Appendix:
Useful Questions
This appendix contains a very thorough list of useful questions. In my work as a SAS systems engineer manager, sales executives often requested questions to ask their customers to break the ice and qualify a given opportunity. I figured it would be good to have a list of questions available for readers of this book.
These questions will improve your meeting preparation. They will also help you clarify and test assumptions and inferences regarding the current or planned predictive analytics environment. Effective questions will initiate the sharing of information required for an effective implementation of a predictive analytics system. When asking these questions, ask for specific examples and agree on what important words mean.
To make the list easier to use, I have categorized the questions by chapter and by subcategories. I hope they are useful for sales staff as well as for those executive readers who will engage in conversations with technical staff in each of the predictive cycle areas we covered in this book.
| Chapter 1: Identification Questions | Subcategory |
| How are analytic best practices shared? | Culture |
| Are cross-departmental projects encouraged? | Culture |
| Is data quality an issue? | Culture |
| How do different departments share information? | Culture |
| How important is intuition in your organization for decision making? | Culture |
| Do you feel your organization seems to be resistant to change? | Culture |
| Have you implemented a change management program in recent years? | Culture |
| Are employees open to changing their roles and responsibilities? | Culture |
| Is information viewed as proprietary in any departments within your organization? | Culture |
| Do managers trust information in their reports? | Culture |
| Can you fulfill urgent needs for information? | Culture |
| Have you acquired any businesses in the past couple of years? Do you plan to in the near future? | General |
| Have you identified a specific business issue to address with predictive analytics? | General |
| How many different business units do you have? | General |
| What happens when there is an organization change? If a manager leaves? | General |
| How much time should it take to adjust for changes? | General |
| Are departments able to leverage data that has already been collected? | General |
| How many permanent employees do you have? | General |
| What is the process for turning usable data into information? | General |
| How long does it take for you to get new analytical applications? | General |
| How long does it take you to make changes to your data structures and financial reports when organizational changes take place? | General |
| What effects do organizational changes to the business have on your group? | General |
| What are your major divisions and their primary products? | General |
| How is your organization structured? | General |
| Has your company changed ownership in the last three years? | General |
| Do you have any strategic partnerships with other companies? | General |
| What are your locations and major services/products offered? | General |
| Have you identified potential risks for the analytic project? | General |
| Have you gone through any recent corporate restructuring or reorganizations? | General |
| How many research projects do you run per year? | General |
| Have you prepared a return on investment plan for your analytic initiative? | General |
| How many different spreadsheets are used within your organization that contain financial data? | General |
| Can the analytic solution support http interactions with Web? | General |
| How many systems does the data reside in? | General |
| How many people work with your corporate financial data? | General |
| Are analysts located at frontline and management positions? | Human capital |
| How many employees does your organization have? | Human capital |
| When hiring experience analysts, what do hiring managers look for? | Human capital |
| Is marketing the area to which other areas turn for information? | Human capital |
| Is there a mentoring system in place? | Human capital |
| What is your overall level of analytical skill and proficiency using analytic software: low, moderate, high? | Human capital |
| How long does it take to plan and run an analytic project? | Human capital |
| What is the impact on new recruitment efforts? | Human capital |
| Do you think the current skill level is sufficient to meet the analytical needs of the organization? | Human capital |
| How do your employees gain information skills? | Human capital |
| Does your company have an analytics training program? | Human capital |
| What kind of training is provided when new enhancements are introduced (for both business and technical users)? | Human capital |
| What training options do you offer online and offline? What topics do they cover? Who is the intended audience? | Human capital |
| What kind of turnover do you have? | Human capital |
| How many analytic users does your organization have? | Human capital |
| Do you use advanced analytics to create models? | Infrastructure |
| How many analytic sessions will be run daily? | Infrastructure |
| Which analytical tool is used to analyze company information? | Infrastructure |
| What is the current window for your nightly batch? | Infrastructure |
| How many transactions do you process every hour? | Infrastructure |
| What is the business objective of this analytic project? | Infrastructure |
| Are there any systems available to track different enterprise objectives? | Infrastructure |
| What is your standard DBMS, and how do you access it? | Infrastructure |
| Does your IT staff use Oracle tools? | Infrastructure |
| Is the access to the Oracle information complicated for the users? | Infrastructure |
| Is enterprise data available to all departments that need it almost immediately? | Infrastructure |
| At what time does the data center open? | Infrastructure |
| Do you have data definitions available at the IT level? | Infrastructure |
| How many extractions will the new system need to perform? | Infrastructure |
| Is business-purpose data integration complex for these marts? | Infrastructure |
| Do you have an automated system to integrate data from different sources? | Infrastructure |
| How many data marts do you have? | Infrastructure |
| Would there be a need to create new data marts for analytical purposes? | Infrastructure |
| Would data mining be running at the same time as data preparation, enrichment, and cleansing? | Infrastructure |
| Is your current data schema relational? | Infrastructure |
| Who cleans the data received? | Infrastructure |
| Would you need data quality software? | Infrastructure |
| Do you have an existing EMC SAN connected at 2 Gbit/sec using TCP/IP? | Infrastructure |
| How many records will be accessed by the data mining software? | Infrastructure |
| How many variables are available for analysis? | Infrastructure |
| Is your business information organized into a single repository (i.e., a data warehouse)? | Infrastructure |
| How many ETL sessions concurrent with operation would you have? | Infrastructure |
| Are your systems currently integrated with external parties (i.e., suppliers, customers, or partners)? | Infrastructure |
| How many forecasts will be run during a given day? | Infrastructure |
| Who is your preferred hardware vendor? | Infrastructure |
| How far back does your data go in the company’s repositories? | Infrastructure |
| Do you see the need for data mining results to be incorporated into the CRM system? | Infrastructure |
| Do you capture knowledge at the enterprise level to enable further learning? | Infrastructure |
| Is there any internal development for marketing campaigns? | Infrastructure |
| Do you have metadata and use it? | Infrastructure |
| How often are the analytical models expected to be updated? | Infrastructure |
| Do you need OLAP processing? | Infrastructure |
| Do you know the current number of hierarchies and dimensions in your system? | Infrastructure |
| Do you have a need for drill down? | Infrastructure |
| How many users will work with the cubes? | Infrastructure |
| Would you prefer to not care about cubes? | Infrastructure |
| What is your main operating system? | Infrastructure |
| How many environments are required? | Infrastructure |
| Are the system records R/O? | Infrastructure |
| Are there any automated feedback loops to improve operational systems? | Infrastructure |
| Is the performance of the entire organization centrally monitored in an automated way? | Infrastructure |
| Is most information delivered through a portal or via paper? | Infrastructure |
| How do you envision your results? Will they be produced as hardcopy and/or HTML electronic documents? | Infrastructure |
| Will reports be distributed via HTML, dynamic HTML, portal, and e-mail? | Infrastructure |
| Would you expect your users to generate their own reports dynamically? | Infrastructure |
| How many new reports are generated per year by IT? | Infrastructure |
| What is the average report turnaround time? | Infrastructure |
| Do you have access to sampling techniques? | Infrastructure |
| Do you have a model used for scoring? | Infrastructure |
| Have you created basic segmentations and a few regression models? | Infrastructure |
| Are you currently using data mining for segmentation purposes? | Infrastructure |
| Who selects the software tools for the different departments? | Infrastructure |
| Is storage managed at the enterprise level? | Infrastructure |
| Is the analytical system hosted separate from the operational environment? | Infrastructure |
| Is there a portal available for Web-based structure query and reporting? | Infrastructure |
| How many active concurrent users does your Web portal support? | Infrastructure |
| Do managers feel they have an adequate view of the company’s information? | Performance |
| Is the tool used to extract information an enterprise standard supported by IT? | Performance |
| Would you consider current data accurate? | Performance |
| Are there any issues associated with the standardization of names and addresses? | Performance |
| What is the primary source of information? Paper reports? | Performance |
| Do you purchase demographic information regularly? | Performance |
| How accurate is your demographic information, and what percentage of your buyers does it cover? | Performance |
| How many tables do you use to store your primary data? | Performance |
| How big is your enrollment table? | Performance |
| What is the database growth per year? | Performance |
| How big is your buyer database? How many years of history? | Performance |
| Do you have a corporate knowledge database? | Performance |
| Are you using mass marketing techniques currently? | Performance |
| Does each customer have a unique ID? | Performance |
| Does the database contain buyers’ names and addresses plus a unique ID? | Performance |
| Do you have a visible corporate performance management system? | Performance |
| Does everyone have access to sales performance information? | Performance |
| How often are critical corporate metrics reported: daily, weekly, etc.? | Performance |
| Do you have published security standards that govern data access? | Performance |
| How many people do you have in software development? | Performance |
| Chapter 2: Design Build Questions | Subcategory |
| Does the analytic software allow the administrator to enable or disable specific data sources from the configuration or administration console? | Administration |
| Does the analytic solution provide a concurrent multiuser environment for administrative and operational functions? | Administration |
