Building a Stronger Community through Data Analysis

Author: Michelle Despres

RevGenerosity, our commitment to the community, helps us make an impact in many meaningful ways. One of the most important is through our community partnership, where we work with a local non-profit on a pro bono project.  

For 2021, we worked with an organization dedicated to combating poverty by offering low-barrier access to a broad range of necessities and wrap-around care options. RevGen partnered with them on ways to optimize their member experience, as the organization’s mission is to continually support the community as their needs evolve. 

In initial exploratory meetings with RevGen, the organization shared a vision of what they hoped to achieve and articulated some of the organization’s challenges in realizing those goals.

Based on those discussions, RevGen determined that our client would be best served by dividing the project into two workstreams. RevGen’s customer experience (CX) experts would focus on enhancements to the member experience, while a group of our data and digital enablement experts would focus on measuring and reporting on that experience.  

CX Workstream 

To suggest enhancements to the member experience, we first had to understand the current state. We needed to answer: 

• Who are the members? 
• What does the current member journey look like? 
• What do members have to say about their experiences? 

The answers to those questions would inform our work developing personas, a customer journey map, and recommendations to help realize our client’s goals.  

Member Personas 

To gain more understanding of members, we conducted independent research and then met with stakeholders for formal interviews. From that work, we developed three personas.  

Customer personas help organizations find a balance between designing programs for a generic everyone and designing for a single, specific person. Our personas provided enough information for thoughtful program design without hindering decision making by being too granular. We were able to define personas that “seem like real people” and meaningfully reflect real-world situations.  

Member Journey Maps 

To define the current member journey, we conducted group interviews that included representatives from all functional areas. From that work, we created a journey map to detail all interactions members have with the client’s people, processes, and services.

The map also included the likely emotional states that accompanied those interactions throughout the member journey. Illustrating the touchpoints and emotions involved in a member’s relationship with the organization helped us understand their needs and expose pain points. 

Survey Data 

Then, for more insight into how members felt about their experiences, we analyzed survey data collected prior to our project, with an emphasis on findings from the qualitative data. The survey asked questions to evaluate members’ awareness of the client’s services, as well as measure their comfort with staff, members, and ability to participate in the various programs offered. 

From the personas, journey map, and survey data, we provided our client with recommendations to enhance member experience from start to finish. Those recommendations were based on real-world scenarios specific to our client and spoke directly to their challenges and desired results.  

Not only did this work provide a detailed roadmap for our client to follow to realize their immediate goals, it also provided a CX toolkit that they could use for future improvement projects.

[Read More: Learn how RevGen’s CX Analytics services set a nascent Customer Center of Excellence up for success]

Data Analysis Workstream 

As part of the data workstream, we helped our client improve how they tracked targeted outcomes so they could effectively measure and report on how their services were directly impacting their members. Based on our discovery, it was clear that the organization was facing challenges with limited bandwidth to implement any new processes, difficulties with tracking data and quantifying it, and a lack of resources that had the ability to use their data tools.  

Additionally, we identified several key opportunities that could be leveraged to improve the client’s data tracking, such as creating data visualizations and using simple surveys to gauge the feelings of their members.  

Increase Capacity Through Training 

Our first recommendation to our client was around training. Given that only two employees had the ability to create reports within their data tool, it was strongly encouraged to provide other employees with training. We also suggested using the available free resources to help get a better understanding of their system’s analytics capabilities and advanced reporting tools.

Assess Member Feelings with One-Question Surveys 

Next, we offered a solution to implement a simple one-question survey at various touchpoints with members. This question was intended to verbally capture, on a scale from 1-10, how members were feeling throughout their day. By implementing this survey and recording the responses, our client would be able to have a quantifiable data to measure over time.

Track Data 

Finally, in conjunction with the single question survey, our team advised on adding a new metric in their reporting system to track this data point. We found that data values could easily be added to touchpoints with members, so every time a staff member connected with a member, a numerical data point could be recorded in their system. Doing this would allow for easy data capture, more consistent measuring, and overall time savings for our client. 

Being able to effectively measure the impact that improvement projects have on the member experience is critical, so we structured our project to ensure that our client was set up for success. More specifically, the CX workstream provided a framework for defining and executing improvements, and the data workstream provided a means for measuring the results. 

Working on this project with a local nonprofit was a special opportunity for RevGen to combine a comprehensive CX project with a data analysis and technology effort, while supporting RevGen’s commitment to give back to our community. In addition to the pro bono work, RevGen also volunteered at the client’s organization.  

This coupling of project and volunteer work allowed our team a firsthand experience that added depth to our understanding of our client and their members. We worked closely with their staff throughout the project, modeling a process they can follow and provided the tools to continue their member experience activities.

This type of work is at the heart of our mission: “We believe in empowering people—employees, clients, and those within our communities — so we may all aspire to be more.”  

Michelle Despres is a manager in RevGen’s Customer Experience practice and specializes in CX program creation, implementation, and management.