#027: Digital Transformation with Gary Angel

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:03.72 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Three analytics pros and the occasional guest discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And now, the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:00:25.17 [Michael Helbling]: Hi everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 27. It’s a new year, and I want you to think. Think about your analytics. Think about your company. Are they really connected? All too often, analysts feel as if their work isn’t making an impact. And all too often, business leaders aren’t using analytics to actually run the business. Someone wise once said, enterprises do analytics, they just don’t use analytics. When you do see analytics in action across the business, it’s an amazing thing. And it’s the quest for this digital transformation certainly keeps this analyst going. If there was one person who could really shine light on this topic, it’s our guest. It’s Gary Angel. Gary is a partner and practice lead of EY’s Digital Analytics Center of Excellence. And before that, he founded Symphonic. He’s the guy you read when you’re ready to get good in this industry. Welcome, Gary.

00:01:28.83 [Gary Angel]: Oh, thanks, guys. Great to be here.

00:01:30.97 [Michael Helbling]: And of course, as always, joined by my two co-hosts, Tim Wilson, senior partner at Analytics Demystified.

00:01:38.26 [Tim Wilson]: Driving down the bar for this episode. And of course, right there with me is…

00:01:45.63 [Michael Helbling]: So it’s a good start to 2016 already. And also joined by the CEO of Nafken and Babbage Systems, it’s Jim Cain.

00:01:57.85 [Jim Cain]: Can you guys imagine me being a COO? That company would burn to the ground.

00:02:01.51 [Michael Helbling]: see something, sea level executive. We always talk about having a sea level executive on this show. I don’t know why.

00:02:11.75 [Tim Wilson]: Dang. Dang. Anyway, finally got Gary.

00:02:18.38 [Michael Helbling]: Anyway, it’s a distinct pleasure. You know, Gary, you’re making me super jealous of millennials right now. And that’s because all the wisdom and thinking that I’ve labored so hard reading your blogs over the years has now been distilled into your new book, measuring the digital world. I’m both excited about that. And of course, upset because, you know, I spent long hours parsing all those blog posts, trying to distill it out into the wisdom I could use as an analyst. But that is coming. It has come out. So it’s available on Amazon. I’m reading it right now and really enjoying it. So congratulations on that milestone.

00:02:59.42 [Gary Angel]: Oh, thank you. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. And all I can say about that is I think I’ve been in three different fields, I think, over the course of my life. And in each case, I saw them go from people who weren’t credentialed to people who were credentialed. And I think in every case, I thought the people who weren’t credentialed and came to it randomly and organically were better at it and more interesting. So probably better to learn it on your own and do it randomly than to pick it up out of a textbook and a college class.

00:03:27.00 [Michael Helbling]: Well, I’m an experiential learner, so I guess that’s working out okay for me. So let’s dive in here. And really what we’re talking about on this show is really the concept of digital transformation. And it’s about evolving an organization into using analytics to really transform how they go to market and digital. So let’s dive in on that. So what does that mean? And, you know, how is digital analytics kind of core to the concept of digital transformation?

00:03:56.77 [Gary Angel]: You know, it’s funny because in some respects, this whole topic of digital transformation is a little unusual for me. I mean, my background isn’t the analyst. It’s what I do. It’s really what I like about what we do. And in some ways, I’ve always been very suspicious of this broader business orientation and business process management and all these self-help books for business. I don’t really like them. I don’t think they do much. As I look at most enterprises that we work with and we tend to work with really large companies, I can see how challenging it is to take any set of ideas and adapt them and make them work. So in some respects, I’ve always been far more interested in the actual hands-on practice of analytics. But I have come to see in the last couple years that most of our clients fail not because they can’t do analytics. It’s not so much the practice that’s holding them back. I think there is some of that. I think people still struggle sometimes to do good analytics. People still struggle sometimes to figure digital out. But more often what I see is companies that have invested in analytics that have fairly smart people doing it. they have a b testing capabilities that voice a customer capabilities they do all the things it’s not like the people doing them are fairly good at what they’re doing but they don’t put the pieces together in a way that actually makes any difference to the organization so i think like all of us who do this stuff when we see that it’s really frustrating. We feel like we’re doing really interesting work. We feel like we’re delivering value. But somehow that value is getting lost in translation. So I have to say, it is true. In the last year or so, a lot of my focus has switched to really thinking about, why don’t companies do this better? What can they do to do it better? And how do they put those pieces in place? Which I guess is a long answer around, because I didn’t really explain how digital analytics is at the core of this. But there was enough there that I’m going to stop anyway and kick it back to you guys. But I will say, from my perspective, as I look at large enterprise and the way they do analytics, I become convinced that it’s less about the analytics itself. Although God knows, I think the analytics itself is more fun, but more about how it gets applied in the rest of the organization if you’re actually thinking about where the value comes from.

00:06:07.41 [Tim Wilson]: So why is it not getting applied? I feel like there’s a lot of misperceptions when we were talking earlier about sometimes it’s better to be coming in not credentialed and experienced because maybe you’ll think about things kind of rationally or logically. Is it partly because in some ways we’ve grown up kind of the wrong way and the people that the senior leadership has Misperceptions about how analytics data should be applied or kind of like, what’s the root call? Do you have theories on why? Why do we get into this boat? Why is it not clicking better more often?