| What functions are available to the administrator using the administrative applications? Can these tools be used behind a firewall? | Administration |
| Are any unique features or characteristics needed in the analytic architecture? | Architecture |
| Do you have a logical diagram of the analytical system’s physical architecture and the distribution of application functionality? | Architecture |
| Are the backup and recovery tools included with the predictive analytics software? | Backup and recovery |
| If the predictive analytics solution is deployed in a cluster, does the product support a centrally supported configuration model? | Configuration |
| How should the analytic solution handle failover? | Failover |
| Should the system work in a geographically distributed environment? | Geography |
| Is the logging functionality supplied by the predictive analytics solution? | Logging |
| Should any third-party technology be OEM’d in the solution (databases, editors, configuration management)? | OEM |
| What are the current system requirements? | Requirements |
| Should the software provide visibility into the rules used and their relative effectiveness? | Rules |
| How are rules tested before they are deployed into production? | Rules |
| Would the analytic software provide notifications for products with inconsistent or no business rules? | Rules |
| Should the system have the ability to schedule long running processes at a desired time and date? | Scheduling |
| Should the analytic application provide the ability to deploy predictive models and scoring in batch and real time? | Scoring |
| Would the system maintain a security log of transactions originating from a Web interface or via the Internet/intranet? | Security |
| Does the analytic software support roles-based security to control who can set the administration parameters? | Security |
| Should the analytic solution use short-term caching? If so, what could be the caching strategy? | Short-term caching |
| Should the analytic solution be standards based? If so, which standards? | Standards |
| What should be the storage mechanism and the propagation strategy for the data? | Storage |
| Should the analytic solution use any databases, relational or otherwise, for persistent storage? If so, which vendors and versions? | Storage |
| What are the system’s perceived strengths and weaknesses? | Strengths and weaknesses |
| What is the total cost of ownership? | Total cost of ownership |
| Should the predictive application insulate a user from others doing the same actions (reporting, model building, model evaluation, model implementation)? | User isolation |
| Does the analytic software have an intuitive and consistent interface (graphical) designed for business users? | Users |
| Should the system have the ability to save a work area to be used for another analysis session? | Work area |
| Should the analytic application provide a user work area particular to an analysis? | Work area |
| Chapter 3: Integration Questions | Subcategory |
| Do you have a separate system in place that enables you to govern access protocols? | Access control |
| How much administrative time is spent making updated changes to your databases? | Administration |
| Define the APIs and SDKs that can be used to extend your analytic applications. | Application programming interface |
| Would an automated, centralized process for rolling up and calculating financial data that was controlled by IT benefit your organization? | Benefit |
| How much IT time and money is spent on maintaining and supporting different systems/tools? | Budgeting |
| How much of your IT budget is spent on these different systems? | Budgeting |
| How much does it cost your departments to ensure strict adherence to integration requirements? | Budgeting |
| What are the repercussions of not meeting these requirements? | Budgeting |
| How much money would you save if you were able to consolidate and centralize integration technologies? | Budgeting |
| Can you currently track the activity and submission of your budgeting cycle? | Budgeting |
| How much of an improvement from your current budgeting process would you like to see? What would that improvement save you? | Budgeting |
| How many different business units, locations, or sites do you have that are responsible for submitting a budget? | Budgeting |
| How many people are involved in the budgeting process? | Budgeting |
| How often are budgets created? | Budgeting |
| Is your budgeting data collected in the same format? | Budgeting |
| How long does the budgeting process take? | Budgeting |
| What does it cost your organization to work through a budget cycle? | Budgeting |
| Are any of your budgeting processes automated? | Budgeting |
| Do you think your current budgeting cycle is slow? | Budgeting |
| Do you use spreadsheets to budget? | Budgeting |
| Do your users have to perform any budget calculations? | Budgeting |
| How much do you think you could improve if users didn’t have to calculate and manually submit budget information? | Budgeting |
| Is too much time being spent on waiting for minor updates that are crucial to the month-end closing process? | Budgeting |
| Would you integrate administrative claims data? | Claims data |
| How do you know if the consolidated view is correct? | Consolidated view |
| How do you consolidate financial information across multiple systems and applications during the closing process? | Consolidation |
| How do you manage multiple currency rates and conversions that vary by scenario, country, and account type? | Conversions |
| Where is the customer data located? | Customer data |
| How does the inability to integrate data from various sources affect the capacity to improve the customer experience? | Customer experience |
| What kind of customer profile information is available to your reps during a customer call? | Customer profile |
| How long does it take to obtain this unified customer view? | Customer view |
| Do you need to shorten the integration cycle? | Cycle |
| What types of database(s) should the solution support? | Data access |
| How do other departments access data in order to leverage existing findings? | Data access |
| What is the current process to access the data? | Data access |
| What system(s) do you have in place today for users to access all the data? | Data access |
| Would you need to run data acquisition processes from a GUI? | Data acquisition |
| Are data collected centrally using the same IT resources? | Data collection |
| Do different departments have different initiatives to collect customer data? | Data collection |
| Are customers being asked similar questions by different departments? | Data collection |
| Which departments are involved in gathering customer-related data? | Data collection |
| Are you able to leverage existing infrastructure, such as your Web site and telephones/call center, for data collection? | Data collection |
| How much does data collection cost your organization? | Data collection |
| Would you need to replace data errors? | Data errors |
| Do you collect your financial data in the same format? | Data format |
| How often or how real time do you get data today: quarterly, monthly, daily, hourly, etc.? | Data frequency |
| What is your data governance process? | Data governance |
| Would you need to see and perform source-to-target data mapping? | Data mapping |
| Would you need to combine data from multiple data sources for analysis? | Data sources |
| Which data sources would you like to integrate? | Data sources |
| Are your current data standardized and comparable over the years? | Data standards |
| Do you have a centralized repository for your financial information? | Data warehouse |
| How many internal databases do you have? | Databases |
| Is the consolidation process documented? | Documentation |
| How much information is duplicated? | Duplication |
| How does duplication affect your valuable IT resources? | Duplication |
| Describe how consistency is maintained between development and production versions of software packages. | Environment consistency |
| What is the impact of an error? | Errors |
| Are these manual integration processes tedious and error prone? | Errors |
| How do you determine if there are errors in the financial transaction data? | Errors |
| Does the manual gathering of data have the risk of error? | Errors |
| How are errors corrected? | Errors |
| Is this done manually or with an ETL tool? | ETL |
| What percentage of IT’s time is spent on data extraction and transformation? | ETL |
| When the ETL process is complete, how many different reporting formats (types) are utilized to present the data/information? | ETL |
| What ETL software/tools are different departments using? | ETL |
| Is the current process of integrating and transforming data automated? | ETL automation |
| Would you need to conduct parallel extract executions? | Extractions |
| How is customer feedback data used in the organization today? | Feedback data |
| Would the consolidation of spreadsheets be easier if you had a system designed for financial analysis? | Financial analysis |
| How many spreadsheets do you have to consolidate and allocate today to get to the forecast? | Forecast |
| Do you have to continually make provisions for changing business hierarchies? | Hierarchies |
| Do you have historical data? | Historical data |
| Can you, with a high level of confidence, say that you trust the information that comes back from your business managers? | Information trust |
| Can you really depend on the calculations that come from your business managers? | Information trust |
| Do you have confidence the numbers are complete and accurate? | Information trust |
| If you were to ask your business managers, how many different calculations would you come up with for what is supposed to be the same business measure? | Information trust |
| How much time would be saved if you didn’t have to review, analyze, and recalculate financial information to ensure its integrity? | Integrity |
| How should the system function and interface with other systems? | Interfaces |
| Does everyone calculate KPIs the same way? | KPIs |
| How are data in all of the different languages and locations gathered? | Languages |
| How do you manage the integration process? | Management |
| Is there a lot of manual rekeying of data from different systems? | Manual |
| Are these manual processes tedious and error prone? | Manual |
| Would you access data through a specific metadata layer? Can the software leverage existing metadata? | Metadata |
| Would you need to input missing values? | Missing values |
| Does manual gathering data run the risk of error? | Multiple system |
| When information is reviewed and updated from spreadsheets, what process do you use to update the source? | Operational update |
| What type of integration is required for the analytic solution? How would this integration be achieved? | Plan |
| Do you have a standard process for consolidating financial information? | Process |
| How is profitability calculated? | Profitability |
| Would you need to manage execution based on error severity/condition codes? | Programming |
| Are cross-sell and up-sell opportunities being missed due to the lack of real-time customer information? | Real time |
| Can information gathered today be used in real time based on input from an inbound call? | Real time |
| How does the inability to track real-time information impact your ability to react? | Real time |
| How many data sources would you like to capture real-time information from? | Real time |
| Do you think a more centralized and automated IT process for financial reporting would reduce the risk of inaccurate reporting? | Reporting |
| Would you integrate response data? | Response data |
