Business – Page 13 – Oliver Pickup

Should you bother with real-time data?

Real-time insights are essential to adapt to a changing consumer landscape, but companies that ignore trust and transparency as part of the process are risking it all

The advice that “trust takes years to build, seconds to break and forever to repair” is attributed to an anonymous sage, which is good news for the sage because the dearth of real-time data means they’ll escape an endless stream of personalised ads.

But it’s wisdom that brands would do well to heed. Now more than ever, given that consumer trust is so difficult to earn and easy to lose, and organisations are becoming increasingly reliant on customer data to manage sales.

The Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report, published in late-June, found that, after price, the most critical factor in a customer’s purchasing decision is trust. “If trust is a key consideration for consumers, it must be a key consideration for brands,” says Henk Campher, vice president of corporate marketing at social media management platform Hootsuite.

However, consumer trust has been eroded in the last six months if engagement from brands has been lacking, or tone deaf, according to new Pegasystems research, which reveals the extent of damage the coronavirus pandemic has caused for businesses’ relationships with their customers.

More than a third (36 per cent) of respondents say they lost existing customers during the pandemic due to failings in their communications. And a similar number (37 per cent) admit to communicating at least one message that was poorly received and dented brand reputation.

It’s not easy for brands, though. The January State of the Connected Customer report from Salesforce highlights a rise in consumer expectations, while stressing four in five consumers won’t buy from companies they don’t trust.

Timing is key to real-time data success

The research shows almost three quarters (73 per cent) of customers think companies should understand their needs and 78 per cent expect consistent interactions across departments. And to make that work, real-time data is required.

“Brands that deliver connected, multichannel and personalised experiences will earn consumers’ trust,” says Adam Spearing, Salesforce chief technology officer for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Personalisation perhaps feeds from trust as much as it drives it

“Having a 360-degree customer view is crucial for enabling brands to have more personal and contextually aware interactions with customers. For retailers, this may be understanding the most appropriate time to offer customers in-store or online discounts. Whereas manufacturers can get ahead of demand based on what customers usually order at a specific time of the year, based on decades of data intelligence.”

And if companies can use real-time data to communicate with customers at particular times, and it feels sincere and authentic, then brownie points will be won. “Brands can build trust through meaningful interactions with their customers, anticipating their needs and delighting them,” says Spearing. As an example, he lauds Premier League football clubs that send personalised messages from star players to supporters on their birthdays.

Personalisation is a risky business

“The more valuable an interaction is for a customer, the more inclined they will be to continue to trust a brand to use their data appropriately,” he says, though warning there is “a fine line” to walk. “Only if brands use the data respectfully will they gain that trust.”

Andrew Hood, chief executive of data analytics consultancy Lynchpin, is equally ambivalent. “Personalisation perhaps feeds from trust as much as it drives it,” he says. “While I might be happier to share my data if I receive a better, more relevant experience in return, if I don’t trust you as a brand with my data in the first place, I might not feel confident enough to make the first move.”

M&C Saatchi’s senior art director Tom Kennedy is treading carefully and acknowledges the risk that comes with data-driven personalisation. “In January, Aviva addressed its whole email base as ‘Michael’, proving that with even the most basic data, mistakes can happen,” he says. “The assumptions, errors and insults will be amplified with each step more personal.”

Increased awareness of data privacy

Hunting for real-time data can be viewed as insidious and creepy, and there are many instances where organisations crossed the line. Cassandra Moons, data privacy officer at navigation technology firm TomTom, recalls how in 2012 American retailer Target supposedly worked out a teenager was pregnant before her parents through data mining. “Knowing intimate details about your customer that they have never told you can make people very uncomfortable,” she says.

More recently, consumer trust has been chipped away by serious data breaches. “Using data to personalise communications could be the tool that destroys people’s trust in advertising if not used smartly and respectfully,” says Megan Jones, senior planner at R/GA London. She points out that record numbers of people are using internet ad blockers and search engines protecting privacy, such as DuckDuckGo.