00:06:49.47 [Gary Angel]: I’ll emphasize the theories because I’m not really that confident about them. I think one of the big reasons is the digital challenges, the sort of classic organization of large enterprise. If you’re a large enterprise and you want to add capabilities, traditionally the way you do it is you add siloed departments. So if you’re a big company and you don’t have digital analytics, you create a digital analytics department. If you then realize you don’t have voice to customer, you create a voice to customer department. If you then realize you’re not very good at customer experience, you create a customer experience department. Each of those departments ends up being siloed in ways that I think are incredibly harmful to the overall process of digital transformation. From my perspective, what people haven’t realized is that all of those capabilities are part of the same thing, which is optimizing the digital experience. And the more you silo them, the worse you make all of them. I think I see our clients siloing down to the level of separating digital analytics and digital reporting and digital implementation. And then they’ve got these other capabilities over here and they’ve got customer capabilities over here. It’s all the same thing. And I think when I look at the companies who do this really well, what strikes me is they function as a far more integrated unit. They don’t have these artificial barriers and what they put together so that the analytics people are talking to the voice of customer. They are the voice of customer people. They’re using customer experience when i try to describe this we will talk about maybe like five core things that i think are really important to do digital well and that’s exhaustive customer research customer experience engineering really understanding the journey. putting analytics into every phase of what you’re doing. Treating experimentation not as a separate capability, but as something you do to make decisions on a continuous basis. And then really taking seriously the idea of continuous improvement. And I’ll wrap that up with the idea of Agile. Virtually all of our clients have gone to Agile in terms of IT. But I see Agile as a lot more about the way the business works. It’s really about creating teams that are integrated that have these analytic capabilities directly within them. so that the content folks, the decision makers, the analytics folks, the customer folks, they’re all on the same team and they’re all tackling a project on an ongoing nonstop basis. And I think that to me is the difference between what works When you look at internet pure plays and what doesn’t work when we get into the enterprise, well, I think there’s a lot of other reasons too. There’s reasons around methodology. There’s reasons around technology. There’s a reason around people. But the more I think about it, the more I think that a lot of the problems we have are structural and come from the way big companies have traditionally been built. A way that I think digital, not just digital analytics, but digital really challenges is a paradigm.

00:09:28.88 [Jim Cain]: That’s one of the things that I like about some of the stuff, is the posts on your new blog, and also the emphasis of the book. It’s one of the first times that I haven’t seen someone who’s good at measurement going, hey, hey, hey, take me seriously, let’s talk about analytics. The approach here seems to me, and I’d love to hear if that was the intent, is that digital is a discipline, and that’s marketing, that’s your website, that’s everything you’re doing that touches the web. Here’s how to do that properly, and to do it properly, measurement needs to be a first class item somewhere near the steering wheel. But it’s not measurement for the sake of measurement, you know?

00:10:00.48 [Gary Angel]: Well, I definitely think that’s true. And I guess to me, in one sense, the blogs that I’ve been posting recently on the new site and the book are two pretty different exercises. And it’s interesting. I won’t say they didn’t flow out of each other. And I won’t say they’re not related. But they are different. The book is really intended To be a textbook, it’s my attempt to say this is what digital analytics is as a field. And to treat it not as a set of tips or tricks, but as a discipline that has an intellectual theory behind it, a reason why it’s distinct and a set of approaches that match the fact that it’s distinct. That’s the book. And the book is really intended for people who want to understand how to do digital analytics. The recent set of posts I’ve been doing, I think, build on that, but are really fundamentally different. They’re not how to do digital analytics. They’re not even, in one sense, how digital analytics fits, although that’s a part of the theme, but they’re really about how to do digital, how as an enterprise you can build these capabilities together to do digital. That is a very new focus of mine. A lot of the stuff I’m writing, is new, I’m still thinking it through. I’m not far from confident that what I’m saying even makes a heck of a lot of sense, but I am pretty confident that when I look at a lot of large enterprise and see how they do digital, that they don’t do it very well. Now, if I’ve got the right, I may not have the right diagnosis for that, I may not understand why that is, and I certainly may not have the right cure, but I am at least pretty confident that there’s a real problem there, that despite pouring a lot of money, into digital when I compare most large enterprise clients who are traditional pure play digital guys with the guys who really come up in digital there seems to be a vast chasm in their effectiveness in the way they approach it.

00:11:44.14 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah I would add to that that when you do see inroads being made in positive ways in those enterprises. It’s the work of years, usually, years and years of effort by very dedicated people. It’s very difficult. And I wonder, and I’ll fill this out to everybody, to what extent is it the lack of senior executive leadership who really get sort of digital and digital analytics and how its uses in enterprise are supposed to be done that’s at the root of this or could potentially be solved by this?

00:12:21.41 [Tim Wilson]: I do think it’s one where I watch the classic of brick and mortar and then they stand up a website and they start selling e-commerce and e-commerce winds up as its own little wing and maybe they wind up with digital analytics as part of them and that’s totally separate from marketing but then marketing starts to get oh you need to be doing you know, paid search and this other stuff and it takes so long for somebody to say, wait a minute, the customer journey is starting with exposure to you, moving all the way through the site. And the fact that in 2016, I’m still running into clients that say, no, no, no, that’s marketing or no, no, no, that’s e-commerce. And those are separate. And analytics may live who knows where, but that conversation isn’t that hasn’t been integrated, or what’s almost the worst is that some senior leader comes in and says, I have the solution, it’s all about Omni Channel now, and they rejigger the org chart, and they’re still operating in silos. And I’m not gonna say that I totally get digital, but it does seem like there’s, if you’re C-level to really have been ingrained in digital enough, not just as a consumer, but as a business to say, I get it. It’s clicked enough that I can figure out how to orient and set the direction and say, go. That’s really, really hard. If you go kind of a level or two down, you have somebody who’s gotten, you know, post from some other, from Amazon or Google or somewhere. that maybe comes from more of a pure play digital and they last for a couple of years and then they’re like, I can’t do this. I’m surrounded by people who no matter how much I talk, I can’t get them to click. You keep going down the organization and you may be getting more and more to people who digital clicks but their clout is low. Like I don’t know sort of where where the level is for it to start for somebody to say, this is the direction and I’m going to stick with it long enough and do all the hard work of kind of maintaining my credibility and hard work to slowly get people on board. I mean, it gets back to what Michael was saying that it’s kind of, you know, it’s of years. It’s not a slap omni channel on it. It’s not a you know, just rejigger the org chart. But I mean, the same thing, like the pure play internet, they just seem like they’re a little more wired to it and the bloated enterprise, longstanding companies, I just, it is so hard for them to make that pivot, it seems.