| Is it difficult to work with financial data due to complex calculations and revenue roll-up requirements? | Roll up |
| How do you calculate different management, tax, and legal roll-up structures? | Roll-up structures |
| Are there any limitations on batch jobs execution from a system scheduler tool? | Scheduling |
| Do you need to ensure “no contact” details and similar requests are adhered to? | Security |
| How do you ensure privacy and confidentiality regulations are met? | Security |
| How do you manage regulations around ensuring customer data are kept with the organization? | Security |
| Are standard security protocols used? | Security |
| Are you able to ensure data are protected? | Security |
| Are you able to manage data security requirements as part of your customer feedback activities? | Security |
| Do you need to add an extra layer of security to ensure feedback is collected through a secure environment? | Security |
| Does the lack of system administration create greater pressure in terms of managing security? | Security |
| How do you ensure data are used only by the departments and teams that should have access to these data? | Security |
| How do you ensure that only those with clearance see certain data? | Security |
| How much does it cost to manage these security and privacy regulations? | Security |
| Are there levels of privacy around what data users are able to view? | Security |
| Do your other systems integrate into your ERP security? | Security |
| How much time would be saved if changes could be made directly from certain spreadsheets right to the database with an approval layer in place to ensure security and integrity of the information? | Security |
| Have there been security breaches? What has been the impact? | Security |
| Would you need to see and select available source tables? | Source tables |
| Can your staff easily incorporate data from a spreadsheet into a database that is used for financial reporting? | Spreadsheets |
| Are you forced to create and maintain a lot of disconnected spreadsheets with complex formulas? | Spreadsheets |
| How do you consolidate these spreadsheets? | Spreadsheets |
| Do you have a standard process for consolidating financial information? | Standard |
| What protocols and standards do you currently use? | Standards |
| Is there a lack of oversight for the IT team when ensuring adherence to government privacy regulations, compliance, etc.? | Standards |
| Are you able to comply with standards and regulations? | Standards |
| Are your strategic objectives part of the governance requirements? | Standards |
| Do you have specific customer data compliance regulations that need to be met? | Standards |
| How many of your IT resources must adhere to these regulations? | Standards |
| How much money does your organization spend on compliance overall? | Standards |
| What is the effect of not meeting standards and regulation requirements? | Standards |
| How do you incorporate previous results into your strategic planning process? | Strategic planning |
| Would you integrate survey data? | Survey data |
| Do you have text fields in your call center? | Text |
| Do you think these text fields might contain information that indicates cross-sell opportunities or customer churn? | Text |
| Would you integrate text data? | Text data |
| Does the analytic platform allow integration with third-party vendors? If so, list the protocols the application supports. | Third party |
| How much of your staff time is taken in managing different tools/solutions? | Time |
| Would you need to see and select transformation routines? | Transformation |
| Would you need to show custom transformation routines in the same GUI? | Transformation |
| Would you need to show the sequence of transformation steps? | Transformation |
| Are you able to maintain different levels of permissions so users have access only to information that they are authorized to view? | User permission levels |
| Do users require different levels of usage? | User permission levels |
| How do you manage these differing requirements for users? | User permission levels |
| How difficult is it to set user permissions on what users can do? | User permission levels |
| Do you have to reassign everyone to the new manager and reassign permissions? | User permission levels |
| How difficult is it to set user permissions on what users can do? | User permission levels |
| Is it time consuming to manage users today? | Users |
| How many people would benefit from the ability to make changes directly to your databases if the process was controlled? | Users |
| Would you need to transform variables? | Variable transformation |
| Would you integrate Web activity data? | Web activity data |
| Chapter 4: Reporting Questions | Subcategory |
| How many resources are allocated to repetitive ad hoc reporting? | Ad hoc |
| How much time would you save in not having to administer reporting if a different set of standards and controls were in place? | Administration |
| Is there room for improvement in your current reporting environment regarding administration procedures and network resource utilization? | Administration |
| What percentage of reports focus on analyzing aggregated data? | Aggregated data |
| Does your reporting include alerts? Are the alerts automatically delivered? | Alerts |
| How are the alerts sent: via e-mail, phone, pager, manually informed, etc.? | Alerts |
| In what circumstances are the alerts generated (i.e., when an event exceeds a predefined threshold)? | Alerts |
| What is the impact on response if an alert fails or is not delivered in error through the current process? | Alerts |
| Who are the alerts sent to? | Alerts |
| Are you able to view reports that would automatically alert you when milestones were not being met effectively? | Alerts |
| How does the inability to efficiently analyze information supporting an alert affect response time and hence mitigation attempts? | Alerts |
| Do you currently have a system that allows you to run reports after an alert is issued? | Alerts |
| How many different reporting applications do you use? | Applications |
| Are reports automatically updated when new information is available? | Automation |
| How much would it help your organization and process if the budgeting cycle was automated? | Automation |
| Are you able to show stakeholders where budgets are being sent and why? | Budget results |
| Are you able to centralize the reporting process? | Centralization |
| Are you able to manage reporting easily, through one central location? How are translations managed? Are you able to keep reporting centralized so changes can be made easily? | Centralization |
| What are the financial impacts of your reporting challenges? How much time do you spend reporting? | Challenges |
| How long does it take you to make changes to your data structures and financial reports when M&A changes take place? | Changes |
| Are you able to show results and compare to other areas? | Comparisons |
| Do you have a consolidated system for managing the financial reports used to derive the forecast? | Consolidated system |
| How do you provide summary reports showing a consolidated view of the enterprise? | Consolidated view |
| How do you summarize information contained in multiple reports into one consolidated view report? | Consolidated view |
| How many IT resources are used to create and distribute reports? | Creation |
| Are standard reports available for reporting campaign performance? | CRM |
| Can custom reports be developed easily? | Custom |
| How are reporting data collected? | Data collection |
| How is information gathered for financial reports? | Data gathering |
| How long are reported data typically retained? | Data retention |
| What storage mechanism do you use for the reported data? | Data storage |
| What is the cost of delay when a manager needs immediate access to a report? | Delays |
| How much time does it take to include different language requirements? | Different languages |
| How do you currently distribute and collect budgeting information? | Distribution |
| How are financial reports distributed to managers today? | Distribution |
| How much of the report generation and distribution process is manual? | Distribution |
| Is it easy to create and modify reports? | Ease |
| How do you currently provide reporting information for ERP systems? | Enterprise resource planning |
| What is the impact of an error? | Errors |
| How much time and money could you save by taking corrective action earlier in the reporting process? | Errors |
| How are exceptions or trends in the financial information found? | Exception/trends |
| How do you analyze exceptions? Can you easily narrow exceptions down to the appropriate level of detail? | Exceptions |
| How do you find exceptions in your current reports? | Exceptions |
| How important is it for you to understand both positive and negative exceptions in your business? | Exceptions |
| How does the executive team receive reports today? Are reports mobile? | Executives |
| What kind of reports would the executive like to view each morning? | Executives |
| How do you report and measure the success of a program to executive management? | Executives |
| How do you report on results, success metrics, and feedback to stakeholders? How do you report these results to the regulatory body? | Executives |
| Is reporting a complex process? | Expertise |
| How much expertise does the reporting process take? | Expertise |
| How long does it take to include feedback in these reports? | Feedback |
| How long does it take to create feedback reports? Are you able to standardize on the creation of these reports? | Feedback |
| After the forecast is complete, how many people need to be able to view the forecast? | Forecasts |
| How many people are involved in coming up with the forecast? | Forecasts |
| Are you generating (many) reports that use different formats to present information? | Formats |
| How often do you need to create financial reports? | Frequency |
| How often do other departments have to come back to you to ask more questions regarding the data? | Frequency |
| Are you measured on enabling reporting technology across the organization? | Goals |
| If you could make improvements to the reporting process, what would they be? | Improvements |
| Do you expect reporting to increase over time? How quickly? Do you have the resources to handle an increase? | Increase |
| How much time do you spend writing interfaces between reporting systems? | Interfaces |
| When delivering reports to end users, how many reporting interfaces do you use? | Interfaces |
| How long does it take to create different levels of report? | Levels |
| Do you send out many e-mails with Web links informing users where to access newly created reports? | Location |
| How do you inform users where to access newly created reports? How many users? How long does it take? | Location |
| How many different types of management reports does your staff provide (ad hoc, excel, static, drill-through)? | Management |
| What percentage of the reports is created manually? | Manual |
| How many manual reports does your group create? | Manual |
| Do your reports include maps? | Maps |
| Do you need mobile reporting? | Mobile |
| Are reports available for publishing in different languages? | Multiple languages |
| Do you have to produce (many) reports that access data from multiple systems and applications? | Multiple systems |
| Are the reports or notification of reports delivered automatically and electronically (e-mail, pager, etc.)? | Notification |
| Do business managers ever go to a management meeting and have different reports that are supposed to mean the same thing, but the numbers don’t agree? | Numbers don’t agree |