“This shift is symptomatic of greater public understanding around data due to Cambridge Analytica’s influence in the Vote Leave Brexit campaign, as well as greater awareness of data privacy through the launch of the General Data Protection Regulation two years ago,” says Jones.

Don’t rely too heavily on personalisation

Because customers arguably cherish personal data more than before, she questions a market strategy founded on real-time data. “Almost a decade ago, easyJet stopped investing in Google search terms and moved that budget into more traditional media to deliver phenomenal results. The company saved £6 million a year and there was a 95 per cent rise in seat sales,” says Jones.

“Similarly, last year adidas’ econometric analysis showed they’d been relying on ‘personalised’ communications too heavily as it was the broad brand-building communication that got them the majority – around 65 per cent – of their sales. And let’s not forget that Amazon, hailed as an exemplary data company, was the fifth-highest investor in traditional media in the UK in 2019, with a spend of £114 million, £26 million more than the year before.”

Lynchpin’s Hood concludes: “Ultimately, privacy and personalisation, using real-time data, go hand in hand. And brands that are transparent with the former are more likely to be able to deliver on the latter effectively to their, and their customers’, benefit.”

This article was originally published in Raconteur’s Future Customer report in September 2020

Seven elearning scams to watch out for

While online learning is booming, charlatans and scammers are looking to take advantage. Cowboy coaches are flooding the market making official accreditation or authenticity essential for individual students and businesses. Here are seven online scams to beware

01 Cloak-and-dagger sales presentations

Online learning can be a crook’s cloak, where the course has little educational content and value and is instead a sales presentation full of commercial advertising. Through advertising and regular email communications, the course is a guise to persuade you to buy a sometimes unrelated product or service.

One anonymous respondent to a CPD (continuing professional development) Standards Office survey says: “I paid to attend a training conference that I thought would genuinely give me some training in beauty and aesthetics for my practice. However, it was a sell, sell, sell session for buying botox and chemical peel products.”

Amanda Rosewarne, chief executive of the CPD Standards Office, advises: “To avoid online scams like this, people should look for training courses listed with many learning objectives and seek out independent review sites such as Trustpilot.”

02 Fake qualifications

It is easy to fall foul of scammers who promise professional qualifications. They hook you in by selling a course, but then fail to provide the correct certificate or licence.

Dr Emma Woodward, a New Zealand-based educational psychologist, says: “I’m concerned by the number of online courses offering training in areas that cross over into fields that are highly regulated, such as ‘diploma in child development’ or ‘diploma in cognitive behavioural therapy’.

“These courses allude to having more gravitas than what they offer, which is both unethical and dangerous as the application to real people is a skill that needs more than a few PDFs online.”

03 Promises of employment

“There are several ‘professional coaching organisations’ we have encountered that promise on completion of their, usually very expensive, coaching ‘qualification’ they will forward clients to you,” says Rosewarne at the CPD Standards Office.

“In this case, the course is not the problem, it’s just that the clients, business development opportunities or guaranteed financial guarantees given at the point of sale, do not materialise, leaving people at a loss of how to make a living, or develop a business, from their new skillset.”

Performing due diligence is critical. Robert Clarke, the managing editor of Learning News, says: “In these times of change and uncertainty, unscrupulous providers are on the make. Recognised training and CPD helps buyers avoid the tricksters and scams, and buy with greater confidence.”

04 Non-existent colleges and academies

“The words ‘college’ and ‘academy’ are unprotected when registering an organisation at Companies House,” Rosewarne points out. Therefore, anyone can set up an online learning course linked to a fake education centre. There are two typical online scams. Firstly, the scammers charge for an expensive and prestigious course before liquidating the organisation. Alternatively, buyers are duped into long-term membership commitments that are impossible to cancel and the content is often freely available elsewhere.

“Make sure it is a well-known provider and check it with a phone call,” says Hilarie Owen, chief executive of the Leaders’ Institute. “Don’t part with any money until you have checked.”

