tailored to the target business, but there will be commonalities throughout all businesses attempting this strategic move. For example, most businesses would expect to work towards objectives such as:

Integrating Customer Salience into Team Objectives

With the aim of Customer Salience strategies being to understand and use customer insights within decision-making processes across the business, one of the overall strategic objectives should cover this particular element. The first objective should always be to increase the number of decisions stakeholders make while taking into account customer insights.

However, to understand whether an objective has been met, one of the key aspects should be that it is measurable. How can this particular objective be made measurable? Using the widely known SMART objective method can help in this area, to create specific, time-bound, data-based objectives that serve this purpose.

This means using phrasing such as: “50% of teams actively seeking customer insights to inform daily decision-making by the end of the quarter”, or “30% of decisions made in all teams in one year used market research insights”. Of course, the actual phrasing you need to use will depend entirely on your own business context. Perhaps you might initially focus on a particular level of stakeholder in each team (e.g. middle or upper management), or a certain type of decision (important strategy-based decisions rather than daily action decisions), and once this has been achieved, then the objective can evolve to cover more ground.

Through the help of the decision-making audit from the Customer Salience Toolkit, insight experts can identify and implement processes that allow two elements required for this objective to work:

1. The ways in which stakeholders need customer insights communicated to them so that they can make insight-based decisions when required.

2. The data collection on the necessary stakeholder decision-making processes that will measure the number of decisions made with customer insights taken into account.

2. Increase traffic to Customer Insights Dashboard or Research Platform

This objective could be set in tandem with the previous objective, encouraging stakeholders to find their own insights when they need to make insightful decisions; or indeed if stakeholders are currently relying on insight experts and advocates to communicate insights to then, then it could be the logical next step, next objective required to help stakeholders take active interest in customer research and insights.

Increasing the amount of stakeholder traffic to the customer insight dashboard or research platform is a tricky task, as it requires engaging stakeholders in something they might not value as much as they need to for Customer Salience to take effect. There are numerous stakeholder engagement methods to choose from, with even more articles, whitepapers and guides out on the internet to help guide the way, but as with a lot of human behavioural studies, finding the right combination of engagement methods that work for you will be a continual task of trial and error.

Understanding how your stakeholders communicate, what priorities they currently have and what priorities they’ll have in the future will be be huge boons to this endeavour. So some internal research will be needed — the decision-making audit mentioned in the last section will uncover some of these truths and provide great suggestions of places to start.

Once stakeholders start more actively engaging with customer insights, it’ll be an easier affair to introduce access to the business’ market research platform or customer insights dashboard. You can use some of the same communication techniques to advertise the new access and invite them to take a look around the platforms. Workshops might be required to get them used to navigating the sites and understand where to look for their insights, and this could even be a great gateway for stakeholders to collaborate with insight teams in the future to produce more relevant and actionable customer research projects, programmes and insights.

As with the previous objective, this should be measurable. However, if we take the dashboard as an example, there will likely be ways of accessing the backroom data where it logs stakeholder activity, how many logins are created and used, how many times stakeholders in general or partiuclar stakeholders access the dashboard, etc. This data will be the key to realising the success of this objective.

In short, it’s about allowing customers not just to be heard, but to lead.

3. Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

This objective is just one that will indicate if your Customer Salience strategy is working on an overall basis. Once Customer Salience measures are implemented, once more stakeholders take an active interest in their target customers’ opinions, activity and behaviours, and once more decisions are being made with customer insights in mind, there should be a greater level of customer satisfaction in the customer experience.

There are a few ways to measure customer satisfaction, so why should we pay attention to customer lifetime value specifically? Customer Lifetime Value is the predicted total revenue that a business stands to gain from a customer throughout the course of their relationship. As such it takes into account your specific target customer segment, customer retention data, and the revenue gained from those customers. It is a great indicator of how well a business is attracting customers from their target segment, how well the business is satisfying those customers (if they keep coming back) in each interaction, and how much the business stands to gain from this improved relationship through the implemented Customer Salience measures.

Measuring the Customer Lifetime Value is a good start to understanding if this particular objective is successful, but if you can directly attribute this success to elements of the strategy then all the better. Perhaps there was a direct uptick in in value right after a customer experience painpoint was fixed? Or maybe there was a greatly-desired change to the service plan that attracted more customers from the target segment? To make it a SMART objective, the specifics will need to come from the business’ context and overarching strategic goals.

Integrating Customer Salience into Team Objectives

The overarching Customer Salience objectives are crucial to set out first, but once they’re set, it’s time to try and integrate Customer Salience into individual team objectives. To do that, we need to understand each team’s purpose, current and future plans, and the ways in which they interact with and influence the customer experience. This will depend on unique business situation, context and trajectory — but here are some examples that could be applied or should spark ideas for your own objectives:

• Employing at least one Insight Advocate into each team by the end of the fiscal year, or converting one member of each team into an Insight Advocate.
• Allocating internal research time or credits to each team each quarter, so that they can request or run their own customer research to connect with customers and gain actionable insights.
• Allow each team to run a regular workshop or seminar session or share in a internal company-wide forum on how they have used customer insight to make better decisions. (e.g. perhaps a specific strategy required customer input or a new marketing campaign used insight to create something truly creative, unique and impactful.)

This article was originally published on the FlexMR Insight Blog and can be accessed here.