| Are you able to report on the outcome and on measurable results? | Outcomes |
| How many different reporting packages does your group support? | Packages |
| How is information gathered for financial reports? | Process |
| Are you able to view reports that show why a previous program was successful or not? | Program success |
| How do you enable stakeholders to view ongoing progress of strategic plans or programs? | Progress |
| How current is the reported data (real time, day old)? | Real time |
| How real time are the data you produce reports on? | Real time |
| Are you able to adhere to reporting regulations? | Regulations |
| How much time and money does it cost to adhere to reporting regulations? | Regulations |
| How much of your IT resource is spent trying to achieve reporting requests? | Resources |
| Can the analytic software produce reports? | Software |
| Do you ever have to write special reports to retrieve information from the different systems? | Special reports |
| How often do you get special reporting requests from sales, customer service, or marketing? | Special reports |
| Does your financial staff prefer to use Excel for doing financial analysis and reporting? | Spreadsheets |
| Do you use spreadsheets to report and distribute information? | Spreadsheets |
| Can your staff easily incorporate data from a spreadsheet into a database that is used for financial reporting? | Spreadsheets |
| Can your analytic solution be integrated with a SOAP-compliant Web service? | Standards |
| Are standards in place for ensuring reports can be reused across the organization or in the future for benchmarking or visualizing improvements over the years? | Standards |
| Do you have a centralized repository for your financial information? | Storage |
| How many people are in a reporting support role? | Support |
| How do you define “thresholds”? | Threshholds |
| How long does it take you to create financial reports? | Time |
| How do you know if budgets are submitted in a timely manner? | Timeliness |
| Are stakeholders satisfied with the time it takes you to deliver forecasts? | Timeliness |
| How are managers notified when there are major updates to the financial information? | Update notification |
| Do managers have to ask for updated reports? How often does this occur? | Updates |
| Are users able to access the customer data and reports they require to make customer-focused decisions? | User access |
| Is it time consuming to manage reporting users today? | User levels |
| Do different users have access to different levels of data and reports? | User levels |
| Do you deliver the same report to all users or customizable reports to different user levels? | User levels |
| What process is used to validate the information in the financial reports? | Validation |
| How do analysts further analyze/confirm information provided in the reports? | Validation |
| Does your department constantly have to wait for financial information from IT? | Waiting |
| Does your current system allow you to view reports in a browser-based format? | Web distribution |
| What percentage of reports do you distribute over the Web? | Web distribution |
| Chapter 5: Analysis Questions | Subcategory |
| Do you have any direct control over who has access to these materials? | Access control |
| Can you really depend on the calculations that come from your business managers? | Accuracy |
| If you were to ask business managers, how many different calculations would you come up with for what is supposed to be the same business measure? | Accuracy |
| How many customer interactions are necessary for the predictive models to start being “accurate”? | Accuracy |
| How are the predictive analytics software installation packages prepared? | Administration |
| What are the run-time requirements for the predictive analytics software? | Administration |
| What type of system maintenance is required when new attributes are added to the customer profile? | Administration |
| How do you further analyze system alerts? | Alerts |
| How do you handle false-positive alerts? Do you feed that information back into the system? | Alerts |
| How does the inability to efficiently analyze information behind an alert affect response time and hence mitigation attempts? | Alerts |
| Can an application send alerts to users when a model is not meeting performance standards? | Alerts |
| Are the details of your analytics processes securely defined? | Analytic process |
| Do you have an archive of previous projects that analysts can use? | Archive |
| How do you know if you are selecting the right data attributes when developing the application’s model? | Attributes |
| How does the analytic solution detect when an attribute’s predictiveness or correlation with a decision either increases or decreases? | Attributes |
| How does the analytic solution help to identify poorly performing attributes (e.g., attributes that are not predictive)? | Attributes |
| Are you able to discern which customer needs what based on behavioral click-stream data alone? | Best offer |
| Does the analytic solution use a combination of analytics (data mining) and rules to determine best offer based on likelihood to respond and benefit to the firm? | Best offer |
| What is the process (or data mining practice) by which specific business goals are translated to a model used by the analytics engine? | Business goals |
| How do call center agents record details of conversations with customers? | Call center data |
| How do analysts use conversations between call center agents and customers in deciding whom to target for a retention campaign? | Call center data |
| Can the software application create champion/challenger models? | Champion model |
| How do you determine the reasons for why customers churn? What methods are used? | Churn |
| How do you follow up with customers who defect in order to refine this model and better understand defection preconditions? | Churn |
| How much does it cost you to replace a customer once he/she defects? | Churn |
| How much does it cost your competition to replace a customer that you’ve taken from them? | Churn |
| What kind of customer feedback loops are built into your interactions that allow you to assess the risk of defection? | Churn |
| What types of customer risk categories have you identified based on attitudinal data collected around key events that shape customer perceptions and future actions? | Churn |
| How does the software create a model that would predict a customer’s propensity to churn? | Churn |
| How much money do you lose when customers leave to go to competitors? | Churn |
| How often do customers leave? | Churn |
| Is the solution rules-driven, model-driven, or a combination of the two? If a combination, how do the two interrelate? | Combination |
| Are you able to show comparisons from one year to the next? | Comparisons |
| Can you show that your analytics processes and systems are compliant? | Compliance |
| How do you analyze customer behavior to predict which customers will respond best to which campaign? | Customer behavior |
| How do you allow for the future inclusion of contact history from other channels in the user profile? | Customer profile |
| Should it be possible for customer profiles to be expanded to encompass more attributes or to replace attributes if necessary? | Customer profile |
| Does the analytic platform provide analysis and insight for business users to assess which customer profile elements/values are driving response? | Customer profile |
| Which customer profile attributes should be able to be binned as necessary for efficiency purposes? | Customer profile |
| Are you able to calculate customer profitability? | Customer profitability |
| Does the software solution have the ability to recognize customer segment/profitability indicator (segment, IXI score, internal model score)? | Customer segments |
| Can you describe the types of data used to build the predictive models? | Data |
| How does the analytic solution deal with incomplete data about the customer? | Data |
| How many/which factors or data elements are analyzed? | Data elements |
| Does the software support the discovery of descriptive and predictive patterns (models) within the data, using a broad set of data mining algorithms? | Data mining |
| Are you able to use previous data to ensure better strategic plans can be made? | Data use |
| How does upper management use data to make key decisions? | Executive |
| How quickly do you find out when there is a failure? | Failure |
| When there is a failure, how quickly can the fault be diagnosed? | Failure diagnostics |
| Do you have a process to keep track of the different forecast versions? | Forecast |
| How many revisions of the forecast do you get before the final forecast is submitted? | Forecast |
| How much time do you spend reconciling additional forecasts as they come in? | Forecast |
| How much time does it take your organization to complete the forecast? | Forecast |
| Do you have a process to keep track of the different forecast versions? | Forecast |
| How many people are involved in capturing forecast data? | Forecast |
| How complex are the calculations for consolidating and allocating the forecast? | Forecast |
| How many spreadsheets do you have to consolidate and allocate today to get the forecast? | Forecast |
| Does your current forecast process allow you to test different theories or ideas on what’s done with your budgets? | Forecast |
| Can you provide a high-level understanding of your forecasting process? | Forecast |
| How complex are the calculations for consolidating and allocating the forecast? | Forecast |
| How much forecasting process time is wasted on identifying and fixing broken links? | Forecast |
| How often do you experience broken links when consolidating the forecast? | Forecast |
| Do broken links cause you to question the accuracy of the forecast? | Forecast |
| If the forecast was 100% accurate all of the time, how would that help your organization? | Forecast accuracy |
| How many fraud investigators do you have? | Fraud users |
| Do you think your claim handlers and investigators currently overlook indications of fraud, hidden in historic claims? | Fraud users |
| Do you need to produce regular analytical reports on your data or models? | Frequency |
| Does the system have a GUI interface to generate the appropriate models to be used by the analytics engine? | Graphical Interface |
| How much historical data do you analyze (e.g., last week’s data, last year’s, or many years, etc.)? | Historical data |
| How much historical data do you have? | Historical data |
| How do you currently analyze historic claims data? | Historical data |
| How do you engage entry-level, advanced statisticians, data prep specialists, and business analysts? | Human collaboration |
| Do you integrate the models you build into your organization’s operational systems? | Integration |
| How long does it take to ensure that all the right pieces of the production process (e.g., scripts, code, SQL, models) are in the right places? | Integration |
| How much time is spent integrating the process, so that all the different inputs and outputs to each step are properly configured? | Integration |
| What is the cost of not having past data? | Lack of past data |
| How does the system’s model weigh recent information differently from historical information? | Learning |
| If a change was made to a key variable, how long would it take to find all the analytical material affected by the change? | Lineage |
| Can you produce a list of changes made to a model? | Management |
| Can you provide access to the right version of a model that was in production last week? Six months ago? | Management |