00:14:55.84 [Gary Angel]: Yeah, I imagine it’s frustrating if you’re a big enterprise in the sense that I think even they tend to think of themselves that way is bloated and slow. And I think that realistically, it’s not like analytics is different than anything else. If you look at large enterprise, regardless of what they’re trying to accomplish, when you have a big ship, it’s hard to steer. And I think that when we talk about, and I agree, I think it is a journey of years, we don’t see companies get suddenly analytically mature. We don’t seem to leapfrog generationally. It’s a journey you have to slog through. It takes time. It takes a lot of work. But I think even getting through that year’s process is a challenge for a lot of organizations, and a lot of them don’t seem to be making even the sort of methodical process you might, progress you might hope they’re making on it. But I do think that, I guess if I had to highlight, to me, three things that stand out as maybe drivers behind this, One, I talk to a lot of executives who support analytics. They talk the talk when it comes to analytics, and they talk the talk in a fairly fundamental way, and that they’re willing to fund it in the organization, which is money talking. But where I see organizations really make rapid progress in analytics, one thing is executives go beyond talking the talk, and they actually start walking the walk of using analytics. And that makes a huge difference in the organization. If you want to build culture in a large enterprise, the easiest way is from the top down. And building culture from the top down doesn’t mean building budgets for analytics. It does mean that, but it doesn’t just mean that. It also means being analytic, forcing people to bring you numbers, forcing people to make their decisions on an analytic basis, pushing them to understand, hey, what’s the view of the customer? Why do you think this? What numbers are you bringing to the table to convince me that this is right? When I see senior people start to do that, I see much more dramatic change in the organization. And I do agree. I think generationally, we just have a group of C-suite leaders right now who are really trained to do that. And I think that’s a challenge. I think the flip side of that is, from the bottom up side of this, as analytics professionals, we’ve mostly done an incredibly crappy job of giving people strategic analytics. I think most of the stuff we produce is very tactical, very low level. It’s the wrong kind of stuff to put in front of a senior decision maker to help them make those strategic decisions. And so I think if I’m a C-suite guy in most organizations, not only am I not trained to think analytically, the people who are supposed to be trained to think analytically aren’t putting the right stuff in front of me to help me make better decisions. And then I guess I’ll go back to the third point. I still believe that in a lot of ways big companies work Well because they’ve siloed core activities but that methodology of building silos of expertise to sort of execute against what you’re doing is really challenged by digital where digital works best when you integrate a lot of different capabilities and just like agile has been I think a big challenge but a challenge that a lot of IT organizations have kind of met. But I think if you take those agile principles and you apply them out to a broader business, you can see both why it’s hard, why it’s really hard for organizations to do, but why it’s really important. I know one thing I’ve been talking about to people is this idea of continuous improvement and taking it seriously, where if you build a website, you don’t disband the team, and they don’t go on to the next project. If you build a website, you keep building it. You keep tuning and developing it. If you build a mobile app, you don’t go on to building the next thing. You keep that team in place. But that really challenges not just the organization of the way most enterprises are set up, but the way they budget, right? Everything’s done on a project basis. We put this team together. We had this team for this budget. The budget goes away, and those people go on to other stuff. And I think if you take seriously this idea of continuous improvement and agile and how to do digital, you can see where it’s hard. It’s really hard at a big enterprise level. It really challenges the way most people are organized.

00:18:46.64 [Tim Wilson]: Or if you take an organization that is outsourced, outsourced a lot of their digital, so we’re going to outsource the web development, there’s that same structure of you’ve, you’ve got a, you’ve got a statement of work that is, you know, redesigned the site and there’s no incentive for the agency to say, hey, we stood up this site and now we need to keep making it better because There are a lot of people who are going to say, well, that means that it’s not perfect. And we want to have our quarterly touch base with the client and tell him, you know, this thing is the greatest thing ever. And we’re kind of wired to not say we should keep tuning it. Totally agree.

00:19:23.02 [Gary Angel]: Totally agree. I think that’s a real challenge for a lot of people. I’m not, despite the fact that, hey, I work for, I’m a consultant, I work for a consultancy, but I’m not a big fan of people who think that they can outsource their analytics or, you know, or they’re creative. I mean, if you can, you can use consultants to help you build capabilities, they can help you do that. Moere quickly more efficiently and at a higher level and maybe you could build if you bootstrapped it on your own, but if you don’t bring these capabilities in house, you’re not taking them seriously in my view. I think that companies who look to outsource analytics are making a terrible mistake and misunderstanding the point and potential of it.

00:20:00.84 [Michael Helbling]: I get shocked look sometimes when I tell clients the best thing you could do is go find a good analyst and then we can work better together. yeah i could take all your money but at the end of the day you’ll be more successful if you start building this competency now but it makes any difference doesn’t it it really is huge difference and i know there’ll be a happier more successful client in the long run but doesn’t that go to one of the bottom up where you were talking about the bottom up saying we’ve done a crappy job of

00:20:29.71 [Tim Wilson]: actually being strategic when we’ve got this, I think legitimate talent gap. So we’re casting broad, hey, we’re going to bring this in house. We need to get some analytics talent. And to me, one of a couple of things happened. You either get somebody who’s really green and so they come in and then you’ve got the people who are telling them what to do and how to do it are the people who haven’t made that leap is to, you know, they don’t necessarily know how to use Analogically so they know you’re the new analyst you can pull this report for me and so it seems like there’s a little bit of a quandary there and that you need to build it in house But maybe it’s more of a catch-22 that you need to build it But you need to have somebody who’s there to build it like you need to have that Seed and even that I think is sometimes tough to outsource because it takes it takes time to actually kind of shift the organization it

00:21:25.09 [Michael Helbling]: If you think about it, we often refer to ourselves as change agents in the digital analytics community.

00:21:32.82 [Tim Wilson]: The other two personally did that. You go after the low-hanging fruit and help people define their key KPI’s as a change agent?

00:21:39.38 [Michael Helbling]: No, I got that from John Lovett. Thank you very much. I will not stand by while you besmirch his fine character.

00:21:46.17 [Jim Cain]: I think of you as a level 7 half-elven rainmaker.

