With a tsunami of data, is there any data you are actively telling your teams to ignore?

Matt Lovell, Head of Group Analytics and Digital Insight, Thomas Cook Group Airlines

“[It’s a case of] Prioritisation rather than ignoring. Lots of data is specific to specific roles, for example particular elements of paid search. There’s no need to make a mountain out of a mole hill.”

Reuben Kandiah Ariyaratnam, Senior Customer Insights Analyst, QVC

“Our early forays into social advertising. Historically we had tracked through click analytics to purchase. But we know now from experience it doesn’t work that way – [that metric is] not indicative of influence.

“The nuances and the context of [social] data is more important.”

Advait Patil, Online Analytics Manager, O2

“Dwell time. It’s a terrible predictor of success.”

dwell time

Dwell time is a poor predictor. Image via bernardgif

Do you have positive or negative stories from working with IT departments?

Advait Patil, O2

“Moving to a tag management solution has freed us and helped operational efficiency.”

Reuben Kandiah Ariyaratnam, QVC

“Yes. We have an increasingly globalised structure, making release cycles less and less frequent, so we use a tag management solution for the same reason.”

Matt Lovell, Thomas Cook Group Airlines

“For me my job is more customer insight, so I do a lot of work developing new products and sites, which obviously we can’t use a tag management solution for.

“But we get people involved in how tag management and analytics works and let people play with it. Yes, we’ve been blamed for some things breaking, but [analytics staff] have trust now in what the system is doing and can [attack problems].”

Mazelle Siton, The Telegraph Media Group

“We discovered a real dependence on the data engineering team. So we highlighted conflicted priorities and delays, and got them ring fenced.”

tag management adoption

Data from the Measurement and Analytics Report 2016

Do you use frameworks that match KPIs to business objectives? Which ones and what are your opinions? 

Advait Patil, O2

“We have an internally developed one. So if you’re in a particular P&L you should be using this metric etc.”

Matt Lovell, Thomas Cook Group Airlines

“We sell through so many different mediums. In other markets, for example, the way they behave is completely different.

“So we have a chief digital officer who sat down and asked, ‘what do you want to report on’ and compared that with what we needed to report on.

“[But there are also circumstantial changes needed]. If you become too rigid, you miss something crucial. We are given the fluidity to add additional elements.”

Reuben Kandiah Ariyaratnam, QVC

“Things are changing quickly. Two years ago, 35% of our business was online or in app. It’s 50% now. But 85% of sales are instigated by TV.”

Matt Lovell, Thomas Cook Group Airlines

“Some KPIs are difficult for the rest of the business to understand (e.g. EBITDA, margin). Having too many of these that others can’t understand needs to be avoided.”

Which brands do you admire that use data to drive personalised CX?

Advait Patil, O2

“In my opinion, Amazon does this really well across sessions and devices. I used customer service and got a two minute turn-around time from web to call resolution, which is pretty incredible.”

Matt Lovell, Thomas Cook Group Airlines

“There are big companies that people often mention, but actually it can be a small, incremental thing. Nice experiences, for example producing a map of where you’ve been and where you haven’t with an airline.

“I also called up Siemens when my washing machine had a fault and they knew which model I had (bought five years ago) by automatically recognising my phone number to identify the machine.”

washing machine

Is there a model you use for social tracking, to calculate the reach of content?

Advait Patil, O2

“Viewthrough attribution is difficult. All we know is if somebody clicked through from a social platform. But we know people use multiple windows when browsing, [so this isn’t accurate].”

Executive buy-in – do you have any success stories or challenges?

Mazelle Siton, Director of Audience Insight, The Telegraph Media Group

“We have had stakeholder buy-in. The desire to use data and get to know your customer more is definitely there.

“I’ve just had my one year anniversary and I’ve trebled the size of my team. I’ve got analysts, user researchers, MVT folk, customer insight. We’re laying the foundations for doing big data analytics later on down the line.

“Don’t underestimate buy-in. [To achieve it] you’ve got to operate on two levels. Build something in the background so it’s ready when needed – strategy, reports, platforms – rather than making people wait.

“I hate the word roadmap, but I’ve got a roadmap.”

Reuben Kandiah Ariyaratnam, QVC

“Tech is often playing catchup with people. We have investment in people and there’s a readiness to accept change with data and analytics but the tech is often lagging behind.”

Advait Patil, O2

“The tool we wanted to move to was so much better than the one in place, that for us it was just a case of ‘shut up and take the money’.”

executive buy-in for analytics

Data from the Measurement and Analytics Report 2016

Are you doing call tracking?

Advait Patil, O2

“Not at O2, but we did at British Gas. It showed which web pages callers were viewing – that’s the only thing we used it for.”

Reuben Kandiah Ariyaratnam, QVC

“When I started at QVC I looked at it – unique phone numbers which tie in with Google Analytics. But for a large org it’s not scalable because there are only so many phone numbers.

“And our phone numbers are so well known that introducing new ones was doing the customer a disservice.”

Matt Lovell, Thomas Cook Group Airlines

“The problem is traffic on website. You need unique numbers regardless of whether they are called, so if traffic is very high, there aren’t enough numbers.

“I have used it for passing previous website enquires of a particular user to the call centre, [rather than showing a complete browser history]. This quick digest was used to massively reduce call times.”

Subscribers can check out the Measurement and Analytics Report 2016, in association with Lynchpin.

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