| Can you recover a previous version of a model? | Management |
| How do you enable measurement of test versus control groups? | Measurement |
| Does the analytic platform provide a robust set of metrics and measurement levels? | Metrics |
| How does the analytic system support the migration of multiple independent analytic projects between different environments at different times (i.e., testing to production), with minimal impact on each other? | Migrations |
| What is the model-building process flow? | Model building |
| Are you required to provide information on which models are run on which data? | Model management |
| Are you required to track and document which models or other materials were used in an analytics process? | Model management |
| What are the solution’s model management capabilities, including model generation, operationalizing, and retirement? | Model management |
| Does the application provide model audit trails for capturing information, such as create date, author, deployment date, last update date? | Model management |
| Does the application provide a model repository for capturing and storing models over time? | Model repository |
| How long would it take a new analyst to find a reusable piece of analysis? | Model reuse |
| Is there any way to search for models that have already been built? How? How much time is spent trying to find old work? | Model search |
| How do your analysts share the models they are working on? | Model sharing |
| How many people are involved in the model update process? | Model update |
| How long does it take to rebuild your regular models? | Model update |
| What proportion of your analysts’ time is spent manually rebuilding and revalidating existing models on new data compared to improving models or working on new models? | Model update |
| How does the software support the use of Web session click data to build/update models? | Model update |
| What are the steps required to apply feedback and improve a model in production? | Model update |
| How long does model update take? Can it be automated? | Model update |
| Would you experience any downtime as a new model replaces an old model? | Model update |
| How long does it take to validate the new production models? | Model validation |
| How many models need to be rebuilt and revalidated for specific projects? | Model validation |
| How do you ensure that analysts have the most up-to-date version of the models? | Model versions |
| What modeling algorithms are used in your analytics? How does the solution determine which algorithm to employ? | Modeling algorithms |
| What are the modeling techniques of the most needed solutions? | Modeling techniques |
| How many models and other materials associated with these projects do your analysts produce? | Models |
| Does the analytic solution provide clustering? | Models |
| Does the analytic solution provide decision trees? | Models |
| Does the analytic solution provide neural networks? | Models |
| Does the analytic solution provide regression (linear, logistic)? | Models |
| Does the software support the ability to filter trivial patterns (models)? | Models |
| Does the software support user-supplied patterns (models)? | Models |
| Can the solution handle nonnumerical attribute values? If so, does it contain a natural language parser for textual attribute values? | Nonnumerical attributes |
| Does the solution have the ability to prioritize if a customer is eligible for multiple offers? | Offer–multiple |
| Can the software recommend offers based on a customer demographic profile? | Offers |
| Does the software use optimization algorithms to present recommendations optimizing across multiple measures/constraints? | Optimization |
| What types of constraints can be applied to optimization strategies? | Optimization |
| Would you need to filter outliers? | Outliers |
| Does the analytic platform provide pattern-matching algorithms? | Pattern-matching |
| Can analytics provide end-to-end measurement in order to continuously optimize performance? | Performance |
| Does the software have the ability to export and import descriptive and predictive models in an independent format (i.e., PMML)? What formats are supported? | Pmml |
| Where are previous results stored? | Previous results |
| If you lost a member of staff responsible for maintaining a process, would you be able to execute or update that process? | Processes |
| Are you able to calculate product profitability? | Product profitability |
| How many analytic projects do you have in production? | Production |
| How long does it take to ensure that the right versions are being used in production? | Production |
| How long does it take to put a new model into production? | Production |
| How long does it take to update a model that is already in production? | Production |
| How much could it cost the organization if the wrong version of a model was put into production? | Production |
| How many projects are ongoing or regularly repeatable? | Production |
| What load are you seeing on your analytical servers at 4 P.M.? What about at 4 A.M.? | Production |
| What proportion of your analysts’ time is spent producing standard, regular reports? | Production |
| Are you able to allocate expenses effectively so you can understand true profitability? | Profitability |
| Are you able to view profitability from different perspectives (i.e., customer, product, business unit, supplier, etc.)? | Profitability |
| How do you currently analyze financial information to better understand profitability? | Profitability |
| How many different analytics projects do you run at once? | Projects |
| How does the software recommend products based on a customer transaction (i.e., purchase) history? | Purchase history |
| What is the recommended validation process for the model created and how do you go over a typical quality assurance model life cycle? | Quality assurance |
| How many modeling techniques can be deployed for real-time scoring? | Real-time scoring |
| Can you describe how the software will respond to calls for scores in real time, using real-time (i.e., Web session click data) and/or offline data? | Real time |
| What would it cost to recover/redevelop analytic materials if they were lost? | Recovery |
| Are your analytics processes subject to internal or external regulation? | Regulations |
| How do analysts further analyze/confirm information provided in reports? | Reporting |
| Are measurement and reporting integrated as part of the overall analytic solution? | Reporting |
| Are these model results accessible to analysts or other decision makers? | Results access |
| Do you know when a customer is about to leave for the competition? | Retention |
| Do you have enough time to react? | Retention |
| How do you know the customer is about to leave? Are there warning signs? What are they? | Retention |
| How do your employees respond to a customer about to leave? | Retention |
| How many customers do you lose per month? | Retention |
| How much warning do you have? | Retention |
| How often are you able to salvage a customer who is at risk? | Retention |
| What is the financial impact of churn? | Retention |
| Does the analytic solution provide more detailed information about customers, ahead of time, when deciding on a real-time recommendation? | Retention |
| How does the organization typically respond to information identifying that a customer is showing signs of leaving? | Retention |
| How much does the organization spend on retention campaigns? | Retention |
| How often do you run churn campaigns? | Retention |
| What is your current churn rate in regard to profitable customers? | Retention |
| What is your current overall churn rate? | Retention |
| How is the ROI of the solution measured? | Return on investment |
| Are parts of your analytics work reused for other tasks? | Reuse |
| Is there any risk that important analytical materials could be accidentally deleted, overwritten, or modified? | Risks |
| Does the analytic platform provide natural language–like formal rule language? | Rule language |
| How does the software decide across all rules and inputs (real-time analytics, business rules, and business prioritization)? | Rules |
| Does the solution accommodate simple or complex rules? | Rules |
| Does the analytic platform provide a rule editor embedding capability? | Rules |
| Does the analytic platform provide a rule interpreter? | Rules |
| Who is responsible for ensuring that analytical materials are secure? | Security |
| What is the skill set of your analytics group? | Skills |
| Does your analysis system provide Chi square test/T-test? | Statistics |
| Does your analysis system provide normal distributions? | Statistics |
| Does your analysis system provide probability calculations? | Statistics |
| Does your analysis system provide regression analysis? | Statistics |
| Does your analysis system provide relative frequencies? | Statistics |
| Does your analysis system provide sampling? | Statistics |
| Does your analysis system provide statistical significance estimation? | Statistics |
| Does your analysis system require ANOVA, MANOVA, or ANACOVA? | Statistics |
| Does your analysis system require time series analysis? | Statistics |
| Does the analytic platform provide standard descriptive statistics, such as mean, median, mode, and standard deviation? | Statistics |
| How often do you get a status report on your live projects? | Status |
| Are all the materials produced by your analysts being stored securely? | Storing output |
| Do analysts work only with structured data (transactional data, etc.), or do they analyze unstructured data (call center notes, e-mails)? | Structured data |
| How much time does it take to analyze, create, and provide an optimized list of targeted selections for a campaign? | Targeted lists |
| Do your managers have the ability to test different scenarios to determine if improvements can be made? | Testing |
| How much of an improvement do you feel could be made if managers had the ability to test out different models or scenarios to help refine their budgets? | Testing |
| Do you think that there may be hidden indicators of fraud in textual data? | Text |
| Is some of the claim data in textual format? | Text |
| Do you perform analysis of both structured and unstructured data (numbers and text)? | Text |
| Would the analytic solution need the ability to use text (or unstructured) data, such as call center notes, as a data source for additional analysis or modeling? | Text |
| Would you store textual data on historic claims? | Text |
| How long does it take to analyze text notes (fields, e-mails, other conversations)? | Text mining |
| What portions of your customer notes are read? | Text mining |
| What are the trends/differences/similarities in your data? | Trends |
| Do you analyze historical trends? | Trends |
| Do you look at trends using statistical or predictive analysis? | Trends |
| What type of analytic rules does your software support? | Types supported |
| Does running your regular, repeatable processes impact the productivity of your analysts? | User productivity |
| Do you have multiple departments with analysts? | Users |
| How many analysts do you have? | Users |
| Do you have an expert team of analysts? | Users |
| Do analysts currently have other responsibilities as well? | Users |
| How do you define independent and dependent variables? | Variables |
| Is it often hard to make sure that analysts are using the correct model version? | Versioning |
| How does the software support the visualization of descriptive and predictive patterns (models) with intuitive charts and graphs? | Visualization |