00:21:50.61 [Michael Helbling]: No, that’s you for sure. I’m a straight work dude. Plus two to SMW closing. Okay, no, but I mean it’s sort of core almost to how we define ourselves as analysts sometimes to be going in from the bottom up trying to organize change inside of organizations to achieve this same end. And when you first started writing about digital transformation, Gary, was when it suddenly clicked in my mind, what I had been trying to do in the organizations over the years where I had been an analyst was trying to do the same thing, but from the bottom up. And so it’s very interesting. And a lot of our listeners will find themselves in the organization without control of the organization. How did they act in a strategic manner to begin that transformation from where they’re at. Because I think that’s another aspect that is going to potentially help drive this forward in the long run, as those people become more strategic, they will become the leaders that then define those organizations in the future.

00:22:57.67 [Jim Cain]: The thing I’m taking away, because the scenario that Gary was talking about, and he led by saying, I speak to very senior executives. I’ve earned the right to do it, and I get to talk. If you’re the analyst inside an organization, you don’t even get to park near those people.

00:23:11.41 [Tim Wilson]: He was really just saying that because he’s on a podcast with you as a senior executive, Jim. Yeah, I mean, it was really kind of the first Jim. Our senior executive. He has really no hope for me and I. Right, my first book. Deal with the senior executive. He just checked off the second thing.

00:23:29.57 [Jim Cain]: So my quota of being able to finish a full sentence this year is still not at one.

00:23:33.45 [Tim Wilson]: Right, correct.

00:23:34.39 [Jim Cain]: OK, just for those of you keeping score for the home game.

00:23:37.17 [Tim Wilson]: Carry on. Fine, sir.

00:23:38.37 [Jim Cain]: But the people that are asking the analyst for stuff that could be counts or reports, like what happened last week as opposed to help me do something next week. You know, we’ve always said, best thing you can possibly do is get a senior executive sponsor. And I think Gary’s really underlining, if you don’t have someone that sits in the boardroom supporting your efforts, then a lot of your effort will be wasted until those lights go on. And that’s why I like the concept of not treating analytics as a standalone discipline, but as a, If it doesn’t live as a part of everything everyone’s doing, you’re gonna fuck up your budget.

00:24:10.55 [Tim Wilson]: But do you, I mean, if you have a senior product manager who’s, you know, different organization, they’re cutting across sort of groups too with what they’re doing, I’m gonna get people who are maybe not that high up, but they own a product, they own something, and I, or the analysts that I work with, I’m like, figure out a way to support them to try to be a little bit more strategic. Now, they’re still, if they’re going upstream and it’s getting shot down, then you’re still stuck. But I feel like you can work a little bit in the middle and you’re going to help them be more successful to work a little smarter, you know, and kind of walk the walk there. And I have seen potential there, plus there help a lot more fun to work with.

00:24:59.51 [Gary Angel]: I agree with that in a couple of respects. I mean, it’s great when you have C-level sponsorship. And I think it’s true too that if you don’t, you are likely in a large enterprise to have a rough go. But that’s just reality. I mean, I think that’s the way it works in large enterprise. But having said that, it is hard to get those people’s attention. It’s hard to convince them. It’s hard to get their time. And sometimes they’re not on the same wavelength they don’t have the same the same way of thinking that that we might so what do you do well i do agree i think that at that mid level there are a lot of interesting strategic decisions to be made those people are much more tuned. potentially to what we do and if you can find allies there you can often drive really good analytics out into the organization. A couple things that I tell people about when I talk about being more strategic I do have in mind a couple things that I think actually make a difference to analytics in terms of being a more strategic asset. One thing I talk about a lot is that most of us come out of a world where we focus on behavioral stuff. Behavioral analytics is what we do. We look at the way people navigate websites. We look at the way people navigate mobile applications. There are strategic learnings to be had in that, but if you want an easy path to strategic learnings, one thing I think you can do is really focus on voice a customer. Voice a customer allows you to be more strategic across the organization. It allows you to tell the organization things that are inherently at a higher level About customers that are really important to a lot of different stakeholders important product managers important to marketing managers and important in a way that’s different than just is campaign X outperforming campaign Y or if I if I swap this image with this image will I improve my click through rates. When you understand what’s driving customers to make decisions about your products when you understand the different core customer segments you have when you understand the key things they’re making customers choose your competitors over you. Those are inherently strategic kinds of facts that we can put in front of people and I think focusing on voice a customer and even better focusing on the integration of voice a customer behavioral. behavioral science to sort of integrate those kinds of findings into what you’re doing. That’s a different kind of knowledge that you can give to the organization. And I think it lends itself to being a lot more strategic. And if we focus on those kinds of things, instead of doing, you know, click reports and campaign reports or in addition to doing those things, i think we make ourselves a lot more strategic and we can find an audience in the organization so it is yes it is about getting decision makers on your side it is about going up the chain of the organization those are political things that we have to do but i think it’s also about changing the focus of some of our analytics. and doing analytics that are actually targeted toward maybe a different set of questions and a lot of us and i put myself in that boat because frankly michael i was listening to what you were saying i was thinking you know for most for most of my career i’ve been focused on totally tactical problems i think as i look at what i’ve done analytically most of the problems that i’ve really focused on How to optimize websites and how to optimize campaigns into websites and those are important problems that the problems frankly that we get hired to solve on a regular basis, but they’re not strategic problems. They’re tactical problems and really for most of my career what I’ve been doing and I don’t think this is wrong or bad or anything else. Those are important problems, but I haven’t been working on strategic problems and I think most of us are the same kind of thing where we’ve gotten very used to thinking about a problem set that frankly is tactical.

00:28:32.59 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it’s almost you get hired into the silo, but you have to learn quickly to see beyond it.

00:28:38.00 [Gary Angel]: Yeah, really, if you want to get beyond it, I mean, if you don’t live in that silo, you got to you got to go outside of it in your thinking too. And I think that’s something that is the analyst. a lot of us miss. We complain about being in silo, but our thinking is still revolving around in that little silo.

00:28:52.22 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, well, that’s why I was curious about how effective you can be by, you know, thinking about different departments, working inside the silo, finding mid to senior mid level stakeholders to support with measurement. Cause people that do that make me lots of money. Because what happens is that people don’t think measurement is a tier one practice in this business. They think, steve over in the marketing department is a bad ass i love that guy now when steve leaves because of a recruiter he or she has not brought the practice to the next level they’ve just shown their value to the or again everything goes And then they go, wow, I missed that. Let’s call a consultant.