05 Rogue conferences

Scamming global conference providers offer fake event agendas by using the names of top academics, business leaders and talking heads to advertise and sell tickets. Supposed keynote speakers will have “cancelled at the last minute” only to be replaced by lower-grade alternatives.

A Trustpilot ConferenceSeries Review provides an example of this dubious practice. “Attended the fifth International CAM Conference in Vancouver in October 2019. Only a few speakers showed up and the rest apparently had their visas rejected or had health issues. Total fabrication.” There were 44 names advertised originally, but only four speakers attended and there was no one from the organisation present. “I wish I had checked before registering,” the reviewer adds.

06 Poor-quality online learning courses

“This online scam involves a concise overview course for a minimal fee, usually £50 or less, which offers what we call ‘skimpy content’,” says Rosewarne. “Buyers will encounter heavy promotion and sophisticated digital marketing tricks for purchasing a further, more expensive, course, which might be £1,000 or more. Sometimes these courses also lack engagement and are ‘chalk-and-talk’ presentations with little practical application.”

Simon de Cintra, director of Act Naturally, agrees. “Professional training providers know that reputation is key to long-term success and actively encourage well-informed purchasing at every stage,” he says, warning that users should always read reviews before buying.

07 Free online learning

Not only are numerous free online learning courses, peddled by charlatans, a waste of time, but the purported expertise they provide is also substandard and therefore potentially harmful. “This learning often focuses on a specific topic, such as beauty aesthetics, child mental health support, or IT engineering technical training,” says Rosewarne. “Most of the time, the authors have had a single fluke success online and are not at all experts in the topic.”

This chimes with Jo Cook, founder and director of Lightbulb Moment. “A lot of people are jumping on the COVID-19 bandwagon, either as a scam or with little expertise in how to provide quality remote courses and live online sessions,” she says. “Make sure to go to a company with years of experience behind them.”

This article was originally published in Raconteur’s Digital Learning report in September 2020

Expert advice: ‘The best business lessons I ever learnt’

We asked dozens of corporate giant C-suites and founders of SMEs for the best business advice they have ever been given. Here are some of their words of wisdom

“It was Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus who said, ‘We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.’ Those words have never been so important to heed.”

Gerd Leonhard, chief executive officer, The Futures Agency

“The best business advice I’ve been given is to acknowledge that leadership is hard, and this means accepting that you’ll need help and won’t have all the ideas. Leaders can sometimes think that they should make decisions on their own to demonstrate that they have full grasp of a situation. But instead they should constantly ask for advice. You never know where the next big idea will come from, but it probably won’t be you.”

Ian Rand, chief executive officer, Barclays Business Banking

“It’s so important to listen to colleagues of all levels and experiences. Employees will never feel comfortable speaking their minds unless companies create an overarching culture of inclusion. We use an online platform called Chatter. We’ve found that actively listening to our employees in this way has had a dramatic impact, empowering individuals, regardless of role or region, to have a voice that is heard.”

Andrew Lawson, executive vice-president and general manager UK, Salesforce

“The hardest but most valuable lesson to learn is your approach to failure. When I first started out as an entrepreneur, one of my businesses failed badly. Although things didn’t go the way I had hoped, my backer sent me a note saying that this business had failed despite me, not because of me. I still use this piece of advice today, which helps me to depersonalise and keep track of my objective.”

Rich Gelfond, chief executive officer, IMAX

Carl Reader is author of The Startup Coach

“My dad told me in my early days of working to keep a contacts book. Since then this has moved onto my iPhone, with emails and social media handles rather than landlines and fax numbers, but it has been amazing how contacts from over a decade ago are still relevant to me today, and how a strong network is vital.”

Carl Reader, business adviser and author of The Startup Coach

“Keep your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds. This means stay humble, but always be brave enough to dream big. I’ve often repeated it to other entrepreneurs – that, and to think like a toddler.”

Paul Lindley, founder of Ella’s Kitchen

“[Executive chairman at Twitter] Omid Kordestani once told me (while we were scaling Google rapidly), always hire people smarter than yourself, but also people you inherently get on with. One day you could be stuck in an airport with them for hours.”