| Does the product support visualization for determining which modeling technique is performing better? | Visualization |
| What percentage of the visitors to your Web site converts into customers? | Web conversions |
| How much would your revenues grow with one single percentage point increase in this conversion rate? | Web conversions |
| Should the analytic software platform capture/receive data from your Web site and use this information to generate customer-specific recommendations? | Web site input |
| How does the analytic software platform deliver recommendations to Web applications or Web pages? | Web site output |
| Is the software capable of supporting what-if scenarios/analysis? | What-if |
| How long does it take to do what-if scenarios in your current way of working? | What-if |
| Chapter 6: Actionable Analytics (CRM) Questions | Subcategory |
| What is the impact of not having access to information? | Access |
| How are you looking to improve your customer acquisition rates? | Acquisition |
| What are your new customer acquisition goals? | Acquisition |
| What is your customer acquisition rate today? | Acquisition |
| How much does it cost for you to acquire a new customer? | Acquisition |
| Do you have a figure for what poorly performing paid placement keywords is costing the business? | Advertising |
| What is the average revenue for a typical campaign? | Average revenue |
| What is the brand development process for new products? | Brand development |
| How would your solution create a model that optimizes call routing to reduce the measurements, such as number of transfers, handle time, costs, etc.? | Call routing |
| Do you have built-in work flow to support approval processes? | Campaign approval |
| How long does it take you to plan a campaign? | Campaign planning |
| How many campaigns are slated for the next quarter? | Campaign planning |
| What is the average cost to develop each campaign? | Campaign planning |
| What is your goal for decreasing your time to market for a campaign? | Campaign planning |
| How much revenue are you missing out on from campaigning issues? | Campaign planning |
| Do analysts play an active role in the campaign selection process by interpreting current campaign selections and refining them? | Campaign planning |
| How do you leverage the knowledge and expertise of your business users for this process? | Campaign planning |
| How long does the selection process take? | Campaign planning |
| What is the response rate when you do utilize the analyst expertise versus the times that you don’t? | Campaign planning |
| What is the cost or impact of not leveraging analytic expertise? | Campaign planning |
| Who currently determines which customers are included in each campaign? | Campaign planning |
| What is the goal for marketing campaign cost reduction? | Campaign planning |
| How many campaigns are executed each year? | Campaign planning |
| How many customers are in an average campaign? | Campaign planning |
| What is the average cost of each campaign? | Campaign planning |
| What is your annual marketing campaign spend? | Campaign planning |
| How do you calculate the outcome of an appropriate or inappropriate balance in resources? | Campaign planning |
| What is the balance between expenditures in brand and development versus brand/marketing launch campaigns? | Campaign planning |
| Do you use mail campaigns? | Campaigns |
| How many e-mail campaigns does your marketing team run each month targeting existing customers? | Campaigns |
| How many campaigns do you have running at the same time? | Campaigns |
| Do you know the average cost per transaction on the Web as compared to some of the other channels you are operating in? | Channels |
| How do you incorporate customer privacy and channel preferences? | Channels |
| Are the marketers/analysts able to allocate campaigns across channels efficiently? | Channels |
| Are previous customer/user interactions taken into account when determining a targeted channel? | Channels |
| How are communications allocated across channels today? | Channels |
| How do you currently segment customer lists for channels? | Channels |
| How do you determine which channel to use for a specific campaign? | Channels |
| How does channel choice affect the campaign response? | Channels |
| What channels do you utilize in executing marketing campaigns: direct mail, e-mail, text, outbound call center? | Channels |
| What is the response rate for campaigns across channels today? | Channels |
| Which channels are most effective for increasing revenue through cross-selling and up-selling your customers? | Channels |
| Have you chosen channels that have shown a poor response? | Channels |
| How do you know which customer prefers which channel? | Channels |
| What is the impact of choosing a low/poor response channel? | Channels |
| Which channels do you use for campaigns? | Channels |
| Do you utilize the online channel as a sales channel? | Channels |
| How many new visitors do you get to the site a week/month? | Channels |
| How much revenue is driven through the online channel? | Channels |
| Who decides which channel to use for a campaign? | Channels |
| How do you target acquisition campaigns across channels today? | Channels |
| Do you ever see customer behaviors that indicate product interest or possible attrition? | Churn |
| Are the costs of capturing new customers not recovered because of the short stay of these customers? | Churn |
| Is the reduction and maintenance of reasonable customer churn rates a challenge for your business? | Churn |
| Do your churn rates originate primarily as a result of commercial offerings inadequate to address the needs of different customer profiles? | Churn |
| Do you currently allow customers to file claims via the Internet? | Claims |
| How many customer service reps are currently involved in handling claims? | Claims |
| What is the process after a claim has been filed? | Claims |
| What percentage of claims gets filed via the Internet? | Claims |
| What would you like this percentage to be in a few years? | Claims |
| Is shortening the claims filing process an objective? | Claims |
| How long does it take to settle claims? | Claims |
| By how much time would you like to shorten the claims process? | Claims |
| Do customers sometimes abandon the claims process halfway? Do you think this is due to the large number of online questions they are being asked? | Claims |
| Do you believe that all relevant questions are asked in the claims process? | Claims |
| Do you believe that some questions are irrelevant for some of the claims? How many? | Claims |
| How many claims do you handle per year? | Claims |
| How many of these claims are filed over the phone? | Claims |
| What are the costs of handling a claim? | Claims |
| How much of the claim handling costs are associated with follow-up steps? | Claims |
| What are the investigation steps after a claim has been notified? | Claims |
| Are you able to identify low-risk claims? | Claims |
| Do you have objectives to reduce the average claim handling time? By how much? | Claims |
| Have any claims settled on the first call resulted in a fraudulent claim? | Claims |
| How long does it take on average to handle a claim? | Claims |
| How many claims currently are settled on the first call? | Claims |
| How many calls does your claims call center receive per day/week/month/year? | Claims |
| How many of these calls are from customers informing about the status of their claim versus customers filing a new claim? | Claims |
| What are the costs associated with claims inquiries? | Claims |
| What percentage of your call center time is devoted to handling these claim inquiries? | Claims |
| What is the current close ratio? | Closure |
| What is the current call-to-close ratio? Per rep? | Closure |
| What is the sales closure rate for your inbound call center reps today? | Closure |
| Do you ask your competitors’ customers if they have experienced anything that has changed their perception of the competitor’s products and services? | Competition |
| Have you ever developed a campaign that targets your competitors’ customers, leveraging key weaknesses in their products and services? | Competition |
| How do transactional or competitive events cause customers to change their perceptions of your company? | Competition |
| Do other companies offer similar products and services? Do they have Web sites? How does your Web site compare to those of your competitors? | Competition |
| What is the average conversion rate? | Conversions |
| How effective are your efforts in converting prospects to customers today? | Conversions |
| What increase in revenue would you be able to achieve with each 1% increase in conversions? | Conversions |
| What is your sales conversion rate from calls originated at your Web site? | Conversions |
| What proportions of visits convert to customers? | Conversions |
| Do you currently use your service call centers for cross-selling? | Cross-sell |
| How much would your revenue increase if you could improve cross-sell and up-sell efforts to existing customers by 1% or x%? | Cross-sell |
| What are your current cross-sell and up-sell goals? | Cross-sell |
| What are your up-sell and cross-sell rates? Across channels? | Cross-sell |
| How much does it cost to acquire a new customer versus keep an existing one? | Customer acquisition |
| Have you tried to analyze customer behavior based on available information? | Customer behavior |
| Are most of your marketing decisions based on customer feedback or interactions? | Customer feedback |
| Do you capture information about customers not happy with services/products? | Customer feedback |
| Do you find that you often respond too late? | Customer feedback |
| How long does it take customer service teams to respond? | Customer feedback |
| What customer information does a customer service rep have access to when receiving an inbound call? | Customer information |
| In your research efforts, what kind of customer input are you seeking? | Customer input |
| How does missing customer profile information affect the rep in making a decision about what to offer? | Customer profile |
| What kind of customer profile information is available to your customer service reps during a customer call? | Customer profile |
| In your marketing and sales activities, do you differentiate between the most desirable customer segments and the mass market? | Customer segments |
| What is the difference in value between customers in different segments? | Customer segments |
| What is the difference in value between customers in those segments? | Customer segments |
| How do you allow for a default decision that can be used when a customer does not fall into a defined segment? | Customer segments |
| Are you able to see customers that are happy with services? | Customers happy |
| What data are you collecting for targeting purposes? | Data |
| What is the impact of using/not using data gathered for a campaign? | Data |
| How valuable would it be to leverage data to enable more proactive customer-led decisions? | Data |
| How are e-mail addresses gathered? | |
| How many e-mail addresses do you have in the customer database? | |
| How many e-mail campaigns does your marketing team run each month targeting existing customers? | |
| Are business users able to combine feedback data with existing CRM data or operational data? | Feedback |
| Are business users able to operationalize feedback data to drive business improvement? | Feedback |
| Does the feedback provide accurate projections of success? | Feedback |
| How do you analyze the feedback? | Feedback |
| How do you gather feedback from target consumers? | Feedback |