00:29:31.57 [Gary Angel]: That is absolutely true. And I do see that all the time, too, where organizations confuse the value behind what the person is doing with the person. And hey, it’s not that the people don’t deliver value. Ultimately, it is all about people. People are the ones driving value. But when you’ve mistaken the capability for the person, I see that all the time, and you’re right. I think a lot of organizations end up doing a kind of two-step where they make some progress on analytics, and then they give it all up when key people leave. That’s a bad policy for an enterprise. That’s not where you want to be if you’re a big company.

00:30:02.83 [Jim Cain]: I didn’t want to lose the train on the voice of customer thing because it’s something that I’ve literally been conceptually pitching for as long as there’s been a napkin. You’re not the first person to say, as an analyst, take that stuff seriously. And I’ve struggled to figure out, because what I like to do when I’m getting a new discipline into a customer is the high value, low effort, quick win. Do you have any of those? Is there a win there? Listen up, kids. Gary says, do these three things for fun and profit.

00:30:33.24 [Gary Angel]: Here’s a couple things that I guess I would say are quick, potentially easy wins when it comes to voice a customer. People ask the wrong questions most of the time. And it’s not that there aren’t some potentially interesting things you can do with the traditional questions. We ask things like, were you satisfied with your visit? Would you recommend us to other people? So those net promoter score, ACSI type scores, those aren’t uninteresting. And particularly when paired with behavioral analysis, they can tell you something. But they’re by no means the richest and easiest kinds of things that you can get out of ways to customer a couple things that I think are really powerful from a voice a customer perspective are instead of focusing on whether people accomplish their task focus on how easy it was for them so that ease of task accomplishment. That often will highlight for you things on your website that are actually or your mobile apps that are more challenging for people to get through and maybe never realized it. One thing we find is that there’s a huge amount of self selection on the web and people who are committed to getting through a process will get through it. So oftentimes. Behavioral metrics aren’t that revealing about where you’re actually putting up barriers or making things hard or slow for people. So focusing on task accomplishment is one thing that’s borne fruit for us for Voice of Customer standpoint. Second thing that I think is really interesting from Voice of Customer is something we call pre-qualification. Really just asking people a couple questions up front about how serious they are about buying, getting at their intent to buy, the product knowledge and their commitment to the to the existing brand and if you understand those three things how much they like us right now coming in how much they know about the product and where they are in the shopping cycle you can categorize them in terms of how qualified they are as a shopper. And I think a couple really interesting things often flow out of that one is you can get a sense right away whether you have digital marketing campaigns that are steering you vastly different qualification levels of visitors so that’s often interesting and it’s stupid but a lot of our customers have never actually looked at. anything on their campaigns except how much they convert. So they don’t understand the deeper qualification levels that are coming out. They may have a campaign that’s a very poor converter, but sourcing a lot of people who are just up funnel, but are very qualified in terms of how serious they are about the brand. So I think that qualification kind of voice a customer often makes it a lot easier for people to start applying voice a customer. And then the third thing that I think is really interesting, we use this technique all the time, we call it resurvey. And the idea is that when you first survey people online, you ask them at the end of the survey, Can we have your email address can we contact you again if they say yes depending on the sales cycle of your product and this is particularly valuable for non e-commerce players. You survey those people again three weeks four weeks six weeks eight weeks downstream and you ask him did you buy anything who did you buy from how much did you spend why did you make those decisions you tie that back to their behavior. And one thing you can start to do is show which digital campaigns and which types of behavior on the website are actually valuable. Not necessarily driving value, but which ones are actually valuable. Where am I getting good customers from? Customers who end up converting. A lot of our customers who are not e-commerce oriented, where they don’t have a simple, easy path to understanding the digital marketing to the end conversion, that’s a huge win out of Voice of Customer that can take almost everything you do and make it a lot more actionable. Because you’ve closed the loop not on every visitor, but on enough visitors to really get a sense of what’s working and what isn’t, both on the campaign side and on the web content side. So those are a couple different techniques, I think, on Voice of Customer that are really powerful. One other thing I’ll say that I think is useful if you’re really selling this concept out a lot of what I pitch these days to clients around voice of customer is creating a voice of customer dashboard in other words taking this voice of customer data and for the first time putting it together. Building Tableau visualizations around it so that people can actually slice and dice it and making it a standard dashboard for people in the company so that everybody has the state of the customer dashboard that they’re looking at. And I think that’s really impactful in terms of making measurement more strategic and getting visibility for analytics in the organization. The truth about voice of customer data, and this is something I don’t see, most people, even the people who are doing a fairly good job with their surveys, do a really piss poor job of disseminating in the organization. All they do is standard, no slicing and dicing reports about what we’re finding. Voice of customer data, like behavioral data, but even more so, if it’s not segmented, it’s useless. So if you don’t cross tab those questions in a voice of customer survey, you’re not getting much value out of it. And most of the organizations we work with have not given any of the decision makers any kind of real access to the voice of customer data. So they can’t play with it. They can’t slice this type of customer by what they like or what they don’t like or where they’re having problems or what they’re not. they’re really not taking advantage of the organization. So I think there’s even a traditional BI reporting opportunity here on Voice of Customer that just isn’t well exploited by most enterprises.

00:35:30.44 [Tim Wilson]: So when you said earlier, you were talking about the senior executives who walk the walk. Does that, I mean, does that to the point, because part of it is while they’re asking for numbers or they’re demanding, they’re requiring, it’s almost, God, we trust all others bring data, like you can go back 50 years, And I had an experience with an executive who twice a week, he would sit down with a group of people and he would just kind of riff on kind of random questions. It pretty much would spawn two weeks of chasing stuff that wasn’t actually going to be all that useful. So it was one where I was like, this is where an executive can say, oh, I’m just going to show them that I can ask a bunch of questions. And that was basically half of his organization’s time was chasing random things that really rarely panned out. But on the flip side, his voice to the customer one that an executive will actually, if you build a good you know, some interactivity into it because they, especially if they are wired to think about who is our customer, where’s our opportunity, where can we grow, where might we be struggling, that they’ll actually get in to some extent and play with the data and kind of generate smart questions or, I don’t know, I’m kind of like torn on the, I can see executives like steering the organization in the wrong direction.

