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Vision Critical Summit Brings Winds of Change

My journey began with a flurry of messages about Hurricane Florence and a state of emergency in Washington D.C. I had just landed in D.C. for the annual Customer Intelligence Summit hosted by Vision Critical, the community insights tool that our client, Idaho Lottery, uses to listen to their customers. My phone blew up with messages like “if you haven’t left, don’t come” and “we’re rearranging things if you’re here, we’ll let you know the new schedule.” The crazy whirlwind soon calmed into a space for sharing trends in insight gathering and customer-centric companies.

The Summit was completely rearranged as many of the participants and speakers changed their travel due to the storms up and down the East coast. Many of the presentations and workshops were about listening to our customers, hearing the input they were providing, using that input in a timely fashion, and sharing back progress so that they understand we appreciate and use their feedback. That loop creates a relationship that motivates intrinsic feedback.

It provided excellent information on the changing landscape of market research and the importance of being able to gather and process data quickly. A few tips on gathering insights:

  • Move away from gathering data in month(s) long processes and instead gather insights in weeks, days and hours. Real-time data transparency can be acted upon instantly. Long gone are the days of the 90-day study.
  • Provide insights that are bite size. These get acted upon and implemented much more often.
  • Automate as much of the insight gathering process as possible, which require technologists working hand-in-hand with researchers.
  • Know all of your data sources and use them. Find platforms that can leverage all of your resources for optimizing the insights provided to the company.

The Vision Critical Summit drove home the need to listen to your most valuable asset – customers. It also reiterated the importance of letting those same valuable customers know you have heard them … and that you did something about it or at least considered what they shared.

Becki Woodbury | Nov 12, 2018