If you are working on a presentation or a business case around customer experience right now, do me a favor – do yourself a favor and just take a couple minutes to read this post (or watch the original video).
I’m seeing a lot of people doing something that is really risky in their presentations, which is using data that is either too old or that that doesn’t actually say what they’re claiming it says. Most of the time, this isn’t done maliciously. It’s done because people don’t take the time to investigate where a piece of data actually came from. Maybe they heard it in somebody else’s presentation, or they overgeneralize the data so that it seems to say something that it doesn’t actually say.
I’ll give you one of the most common examples of this. I still see presentations that start with the statistic from Gartner that 89% of companies plan to differentiate primarily on the basis of customer experience. That statistic, as far as I can tell from my research, comes from a 2014 study – now five years old. It said that by 2016, three years ago, the marketers surveyed expected to be competing mostly on the basis of customer experience. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that, that’s what was true in 2014, but it’s old. Using that data to assert now that marketers still think customer experience is the primary way they’re going to compete doesn’t really hold water.
Thankfully, the folks at Gartner have published an updated version of that study. They did it in 2017, and in that one 81% of the marketers said that they expect their company to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience in the next two years, so by the end of 2019. If that in particular is one of the statistics you’re using, here’s a link to the Gartner blog post that actually shows that data point so you can reference it.
If you have other data points or things you’re using that you’re not sure where they came from, that’s what we’re here for, the community, your community on LinkedIn, the customer experience community. Post them in the comments or on your own feed and say “hey guys, I heard this statistic somewhere… …before I repeat it I want to make sure that I know what it is, and where it came from”. I’ll take a look and see if I know where it came from, and chances are pretty good that – if it’s a valid statistic – someone in this community will know where it came from and be able to point you to the original source.
That saves you from being open to the potential for somebody questioning you when you’re giving your presentation, or when you’ve submitted your business case. Because you don’t want to give people who are already skeptical or reluctant to try do to this work any reason to trust what you’re saying any less, right? Trust is low enough in the business community right now, we certainly don’t need to do things, or fail to do some due diligence, that ultimately hurt the level of trust that we’ve earned from people.
I know it’s a little extra work, but it’s worth it. I’m happy to help, and if you have really cool statistics that you’ve found, share those too, because we all could use them. Good luck with your presentations, thanks for listening and have a great day!