00:36:50.30 [Gary Angel]: You know I hear you and that is always a risk. I will say I think that the voice of customer data is more accessible than behavioral data. It’s really hard to democratize the behavioral data we work with all the time and I think that certainly that’s been a big challenge in a lot of organizations I work with where you package up nice reports but you really have to work to make sure people understand what they’re looking at and A lot of times, I’ve said before, but it’s really true. I think we fail at reporting more often than we fail at anything else, far more often than we fail at analytics. But the voice of customer is more accessible. Can it be misused? Sure. It’s like any other piece of data. I think it’s easier to understand for executives, though. The cross tabulations are cleaner, less likely to be misleading, and I do think it’s more actionable for them. Getting back to that whole conversation about setting the table for strategic decisions, you’re not really going to make strategic decisions for people. In some ways, you can hope to make tactical decisions for people, but strategic decisions almost never come down to a binary yes-no. They’re almost always shaded and there’s always intuition involved, but you can certainly give them data that helps them make those decisions in a more informed fashion. And I think that starts with understanding what customers care about and how they’re deciding and why they’re deciding on your competitors or why they’re deciding on a particular product set for you or why they’re deciding on the channels they’re deciding on those are the things that i think voice a customer can really do a good job on and is sorely underutilized in in in our industry and i i guess one of the thing i would say and i hear you about executive sending people on wild goose chases and chewing up a lot of time but you are i i guess what i would say is i like it when. executives have that back and forth. And one thing I think is a sign of a healthy voice of customer program is when a senior decision maker has a decision, they go to their analytics folks and they say, I want to run a survey to find out what customers think. I’m trying to decide if we’re going to go responsive or if we’re going to do a mobile application. Can we find out from our customers, which is more important to them or which would be better? Can you frame up something that will help me make this decision about if I build a mobile app, Will people actually download it and use it? Or will it just be another thing that nobody cares about? Those are questions you can legitimately explore with voice of customer. And I think it’s great if people have set it up so that when senior people are making decisions, they’re thinking about Not just the information they have, but what questions they can ask, and they assume that, hey, in a week, I can roll out this survey and get the data back, and then I can maybe do a controlled experiment about it. And if you’ve got that kind of organization, I think you’re getting to that use of analytics in a strategic fashion that we all want.

00:39:33.90 [Tim Wilson]: They’re not ringing their hands about, oh, but if I get new data, I won’t have a two-year historical trend of it because they recognize they don’t need that much. But the other thing I think with Voice of Customer, I mean, it’s a great point. If they filter down to a point where very quickly they see three out of 10 open ends that are complaining about product availability or the shipping price being revealed very late in the process, I mean, it’s the whole open ends, right? It’s kind of the classic Voice of Customer statement that if you The open ends are the things that carry the weight, because that’s a real person in their own words. And if you’re cross-tabbing, you can wind up where you can say, oh, I’ve got 50 comments that I’m reading, and it doesn’t take a big number to say, huh, these completely unrelated people had a very similar, very similar negative reaction. And it’s kind of a, might be a more strategic reaction. It’s more of a brand response, even though it’s in the middle of their website experience that they’re providing it.

00:40:30.57 [Gary Angel]: That gets also to where the danger is and voice a customer in some way. The fact that people get it and that it can be very impactful is also where the danger is because obviously people will pick up on that anecdotal stuff and assume that just because six customers say it’s a problem, it’s a huge problem. If you look at the kinds of interpretation errors we see, that’s the one that plagues Voice of Customer the most.

00:40:51.76 [Tim Wilson]: But in the solution to that is saying, don’t run with it. Say, you’ve got it. So now you’ve got an idea. So now let’s now formally go and ask an explicit question, throw that out for a week, and say, how really big is this?

00:41:04.70 [Gary Angel]: Exactly. I agree. If you can train them to think that way, I think you really have a good program.

00:41:09.51 [Jim Cain]: I was just going to say something in support of basically what you guys just said, but it kind of is a best practice to a listener. That voice of customer data is valuable. It can be fundamental, but it’s also an unbelievably dangerous or powerful executive management tool because you can spend six weeks doing really, really good analysis, or you could spend 30 seconds finding a paragraph from Wilma from Idaho saying exactly the same thing. And that person feeling something who’s also a customer, We’ll kick the crap out of all of your Excel every single time. So if you can use it as a supporting argument for something you’ve proven with data, your likelihood of winning in the boardroom goes way up. Use it on its own. You can just screw up your life for the next six months. So it’s very, very powerful stuff.

00:41:53.85 [Michael Helbling]: Well, I’m sure that’s where behavioral data has a part to play in helping prove or disprove the voice of customer data. Or in the programs that I’ve run, usability testing and behavioral data combined made a very powerful case for site enhancements and improvements. So yeah, that’s really good. All right, well, we can either go to the light side or the dark side. Your choice, Gary. Hey, let’s do dark side first. Awesome. Let’s talk about large agencies and why they fail at analytics.

00:42:25.92 [Gary Angel]: It’s an interesting question. I’m going to kick back on that and say that large agencies fail about as much as small agencies, which is nearly all the time. And I think that with size does come a burden. I’ll admit that, guys. Frankly, that’s true. Just as we’ve been talking about the fact that large enterprise struggle to be agile, struggle to adapt to the digital paradigm, well, it’s no different. When you talk about scale and the consulting side of the business, and obviously I’ve seen both sides of that, you get advantages with scale, but it would be a flat out lie to say that with scale you don’t come with serious disadvantages. I think as a client, you’re always having to pick your poison, and you ought to be thinking about it intelligently about What exactly do you need because there are things you’re going to get out of a small agency that frankly you’re never going to get out of a large consultancy there are some things you can get out of large consultancy that small agencies can’t deliver I think we’re a lot of a lot of companies don’t do a good job is thinking about that very strategically and actually make me make some kind of judgment about what they actually need from people and And I think, and I’ll say that that’s both benefited me and hurt me from time to time. So I mean, it’s a really fair question actually.

