20 Jun Three Changes to Make Following the MRIA Conference in Saskatoon
by Briana Brownell
I always find conferences inspiring, and the recent MRIA conference in Saskatoon was especially motivating. It was packed with great concurrent sessions, provocative panel discussions, motivating keynote presentations, beautiful views of Saskatoon, and great times talking with the many industry leaders in attendance.
Now that I’m back in the office, I’ve got my desk cleared off, and I’ve written up my lengthy conference follow-up to-do list. These are the top three changes I’m going to make:
#1. Be okay with frayed edges
I’ll always remember one designer’s interview comment about the Canadian fashion market: “You can’t sell frayed edges to Canadians. They just don’t get it. They need everything to be done.” This is true as well for marketing research in this country - we’ve got big firms with a fairly wide array of off-the-rack products that see minimal modification. And I see why: structure is cozy. It’s so nice when a research project has clear boundaries. When you’ve collected the data, done the analysis as per the plan, and written that last word in the PowerPoint “conclusions” slide, you can be satisfied that it’s done.
But, unfortunately for a quant person like me, not everything can be so nicely captured in an SPSS file. Instead, the edges of the research often become important, as we have seen in the many new and often surprising findings in customer satisfaction research. To this end, I was happy to see several exploratory presentations that examined a customer’s holistic interaction with the brand.
Lesley Haibach and Anne Kossatz’s presentation on their successful implementation of a change in RBC’s inbound call centre explored times where a company has the greatest chance to impact customer satisfaction. They found that an important insight came from understanding the customer’s state of mind when he or she contacts customer support and allowed RBC to make a small change in the organization that had big results. What was so impressive about this research program was the alignment of the organization with the research results. They achieved considerable buy-in from all levels within RBC, so much so that human resources even altered their hiring practices!
Amy Charles and Joel Weinberger explored the edge of conscious and unconscious responses using a very interesting method based on psychology experiments to derive implicit associations. I’ve seen this technique used before (actually, I personally feel that this is an example of such successful gamification that it becomes a methodology in its own right. But that’s a discussion for another time...
