How to Close the Action Gap

In my last blog post, I spoke about the “action gap” and “analysis paralysis.” Now, I want to talk about how an organization maintains its focus on customer intelligence while closing the action gap.

There are three key steps to closing this gap:

Step 1: Cultivate a “Bias to Action”

People, departments, or entire organizations often have a bias to inaction or to action. You can specifically cultivate a bias to action, a desire to move off the dime and get something done, by utilizing the proper incentives:

Reward results, not reports

Too often the analysis itself is rewarded, without regard to the results driven by the analysis. Don’t peg rewards to analysis, reports, MIS, or anything intangible – instead, follow the money: did the analysis lead to direct action which impacted the bottom line? Measure the impact in dollars, not the impact in pixels or bytes.

Adopt SMART goals

All goals in the organization should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Timely. With an emphasis on specific, action-oriented goals, the organization will be forced to implement learning’s from analysis rather than just produce . . . more analysis! Specifically, action-oriented here means an emphasis on the kinds of initiatives that will drive bottom-line results: marketing campaigns that target customers for cross-sell with compelling offers, say, or development of new services that are geared to serving the needs of a particularly profitable customer segment.

Encourage mistakes

That’s right – don’t just tolerate mistakes, encourage them. An organization that has no tolerance for trying and failing is not rewarding innovation; a lack of mistakes is not a sign of precision, it’s a sign of predictability – there’s just not enough action in the organization for there to be enough forward momentum to drive business results.

Step 2: Imbue the Organization with a Desire to “Know the Right Thing”

Any action at all won’t suffice – it has to be the right kind of action. Specifically, the organization must have a knowledge-driven culture that rewards knowing the right thing and then implementing it: call it a “bias to informed action.” Customer Intelligence is all about first knowing, and then doing, the right thing to enhance value for both the organization and the customer, so this step is crucial.

Step 3:  Evaluate and Prioritize Insights

Knowing the right thing is not enough, it’s crucial to prioritize among a whole set of “right things” so that the organization generates the most value from these insights. It’s critical that the insight-generation process tie to practical, bottom-line outcomes so that these insights can be evaluated and prioritized in terms of their:

• Cost to implement
• Time to implement
• Impact on the customer
• Net benefit to the organization

Using these four metrics, insights can be ranked in order and implemented based on their impact on the organization, not on whether the insight is “sexy” or “interesting.”