Team value leverages how your team incorporates data-driven analytics-based insights and clarifies with real-time customer context.
Today’s customers are demanding enough. Tomorrow’s customer expectations will be more challenging. Customers will assess your team value on more than whether you provide cost-savings and timely delivery. Those variables are yesterday’s differentiators and today’s table stakes.
Cost-savings and timely delivery are commodities for tomorrow.
Your teams will take that deep-dive into Big Data and analytics, regardless of the size of your business or the industry vertical in which you operate. When your teams make decisions, they will factor in-the-moment customer information in to their interpretation of data-driven insights.
Your teams start to develop a Yin-Yang business focus. They look outward towards the customers and industry for insights. They simultaneously look inward: how well are business and operational processes managed in order to be relevant in meeting customer needs?
Are you geared up to deliver team value in this manner?
Team Value is more than a bunch of numbers.
Your teams learn to collect/access data and not just a little and not just every now and then. The more data, the more comparative insights driving team decision-making. Your team combines data-driven analytics with real, live customer insights based on a best practice of maintaining continuous, real-time customer conversations.
Your team value is catalyzed by sound decision-making based on combining quantitative (numbers) with qualitative input (anecdotal, conversational).
Don’t underestimate the importance of those real-time customer insights. It’s not a bunch of “how’s-the-weather” chit-chat. These scripted conversations, created by your team based on what they currently know about your customers, serve to test assumptions and findings from data-driven analytics. Your team takes your customers’ pulses regarding ease-of-use or implementation, satisfaction and overall customer experience in doing business with your teams and your company.
Your team establishes customer context. Your team references customer context when recommending relevant solutions.
Team Value is more than just a bunch of people called a “team.”
When team value is based on data-driven analytics insights and customer experience, you start hiring more than warm bodies for your workplace. Your focus becomes hiring individuals who are not data- and analytics- averse. You hire people who thrive in a culture of collaboration. You bring in people who are committed to creating enduring business and experiential outcomes for your customers – and for each other as well.
Some team members will be more comfortable working with data-driven insights. Other team members will be more comfortable speaking with customers. When all team members contribute to utilizing informational insights to catalyze your business growth, your corporate culture becomes more collaborative.
The numbers tell you only so much. Past experience will take you only so far. Data-driven analytics insights make your company, and your teams, smarter. When teams factor in what they hear, real-time across your customer base, solutions become more relevant and valuable for your clients.
Team Value is Transformational.
The beauty of creating team value by analyzing information about your industry, processes and customers is that your people start talking to each other. Across cubicles, across departments, across pay grades. They gain greater professional expertise about how “what they do” creates business value for the internal and external customers they serve.
Your teams create value by becoming not only technical, engineering, administrative, financial, you-name-it experts. They create team value by becoming customer experts.
Everyone grows professionally when they focus on creating team value in all their activities. Today’s digitized global business ecosystem calls for nothing less, if your company wishes to compete tomorrow.
What will your first steps be in leveraging your team value with data-driven analytics and real-time customer insights?
Babette N. Ten Haken is a strategist, analyst, author and blogger. Her focus: the interrelationship between teams, leadership and culture in technology and manufacturing. Her Workshops target excellence in the execution of strategy. Babette began her career in clinical research where she was asked to bring clarity to stalemated cross-functional conversations. Her Playbook of collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com.
Photo source: iStock
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