| Do you intend to provide better service to high-value customers? | High-value customers |
| Do you take customer value into account when settling a claim with a customer? | High-value customers |
| Do your customer service reps know who your high-value customers are? | High-value customers |
| Have you segmented your customers by value? | High-value customers |
| How does your spend on high-value customers vary from mainstream customers? | High-value customers |
| How much time does it take to develop a new customer into a high-value customer? | High-value customers |
| What is the net lifetime value of a high-value customer? | High-value customers |
| How are you able to track who moves from lower- to higher-value loyalty segments or vice versa? | High-value customers |
| How are your marketing and sales activities designed to move contacts from low- to high-value customers? | High-value customers |
| How do you predict which of your customers (or segments) have the best probability to respond to a campaign and evolve into the high-value segment? | High-value customers |
| In your marketing and sales activities, do you differentiate between the most desirable customer segments and the mass market? | High-value customers |
| Are you able to predict which of your mass-marketing customers have the potential to evolve into the high-value segment? | High-value customers |
| What is the difference in value between customers in those segments? | High-value customers |
| Is there a focus on specific segments to attract high-value prospects? | High-value customers |
| Can you describe the integration effort to incorporate CRM data into the analytics engine decision process? | Integration |
| Do you send text messages in multiple languages? | Languages |
| How much do you spend on loyalty programs annually? | Loyalty |
| How often do your loyalty program expenditures result in reduced defection? | Loyalty |
| What do your customers appreciate about the products, services, and loyalty programs of your competitors? | Loyalty |
| What percentage of your customer base is currently enrolled in the loyalty programs of your competition? | Loyalty |
| What is your process for getting market reaction? | Market reaction |
| How do you currently measure the performance of online campaigns? | Measurement |
| How do you make choices between competing new product concepts? | Measures |
| How do you measure success? | Measures |
| How does missing customer profile information affect the rep in making a decision about what to offer? | Missing information |
| What is the process for planning marketing outreach campaigns to launch new products? | Offer status |
| How do you factor the offer status into a recommendation (i.e., not recommending inactive offers)? | Offer status |
| How many products/offerings do you have? | Offerings |
| What is the affinity between products/offerings? | Offerings |
| Are you running online marketing campaigns today? | Online |
| What does online/digital marketing contribute to revenue? | Online |
| What is your spend for online marketing? | Online |
| What forms of online marketing do you currently utilize? | Online |
| What percentage of your overall marketing spend does online represent? | Online |
| Are campaigns optimized around cost reduction, user acquisition, conversion, revenue growth, retention, or a combination of all of these? | Optimization |
| Upon what criteria are the campaign optimization decisions made? | Optimization |
| Who in the organization is tasked with the decision to optimize online campaigns? | Optimization |
| How many outbound campaigns do you run? | Outbound campaigns |
| Can the solution take into account the number of offers a customer has received over time to control/reduce overcommunicating? | Overcommunication |
| What partners do you use to target customers? | Partners |
| Which partners are most effective for increasing revenue through cross-selling and up-selling your customers? | Partners |
| Do you have a unified view of overall online marketing performance? | Performance |
| How do you regularly review the performance of the various channels? | Performance |
| How is the performance information compiled? | Performance |
| How many different sets of performance metrics do you have to deal with in your review? | Performance |
| How do you exclude products from being recommended, based on business rules or customer life cycle status? | Product exclusion |
| How do you provide product recommendations based on stated customer requirements? | Product recommendations |
| How many new products do you introduce in a year? | Products |
| How many of the products would you consider to be successful? | Products |
| Can you make a profitability assessment prior to a campaign? | Profitability |
| How do you determine campaign profitability? | Profitability |
| How many campaigns are profitable? | Profitability |
| How much money is lost on unprofitable campaigns? | Profitability |
| How do you determine which campaign to use for which customer (prospect)? Is the choice determined by profitability? | Profitability |
| How much profit do you lose when selecting customers for a less optimal campaign? | Profitability |
| What level of profitability delivers 100% of commissions? | Profitability |
| How do you optimize recommendations to maximize profits? | Profitability |
| What is the average read rate for a particular campaign? | Read rate |
| Are cross-sell and up-sell opportunities being missed due to the lack of real-time customer information? | Real time |
| How much revenue might be missed due to the inability to cross-sell and up-sell your customers in real time based on understanding them better? | Real time |
| Can inputs be incorporated in real time or batch mode? | Real time |
| In addition to providing a real-time decision, what additional information can be returned from the system (confidence level, reasons for decision, gathered customer data)? | Real time |
| How do you support the ability to turn on/off recommendations for specific instances? | Recommendation |
| How do you weigh product recommendations based on business rules? | Recommendation |
| How do you provide the ability to determine if the recommendations are part of an existing campaign? | Recommendation |
| How do you incorporate inputs, such as product availability, rate info, margin, and price information, prior to delivering final product recommendations? | Recommendation |
| How do your reps record details of conversations with customers? | Records |
| How many customer service reps do you have in your service call center? | Reps |
| How many service calls does each customer service rep take per day? | Reps |
| What customer information does a customer service rep have access to when receiving an inbound call? | Reps |
| How do customer service reps currently determine which of their customers to call? | Reps |
| How many of your reps do outbound calling? | Reps |
| How many of them are making quota? | Reps |
| What is the reps’ quota? | Reps |
| How much revenue does this quota represent? | Reps |
| What portion of your reps’ time is being spent on calling unqualified/uninterested customers? | Reps |
| How do they currently determine which of their customers to call? | Reps |
| What is your current response rate to launch campaigns? | Response rate |
| What is the average response rate? | Response rate |
| What is the current response rate? | Response rate |
| Could it cost you from five to 30 times more to acquire a new customer than to satisfy and retain an existing customer? | Retention |
| Is the revenue in line with forecast? | Revenue |
| What is the target revenue growth for this year and next? | Revenue |
| What is the impact of missing opportunities on your revenue numbers? | Revenue |
| How much money do you spend on reevaluating and revising marketing campaigns? | Revising campaigns |
| Do you have the ability for marketing and sales to set arbitration rules as well as actions of the recommendation engine? | Rules |
| How do you provide effective dating for rules? | Rules |
| How do you handle loading and execution of rules? | Rules |
| How do you handle parallel execution of rule engines? | Rules |
| What are your current sales goals? | Sales goals |
| How do you provide the ability to have multiple scripts for a given offer and deliver a script version based on business rules and/or predictive analytics? | Script |
| Do you have the ability to leverage the scripts/rules across the channels? | Script |
| Do you have the ability to test multiple scripts for an offer and serve the appropriate script based on probability of success in making the offer? | Script |
| Do you have the flexibility to display one script with minimal direction or a selection of scripts? | Script |
| Can you suppress scripts based on previous usage—time frame to be determined by the business? | Script |
| How do your reps receive scripts or other aids to solicit customer profile information? | Script |
| How effective are the scripts? | Scripts |
| Have you engaged in a search engine optimization initiative to improve your site’s position with the major search engines? | SEO |
| How do you know the proportion of customer acquisitions that result from both organic and paid search? | SEO |
| How many keywords do you have ads running on? | SEO |
| Typically, how much do you spend per annum on paid search campaigns? | SEO |
| What is the revenue proportion of organic and paid searches? | SEO |
| Which paid placement keywords are expensive to buy but have a low conversion rate? | SEO |
| Do you have a figure for what poorly performing paid placement is costing the business? | SEO |
| How do you ensure that your search engine sponsorships are optimized? | SEO |
| Do you conduct paid placement campaigns? | SEO |
| What is your spend for campaigns? | Spend |
| What percentage of your overall marketing spend does online represent? | Spend |
| How do you leverage current circumstances or events to target prospects for campaigns? | Target customers |
| Are marketing campaigns missing the key points of why a customer should or would want to buy a product? | Target customers |
| Do you have untargeted campaigns? | Targeted campaigns |
| What is the amount of dollars lost on untargeted campaigns? | Targeted campaigns |
| How are customers selected for campaigns? | Targeted campaigns |
| How long does it take to target a campaign? | Targeted campaigns |
| How much does a campaign cost? | Targeted campaigns |
| How often do you target customers with the greatest potential value or response probability? | Targeted campaigns |
| What is the response rate on targeted campaigns? | Targeted campaigns |
| Who is involved in campaigning? | Targeted campaigns |
| Why aren’t all campaigns targeted? | Targeted campaigns |
| How do you test marketing campaigns for launching new products? | Test campaigns |
| What information is being collected in your CRM application text fields? | Text |
| Do you have text fields in your call center data? | Text |
| Do you think text fields might contain information that indicates cross-sell opportunities or customer churn? | Text |
| How do your reps record details of conversations with customers? | Text |
| What information is being collected in text fields? | Text |
| How do untimely messages affect customer response? | Timeliness |
| How often do customers receive messages that are untimely due to current circumstances? | Timeliness |
| What is the impact of a well-timed message? | Timeliness |
| What is the potential impact of an untimely message? | Timeliness |
| How do you train models so that they are ready to score when deployed into production? | Train models |
| What does an “unsubscribe” request ultimately cost? | Unsubscribe |