00:43:44.99 [Michael Helbling]: Well, you’ve written in the past about this, you know. Yeah. So, you know, that’s kind of what it’s, but your midichlorians are really off the chart here. So we’ll just let. All right. So let’s, let’s wrap up here and let’s go around the horn, maybe just share one takeaway or last deep thought with our listeners. And we’ll, as we start to wrap up, you know, it’s too hard. We need to, this show, when you’re our guest Gary, we need, really need this show to kind of go for about three and a half, four hours to really get any good mileage. But certainly it’s been a pleasure, but let’s, uh, let’s, let’s start around the horn. Who wants to go first?

00:44:26.39 [Jim Cain]: How about I go first? I love it. It’s the first time all day. Tim didn’t speak first. I just, I didn’t know what to do. I think the first thing I say, so, you know, this is our first podcast of the year, which means the, the most recent one that our listeners have had was the year in review. We’ve got a lot. Uh, we’ve got a lot of listeners, easily 70 or 80, easily global.

00:44:46.74 [Tim Wilson]: Um, and you’re counting friends and family or family specifically.

00:44:49.76 [Jim Cain]: My mom downloads 75 times. We’ve got five listeners. Easy. But there’s people who are on the Facebook page in particular saying, I am a new analyst. I am looking to you guys as a place to learn best practices and get some direction. And I wanted to give a real clear heads up. We’ve had some really great guests on this show. But Gary represents one of a very small group of people who were the people that I was reading when I was starting my career. so you know when you when you go to not just the new blog but his his old blog like i could list probably five to ten people that i was reading religiously whenever something new came out and then there was that yahoo forum and that’s literally how i started my career like i will be buying the book this will not be like a uh… we have a guest or plugging whatever crappy things is interesting quickly this is a strong recommend and the other thing is is that i’m actually starting to adopt some of the the concept that like treating digital first is almost like an assumptive close for measurement to use my terminology. And I think that as an analyst going into a business trying to sell why analytics is great is really frigging hard and why trying to sell Here’s how I’ll help you get your bonus. Analytics may be included in small font on the bottom is a really good way to drive change. And I really like that emphasis. I really kind of dug that piece of today’s conversation. It wasn’t about measurement. It was about winning. But of course, you need numbers to do it.

00:46:18.40 [Tim Wilson]: I’ll say, actually, I’ll echo that on the, you know, what has been read. I’m not sure we’ve actually said measuring the digital world.com is the new location. We’ll link. We’ll definitely have that linked in the in the show notes, the book as well as the site. But same thing, I would say I’ve got a ton. I love the kind of takeaways about how to think about voice of customer and kind of the voice of customer imperative. But I think kind of stepping back a little bit, just the fact to hear Gary here, you kind of introspecting on saying, Wow, the light bulb kind of went on that I’ve really been doing a bunch of tactical stuff. And there’s A, nothing wrong with that. And B, there are levels of, there’s tactical non-value add stuff. There’s tactical stuff that is very valuable at value. And so you can do tactical very smartly and with and I, to the strategic, my takeaway is there aren’t simple answers. It’s not flipping a switch. And to me, part of what I love about the field is continue to have that kind of guidepost of, I know, I have a general sense of what Nirvana looks like. I’ve recognized that I’m probably never going to achieve it, but I love having that as kind of, that’s what I’m striving towards and across all the the frustration that, you know, if you’re an analyst and you’re doing this, yes, you’re still going to do stuff that is, you know, frustrating and annoying, but if you actually kind of kind of grok some of this stuff, you know, get the book, read it and say, that’s where I’m heading. And probably not going to get there next week or next month or next year, but if you’re marching in that direction, you’ll start to recognize it and have a absolutely fantastic career because I’m deathly afraid about the people that don’t even realize they’re not marching in any sort of meaningful direction. They’re like, Yep. Yep. I’m the site catalyst dude. Yep. Yep. I pull the weekly report and that to me I think is like this insidious danger to our Industries we don’t have enough people enough analysts at any level who are Recognizing that there’s this bigger opportunity and they’re gonna kind of try to keep pushing in that that direction So there were things you were saying where I was kind of hearing them like holy shit if Gary’s kind of thinking the same thing I’m not there But I’m kind of trying to figure it out and drive in that direction. I think that that’s a big, big takeaway for me.

00:48:43.49 [Gary Angel]: I guess I’ll close making two points. When I wrote measuring the digital world, I mean, I think my goal was to try to create something that described a discipline that showed people that digital analytics is not running a bunch of reports. It’s not a bunch of tips and tricks. It’s not a bunch of clever little practices. It’s a formal approach to measuring something that’s really unique and unusual and different from everything else we do. When we measure digital, we’re measuring with a different set of measurements than we’ve all grown up to that we use as humans all the time. There’s no length. There’s no weight. There’s no measure. Time is distinctly different. All the core things we’ve always thought about fly out the window. And I don’t think it’s ever been well formalized as to how you actually do this. And so I try to distill, you know, all the stuff I’ve written into a practice about here’s how you go about doing that. But that is when you get right down to it, a tactical approach to measurement. It’s here’s how you do. digital analytics on a tactical basis. What I’ve realized, and I think where the book really helped me, writing, sitting down and doing all that work to write the book really helped me, is it got me thinking about what it didn’t cover, all the things that even if you do all of this, you may still fail. And you may still fail a lot on the enterprise level. And I’ve certainly had that experience. One strange thing about being a consultant is you work for a lot of different clients. You’re bound to have some successes. You’re bound to have some failures. So you do you do get that experience of failing you get that experience of failing pretty regularly and by sitting down and really writing about here’s all the methods. It also made me think about all the things that go wrong that are outside of those methods and I think that’s where this broader conversation about digital transformation comes in. And in some ways, I’ve always been very reluctant to tackle these kinds of issues. I feel like culture can be such a squishy discussion. Business process can be so goody two shoes and so raw raw. Here’s how you do it. And this is the only way it works. But I do think that we can all recognize that there are different ways of structuring things that if you approach things a certain way, you’re more likely to be successful. It’s not necessarily going to solve all your problems. You still have to have those methods. You still have to know what you’re doing. You still have to know how to do the analytics. But if you know how to do the analytics and you put it together with good structure, maybe you can actually be successful. And God knows for all of us, it’s hit or miss.

