Top 10 BOB Blog Posts of 2014: Empathy, Big Data and Metrics

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I’ve counted the pageviews of each blog post for 2014 and present them here in my end-of-year summary. The topic of empathy topped the list of posts this year. I was surprised that my blog post on the role of empathy in the customer experience received the most pageviews this year. Other top posts reflected Big Data trends, data science skills and measuring employee empowerment. Posts also included results of a few research studies that identified key drivers of business growth, biases in customer metrics and redundancy of Net Promoter Scores. The top 10 B.O.B. blog posts for 2014 were:

1. Got Empathy?: In this post, I explore the importance of empathy in delivering a great customer experience.
2. The Big Picture of Big Data for 2014: As the Big Data phenomenon picked up steam in 2014, key areas of importance in 2014 included analytics, Hadoop, data integration and privacy/security.
3. The One Hidden Skill You Need to Unlock the Value of Your Data: Data science is the process of extracting useful information from data. In addition to the traditional skills needed to be a data scientist (e.g., statistics, business acumen, computer programming, communication), data scientists also need to apply the scientific method to uncovering value from their data.
4. Customer Loyalty is Alive and Well: Can we just stop trying to relabel “customer loyalty” as “customer engagement?” Customer loyalty reflects the extent to which customers like you and engage in positive behaviors toward your brand. Conventional questions that measure customer loyalty include: overall satisfaction, likelihood to recommend and likelihood to buy again.
5. Estimating Other Likelihood to Recommend Metrics from Your Net Promoter Score (NPS): Different summary metrics (mean, top box, NPS) are all highly related to each other (r > .95). So, if you’ve got your mean score for the recommend question, you can easily estimate the corresponding NPS.
6. Improving Employee Empowerment Begins with Measurement: Delivering a great customer experience begins with your employees. Make sure your employees feel empowered to do the right thing. This article presents a series of questions you can include in your employee survey to measure employee empowerment.
7. Big Data Improves the Customer Experience Through Silo Integration: The saying, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” is especially true in the world of data and analytics. If analytics is all about finding relationships among variables, integrating disparate data silos allows for a deeper exploration of relationships among a lot more variables.
8. Your Product, Future and Employees: Three Customer Experience Pillars of Growth: In a study including six B2B companies, I found that companies need to do several things exceptionally well if they want to grow their companies. As a general rule, your product gets customers in the door; your future direction opens up their wallets; your employees make them stay.
9. Six Ways to Define Big Data: Big Data is a vague term, used differently by different people. In a review of 40+ definitions of Big Data, I found that the Big Data phenomenon includes discussions of six areas, each important to the field of Big Data.
10. The Hidden Bias in Customer Metrics: Metrics don’t exist in a vacuum. They are interpreted by people. It turns out that customer experience professionals are biased in their understanding of the meaning of two commonly used customer metrics, the Mean Score and Net Score.

In the upcoming year, I expect to continue conducting research in and writing on the areas of customer experience, Big Data, analytics and measurement.