| Have unsuccessful launches ever been attributed not to the usefulness of the product but to its brand (name, logo, image)? | Unsuccessful launches |
| What are your campaign volumes? | Volumes |
| Are all visitors to your Web site looking for the same thing, or do some segments have different needs and priorities? | Web site |
| How do visitors navigate your Web site? | Web site |
| How do you prevent visitors from leaving your Web site when they have difficulty finding the content they seek? | Web site |
| How do you drive visitors to the content they are looking for? | Web site |
| What issues have you discovered regarding navigation on your Web site? | Web site |
| When visitors come to your site, do they find what they are looking for quickly and easily? | Web site |
| During a campaign, do you know what percentage of customers hit the “unsubscribe” button? | Web site |
| Do Web customers spend more or less than offline customers? | Web site |
| Do you believe that you are missing opportunities to cross-sell or up-sell products or extended contracts through your Web site? | Web site |
| How do you qualify the prospects and customers for the appropriate offers you make them through your Web site? | Web site |
| How many products or services are you currently selling through your Web site? | Web site |
| Do potential customers think more or less favorably of you based on their experiences when visiting your Web site? | Web site |
| How much, on average, does it cost to drive a visit to your Web site? | Web site |
| Is the look and feel of your Web site consistent with your brand, your products, and the expectations of site visitors? | Web site |
| What is the average value of an online purchase? | Web site |
| What percentage of visitors to your Web site make a purchase? | Web site |
| How many questions do customers currently have to answer on the self-service Web site? | Web site |
| What are your up-sell and cross-sell rates? Across channels? | Cross-sell |
| What channels do you use to target customers for cross-selling and up-selling? | Cross-sell |
| What customer information do you currently use for cross-selling or up-selling? | Cross-sell |
| How do you utilize these opportunities for cross-selling? | Cross-sell |
| Chapter 7: Feedback Questions | Subcategory |
| Are key findings often too late to be actionable? What is the impact? | Actionable findings |
| How would program decisions benefit from incorporating this feedback? | Better decisions |
| Are there bottlenecks in the decision-making process? | Decision bottlenecks |
| What is the impact of these bottlenecks? | Decision bottlenecks |
| Do users need to ensure they are using the correct branding? How do they do this? | Branding |
| Would the feedback process help manage budget allocations for future programs or program continuation? | Budget allocations |
| Does the solution collect feedback and opinions from customers through any channel—phone, Web, paper, scan forms, or in-person interviews—in any language? | Channels |
| Are customers given the option to communicate with you in their preferred mode: telephone, Web, paper? | Channels |
| Are your business users missing out on important information by not offering different channels? | Channels |
| Does offering multiple communication channels create an extra burden for your IT infrastructure or resources? How much does this cost? How much extra IT support time does this result in? | Channels |
| Are you offering customers different options for giving you feedback, such as Web, telephone, paper? | Channels |
| How much does it cost to incorporate this feedback? | Cost of feedback |
| Do you leverage customer feedback for lead identification or qualification? | Customer |
| Are you basing decisions on only partial customer data? | Customer data |
| How much money are you losing by making decisions based on only partial data? | Customer data |
| Are you able to obtain and integrate customer feedback on a regular basis? | Customer feedback |
| How do customers give you feedback today? | Customer feedback |
| What kind of customer feedback lead initiatives are in place today? | Customer feedback |
| How are customer feedback data taken in the organization today? | Customer feedback |
| Have decisions been made that could have been better if customers were involved earlier? | Customer involvement |
| How often are you involving your customers in product feedback? | Customer involvement |
| How easy is it to seek customer opinions? How much time does it take? Is this a continuous process? | Customer opinion |
| Do you spend time and money on developing prototypes of products to gauge customer reactions and preferences? | Customer reaction |
| How much goodwill and PR would you create by including this feedback into your decision making? | Decision making |
| How often are product launches delayed? | Delays |
| How do you direct development during this time? | Development |
| What is the cost of making development changes? | Development changes |
| How do you currently capture employee feedback? | Employee feedback |
| How do you measure employee satisfaction? | Employee satisfaction |
| What is the impact of unhappy employees? | Employees |
| How long does it take to get key results to executives and business line managers? | Executive management |
| How many different customized reports are required for different management levels? | Executive management |
| Are you able to consolidate customer feedback initiatives so that senior management can get a complete view of customers and their interaction(s) with the organization? | Executive management |
| How valuable would it be to you and your organization’s objectives to leverage feedback data to enable more proactive customer-led decisions? | Feedback data |
| At what stages of development do you seek market feedback? | Feedback |
| How do you show feedback was taken into account when making feedback decisions? | Feedback-based decisions |
| How often are you trying to make key decisions without customer feedback? How do you go about it? | Frequency |
| Does your customer feedback include all your customers globally? | Global customers |
| How many countries are included in your global market? | Languages |
| How much money and time could be saved by providing data in managers’ native languages? | Languages |
| How often do global managers ask for results in their native language? | Languages |
| How often do you think customers might be reluctant to answer questions in English if it’s not their native language? | Languages |
| How many languages are spoken in your global enterprise? | Languages |
| How much valuable information is lost because results are available only in one language? | Languages |
| How much would it cost (in money and time) to have results translated into different languages? | Languages |
| In how many different languages do you offer your surveys? | Languages |
| What information is being misconstrued due to lack of localization of employee input and feedback? | Languages |
| Would worldwide managers be able to make more effective and local decisions if the data were reported back in their native languages? | Languages |
| When collecting feedback, how are you meeting the language requirements of the different users? | Languages |
| Is feedback captured only at the end of a program? Does this sometimes mean the feedback is too late for corrective measures? | Late feedback |
| Do customers’ requirements change during the life cycle of the product? | Product life cycle |
| How much has this cost the company in terms of money and potentially lost customers? | Lost customers |
| How do you incorporate market feedback? | Market feedback |
| How often is development redirected based on market reaction? | Market reaction |
| How do you incorporate current market research? | Market research |
| How often do you conduct market tests during development cycles? | Market tests |
| Would enabling multiple feedback methods provide you with a wider information pool to help make decisions? | Methods |
| What is your development cycle for new products? | New products |
| What kinds of notifications of unhappy customers do sales or customer account reps receive? | Notifications |
| How do your managers know how their business units are performing? | Performance |
| What are your key performance metrics? | Performance |
| Are you able to incorporate feedback at different points in a program life cycle? | Program life cycle |
| Are questions asked in a standardized method (e.g., 1 to 5 positive to negative or negative to positive)? | Questions |
| Are there standardized questions around how feedback data are collected that your users need to use? | Questions |
| If online, what is the process for incorporating the feedback in real time? | Real time |
| Would incorporating this feedback maintain constituent support and trust and build better relationships? | Relationships |
| What is your global response rate to surveys? | Response rate |
| What channels can be used for these responses (i.e., Web-based, call center, direct, etc.)? | Responses |
| How do users ensure the right question is being asked? | Right questions |
| How can they ensure this question is comparable to previous feedback activities? | Right questions |
| When collecting feedback, how do you maintain security and privacy regulations? | Security |
| How do you determine which strategic programs should be implemented in the future? | Strategic programs |
| What is your survey process now? | Surveys |
| Are staff unwilling to take part in staff surveys due to fear of repercussions—big brother syndrome? | Surveys |
| Are you missing opportunities to address staff problems due to lack of reliable information? | Surveys |
| Are you getting the response rates that you expect? What is your current response rate? | Surveys |
| How much money and time are being spent on decentralized surveys and data that have been collected? | Surveys |
| What percentage of your customer base do you survey? How much money is spent on surveying only a subset of your customer base? | Surveys |
| Are surveys visually engaging and interesting for customers? | Surveys |
| How much survey money is wasted on incomplete surveys? | Surveys |
| How often do customers complete a survey only partially? | Surveys |
| What kind of valuable information could be found in open-ended survey responses? | Surveys |
| When gathering customer insights, how often do you ask customers open-ended questions to solicit opinions in their own words? | Surveys |
| Does the solution provide support for a full end-to-end survey process—from questionnaire design to the analysis and publishing of results? | Surveys |
| Does the solution include methods of obtaining opinions and attitudinal information from customers regarding services provided? | Surveys |
| Do you use surveys or customer interaction for gathering customer feedback? If so, how often do you gather information? | Surveys |
| How do you analyze these surveys? | Surveys |
| How do you gather customer feedback today? | Surveys |
| How do you use the results of a survey? | Surveys |
| How many employees participate in surveys? | Surveys |
| Would doing surveys in many languages be very expensive and difficult to administer? | Surveys |
| Is feedback captured only at the end of a program? Does this sometimes mean the feedback is too late for corrective measures? | Timeliness |
| Do users have different requirements in terms of what activities they need to be involved with through the feedback cycle? | Users |
| Are you able to leverage existing infrastructure, such as your Web site, telephones/call center, to gather feedback? | Users |
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