00:51:11.42 [Jim Cain]: When I think of the words of one of the greatest analysts of our time, you’ve got to know when to hold them. know when to fold them, know when to KPI, something like that, I forget. That is core knowledge, right? Yeah, core knowledge.

00:51:28.41 [Michael Helbling]: No, I think, you know, my, my head is exploding and heading into many different directions. And, and frankly, Gary, this is one of the things that I have against you is that in my career as I’ve started to like pull out something I think is really core and started to finally sort of formulate some sort of a I’ll see your blog or something and you’ll be dancing all over the topic with this amazingly well thought out elegance that really like is well beyond where my thinking was but and so I’m like yes that. That’s what I meant. That’s where I was headed. Thank you, Gary, for getting me over the hump there. But it’s been great. So personally, I’ve always appreciated what you’ve had to say and found you a deeper thinker. a more full thinker in this space than many. And so your book is one that I also will be making a required reading for anybody that happens within 20 meters of me. So yeah, a couple of things that I was thinking about is it seems like we danced around a little bit, but in terms of this concept of digital transformation and specifically in the area of digital analytics, We so often sort of fail at these key points first around translation of it into our data into something meaningful. You know the business will even want to take it pay attention to. Secondarily once we start getting there the people that own that can be. swept away out of the organization so easily and we lose all of our progress and then thirdly and more importantly the process and methodology that organizations can build is the way to cement that knowledge into place so that the shifting of people and time doesn’t take all that away and as I look at 2016 and the clients I’m most excited about working with are the ones where we’re in that space and we’re really driving towards this common goal of really setting up These kinds of capabilities and it’s it’s energizing. It’s very exciting But yeah, I just can’t thank you enough Gary for coming on measuring the digital world is Gary’s book it’s available on Amazon and other places where books of high quality are sold and You know Gary any other announcements you want to make about you know anything conferences anything? Nope, no, not specifically like a helping just desperate one conference that you might want to talk about that was going to happen in the fall, but didn’t happen. But now might happen.

00:54:08.76 [Gary Angel]: Yeah, it’s true. I will say one thing. So I have as probably you guys, well, you guys all know, of course, but but maybe other people don’t for a long time. ran a conference called Exchange, which was really one of my favorite things on a year-in-and-year-out basis. And what I liked about it is, I guess in some ways, it’s just like this conversation, right? It’s just people sitting around talking. And I think, from that perspective, hey, the best parts of every conference are the conversations you have in between them, right? And Exchange really was meant to capture that. I’ve had a hard time in the last year actually putting that together logistically. I’ve actually been talking with Michael Finer and Matthias Spettach, run a similar version of the conference in Europe called Digital Analytics Hub, and they’re going to be bringing it over here in the United States, which I’m really excited about actually. I think so that’s going to be scheduled in September. It’s exchanged in every way, almost the name, and I’m certainly going to be involved with it. I love those guys. I think they’ve done a great job within Europe, excited that despite my terrible logistical challenges, they’re actually going to go ahead and do it. I’m going to work with them on that, and I got to say, if you’ve never been to And if you have been to an exchange, definitely consider the Digital Analytics Hub in September of 2016. And I think it’ll be a great conference, and I think it’ll give you a real taste of that conversational experience. So Michael, that’s the only thing I have that I think is really worth pointing out.

00:55:36.18 [Tim Wilson]: That’s what he was looking for.

00:55:37.72 [Michael Helbling]: That’s what I was looking for. Mattias has been a guest also on the podcast and an outstanding practitioner from the EU. So that’s awesome.

00:55:48.34 [Gary Angel]: He’s a great guy. I really like what they’ve done and it’s been so frustrating for me logistically to not be able to do it. So I’m really excited that it’s going to be coming here.

00:55:57.86 [Michael Helbling]: Well, and a whole generation of talented analytics people share that excitement, I’m sure. So that’s awesome. Anyway, it’s been such a pleasure. Obviously, as you’ve been listening, you might have questions, and we would love to hear from you. You can reach us on our Facebook page, facebook.com slash analytics hour, or on Twitter, or on the Measure Slack, which instructions on how to get added to that are on our Facebook page. So we’d love to hear from you. We’d love to hear your questions, your thoughts around this topic. It’s certainly one that I think, you know, the four of us have a great deal of passion about. And like all of these episodes, we never feel like we’ve done more than just scratch the surface. So there’s a great book for you to get ahold of now that will help you get that itched scratched. So for all of us here at the Digital Analytics Power Hour, for Jim Cain and Tim Wilson, I am Michael Helbling.

00:57:07.84 [Announcer]: Keep analyzing.

00:57:19.81 [Jim Cain]: What if we call it Ernst & Young Masterpiece Theater featuring Gary Angel?

00:57:34.46 [Jim Cain]: The squirrels in Ottawa are getting morbidly fat. And I looked out my window and there’s nothing but fat ass Texas State Fair squirrels falling all over the street from my building. It’s actually a thing.

00:57:46.44 [Gary Angel]: You are getting a comic-con experience here. I like that. I can see that.

00:57:50.28 [Jim Cain]: We can neither confirm nor deny that Gary Angel has said to fire ****.

00:58:01.12 [Michael Helbling]: Hey, Gary Angel. Do you remember that time? Do you remember that time you were with Symphonic?

00:58:10.52 [Gary Angel]: You did that pretty well, I gotta say.

00:58:12.60 [Michael Helbling]: You thought of two-tiered segmentation?

00:58:19.43 [Gary Angel]: I’d have to speak a lot more if we were actually gonna go down this route.

00:58:24.27 [Jim Cain]: Boring as fuck, Colin. A presentation no one will attend.

00:58:29.08 [Tim Wilson]: I might complain about that.

00:58:31.66 [Jim Cain]: I was in the room and I was pretty sure I wasn’t high.

00:58:35.44 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, kill me.

00:58:37.85 [Jim Cain]: Let’s edit that whole thing out. God, I could be at the bar right now.

00:58:43.80 [Tim Wilson]: Rock flag and transformation.

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