Kate Burns, chief executive officer of Media Tech at startup accelerator Hambro Perks (and Google’s first international hire)

“ ‘Frustration comes before a breakthrough.’ What I like about this is not its truth – that is inevitable, as most breakthroughs need tension to be achieved – but the philosophical view it provides. It places you in your own story and allows you to imagine the perspective from the future, which in turn gives you permission to accept the frustration of not being where you wish to be.”

Mark Curtis, co-founder and chief client officer, Fjord, design and innovation from Accenture Interactive

“The best advice given to me came in the form of the following story. There are two hunter-gatherer tribes searching for food. One group splits up and covers a large area. The second grabs a charred stick from a fire and breaks it on the ground. Whatever direction the stick points, the whole tribe go. Despite being no more strategic, the second group find more food because they travel all together in the same direction. So, in business, choose a direction, communicate it to your crew and go together. That is what real success is made of.”

Leo Rayman, chief executive officer of advertising agency Grey London

“The head of our Spanish organisation once explained to me he takes a ‘nose in, fingers out’ approach to management. As a business leader, no matter how much you want to, getting involved in everything makes you stressed and unproductive. Set up a reporting structure which means you only have to be involved in making the critical decisions, freeing up your time to tackle the bigger challenges which, ultimately, you’re paid to overcome.”

Matt Cross, UK managing director, Hotwire Global

“ ‘Don’t do what I say, do what I mean.’ This is my favourite quotation from a friend, and an amusing way of remembering how important it is to be clear in your communication.”

Aidan Bell, chief executive officer of e-commerce service EnviroBuild

“One of the best pieces of advice I’ve been given was to ‘hire positive people’. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not about your team blindly saying ‘yes’ to everything; innovation flourishes when you build a team that challenges the status quo. But it is about a team that communicates ideas and feedback in a positive, productive and fair manner. In the end, happy staff are productive staff. It’s a win-win.”

Pip Jamieson, chief executive officer of professional networking platform The Dots

“The best advice I’ve ever been given is: ‘Make sure you are a painkiller, not a vitamin.’ You need to be offering something to customers that it would be painful for them to live without rather than just a nice-to-have – then your business will have more chance of longevity and success.”

Ed Molyneux, co-founder and chief executive officer, FreeAgent

This article was first published in The Telegraph in March 2018

Tech-enabled finance could save your company

When crises hit, organisations always lean heavily on their internal finance specialists to reduce costs, streamline operations and plot a roadmap to recovery, in that order. While lessons should have been learnt after the global economic crash a dozen years ago, and more robust business continuity plans established, it was impossible to predict the speed, scale and severity of the coronavirus pandemic.

Once again, business leaders are looking, desperately, to their finance teams for rapid solutions to colossal challenges. It’s a mighty responsibility, given the amount of uncertainty and an impending global recession.

“During the current crisis, C-suite executives rely on financiers to identify the most cost-effective sources of financing, not only for the survival of the firm in the short run, but also for the growth that follows economic stagnation,” says Dr Nikolaos Antypas, finance lecturer at Henley Business School.

“For most companies, the top-down directive is: survive first, grow later. Since the pandemic started, the role of internal finance has shifted towards turning down or postponing indefinitely any project or cost item with non-existential importance.”

However, unlike in 2008, access to digital technologies, cloud storage and data analysis are enabling faster results, greater agility and collaboration, and better forecasting. If COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation, the financial function is in the driving seat of that change.

Tech-savvy organisations have major advantage

Laggard organisations that decline to embrace technology will fail. And even industries that have rallied well since lockdown, such as ecommerce and healthcare, should be anticipating more obstacles on the road to recovery.

“The threat of decreasing revenue looms ominously,” warns Antypas, nodding to the tapering of the furlough scheme, which could trigger a sharp rise in unemployment. “No company should be complacent with their current success; their customer base is about to lose its revenue stream and that loss can have devastating ripple effects. Even the most profitable company can suffer if cash flows are not managed efficiently.”

Red Flag Alert, a credit risk management company, has amassed financial data of UK businesses for the last 16 years. The analysis is bleak. “UK industry is facing a mountain of unsustainable debt; it could be as much as £107 billion,” says Mark Halstead, a partner at the Oldham-based firm.

“Technology and data will be critical to companies bouncing back from the pandemic. It will also enable businesses to protect themselves and strive for growth in an economy saddled with record levels of debt.”

Technology and data will enable businesses to protect themselves and strive for growth in an economy saddled with record levels of debt

Organisations that invested in digital technologies and evolved the financial function before the pandemic have an early-adopter advantage. Kaziu Gill, who co-founded London-headquartered LimeGreen Accountancy in 2009, has long promoted accountancy software and other digital tools to his clients, who are mostly small and medium-sized businesses in the creative industries.

“COVID-19 has forced many businesses to change and become leaner and more mobile, but we have managed to continue without any disruption,” he says. “In some cases, we have been more productive.

“We are seeing more businesses exploring how they can grow digitally and the suite of tools that we use complements any organisation’s approach to budget and forecasting.”

Finance functions arm themselves with digital tools

LimeGreen enjoys a partnership with cloud-based accounting software platform Xero. “We offer plug-ins to Xero, like Spotlight, which is a great forecasting tool, and Receipt Bank,” says Gill. “And there are other project management tools that help link the financial function with human resources, such as CakeHR. We have always strived to utilise tech and now financial functions simply have to make that transition to digital. Pieces of paper are no good when you can’t send or receive physical mail during lockdown and with remote working.”

He argues that the recent open banking directive – a government-enforced programme designed to open up banking data, launched in 2018 – strengthens the case for finance departments to embrace digital tools. “It’s the perfect time because every bank in the UK is obligated to open up their application programming interfaces so third-party software companies can use them.”

Xero, for instance, recently launched a short-term cash-flow tool that projects bank balances 30 days into the future, showing the impact of existing bills and invoices, if paid on time. “This capability helps the financial function to scenario plan accurately and make changes to business plans instantly,” explains Donna Torres, Xero’s general manager of global direct sales and operations.

“It’s more important than ever for organisations to have an up-to-date view of their cash flow so they can plan, forecast and make the right decisions about their future. Cloud accounting technology provides a real-time snapshot.”

Empowering finance teams to change business plans

Financial functions that push to arm their organisations with other digital tools, including artificial intelligence-powered document scanning and e-signature, are discovering they can achieve company-wide efficiencies almost overnight.

Mike Plimsoll, industry head of financial services at Adobe, offers a banking example. “Facing increased demand with reduced branch capacity to maintain social distancing, TSB acted quickly to transform a significant amount of offline forms into digital-only interactions, creating an end-to-end journey for its personal and business banking customers,” he says.

“After implementing Adobe Sign, TSB managed over 80,000 customer interactions in the first eight weeks, saving the need for up to 15,000 potential branch visits.”

Plimsoll posits that by switching their processes and establishing digital technologies, finance teams have been able to “keep the business moving and react quickly to the shifting landscape and help steer a course through the uncertainty”.

Adopting a shorter planning window is paramount for business continuity and recovery, says Thomas Sutter of Oracle NetSuite’s Global Solutions Centre of Excellence. “Most businesses operate on a 12-month budget cycle and manage strategictra plans with longer timeframes, but at this time the focus must shift to immediate priorities,” he says.

“Now more than ever, establishing a clear framework of visibility and control will streamline and protect cash flow in the short term, keep customers happy, and reveal new and innovative options business leaders have available to drive the business forward in the future. Finance leaders and their teams will be at the heart of these strategic moves.”

Finance departments may have had more responsibility thrust upon them when COVID-19 hit, but it seems their role will only grow in importance in the coming months and years. Technology is both empowering and enabling their new lofty status.

This article was originally published in Raconteur’s Business Continuity and Growth report in August 2020