One of the major problems that data visualization solves is the need for quick and clear communication of complex insights, particularly to time-constrained executives.
It’s about storytelling with data…but how?
With her extensive expertise in data analytics and digital transformation, Katie Manty, a professor at Michigan State University’s Customer Experience Management Master’s program and a leader at Omnicom Health Group, offers unparalleled insights into this crucial aspect of business strategy.
In this episode of “Delighted Customers Podcast,” Katie shares compelling strategies and best practices for utilizing data visualization to enhance customer experience and drive executive buy-in.
Key Takeaways:
1. Customer Experience Improvements:
– Pain Points in Banking: Katie highlighted how customers in banking and investment sectors often struggle with mobile check deposits and managing dormant 401(k) accounts. The complexity and inaccessibility of instructions lead to dissatisfaction. She shares best practices on how to solve for that.
2. Data Storytelling:
– Katie’s personal advice: Focusing on data storytelling and understanding audience incentives can significantly improve your professional influence. She walks through several illustrations of how to effectively tell stories with data.
3. Effective Data Visualization:
– Importance for Executives: Visualizing data is essential for conveying insights quickly and clearly to senior leadership, facilitating swift decision-making. Katie shares common missteps and how to overcome them.
Meet Katie:
Katie has a passion for building highly-prized customer experiences. Throughout her marketing technology enablement career, she gathers multiple perspectives, analyzes data sets, forges a business vision and puts the initial concept into production using a test and learn mindset for continuous improvement of the product or process. Katie has been with Omnicom Health Group for three years as a leader in digital transformation and data analytics capabilities in the health care sector primarily supporting biotech and pharmaceutical marketing teams.
Katie services clients with Omnichannel marketing solutions based on a framework and capabilities that she derived from years of marketing and data strategy experience. She is a Thought Leader enabling colleagues to upskill and speak marketing acumen underscored by data, data visualization and technology integration concepts. She shares a regular Data Coffee Talk with colleagues on all topics data in marketing including how AI is changing the advertising business.
She began her career at Ernst & Young leading application development, business analysis, roadmap visioning and emerging technology teams. Katie earned an MS degree from MIT in the Management of Technology. Her undergraduate degree is from Smith College with a BA in Computer Science and Economics double major.
Katie is an active alum with both of her alma maters. She spends her free time soaking up the sun as an avid beachgoer, consuming fiction and shuttling her teenage daughter to activities.
Additionally, Katie is a Faculty Instructor for MSU’s MS in CXM degree. She teaches Data Analysis, Data Integration and Data Visualization as part of the program.
Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Mark Slatin:
Well, today on the Delighted Customers podcast, I’m really excited because we’re going to talk about something we haven’t talked in over a hundred episodes, data visualization and its impact on customer experience management. And I am so excited to have my guest on the show, Katie Manty, who is a colleague of mine, a professor of practice at Michigan State University’s Customer Experience Management Master’s of Science degree program. Katie, welcome to the show.
Katie Manty: Thanks, Mark. It’s great to be here.
Mark Slatin: So Katie, you are, for the last three years or so, you have been at Omnicom Health Group as a leader in digital transformation and data analytic capabilities in the healthcare sector. And you’ve been primarily supporting biotech and pharmaceutical marketing teams. You have a master’s of, you got your master’s of science from MIT. So you’re automatically what I call wicked smart. And you are, you know, the needed part of the brain spectrum that I don’t have. So, so grateful for people like you and you teach so that there’s a saying, you know, I like to have my, I focus my meals around dessert. And when I, when I get to a restaurant, I don’t know about you, but I look at the dessert menu and I say, is there something worth having? If so, I’m going to figure out what I’m going to order. So there’s a saying, we save the best for last. And of the 15 courses at Michigan State, Katie teaches the last class of all. I’m 13 out of 15 and she’s 15 out of 15. So we save the best for last, but really, really important because look, if you’re a change leader, you’re going to be telling stories. And you can’t assume that people are going to connect these dots, you have to help them out. And Katie, you are so good at that. And now you’re teaching, you know, people coming out of the program with it, you’re doing it at your work. And I and I want you to tell us two things, if you don’t mind, as you as you introduce yourself to the audience. One is what you’re a little more specifically about what you’re doing now. And two is Data coffee talk, you have to tell us what that is.
Katie Manty: Absolutely, sounds good. Yes, I have used data throughout my career to really help me show and demonstrate the impacts of a technology program or platform that I’m putting in play. I launched a personalization platform back when we were just starting with SharePoint sites and we’re going to collaborate. Um, we always had to think about what’s the story that we’re telling and how do we get more investment dollars for these marketing and technology platforms that are presumably making the business better? Um, I worked at a financial services firm for 11 years and learned a lot of, um, great ways to use data, uh, to drive customer experiences. Uh, and then I worked at a, uh, data aggregator company for over three years, which also it, it, it’s all about data and the strategy and how do you have high quality data? Um, how, where do you store it? How do you create a cloud-based architecture so that it’s accessible to everybody? And then how do you analyze it and activate it? Um. So I I’ve truly passionate about data. I’m often the one in the group who can help any of my colleagues figure out what’s the story they could be telling about data. Um, and I do, I do a lot now with servicing clients, um, in, in the healthcare space, as Mark said, uh, and thinking about all of the different marketing channels that our teams are on. You know, you think about. Twitch and the web and your social channels and your custom programs and your email. It’s really all about, are we getting the reach frequency and engagement that we hope that we’re getting? So I work with the marketing teams and I help them think about dashboards in addition to their marketing tactics. And then how do we create a customer journey? So meaning, how do you start to distill down to that one-to-one level? How can you start to use keys across different channels and different data sets to really understand someone’s journey with your brand? I also do a lot of thought leadership inside of Omnicom Health Group, and I’m interacting and trying to upskill and enable my 4,000 plus creative agency colleagues to think about technology and data as maybe not the most important part of their business and their daily jobs, but trying to help them see that being data literate and being able to speak data and talk about the content and create communications that our teams build are having an impact for their clients. So data coffee talk series is trying to answer that need. It’s really about data literacy. And again, how do I bring up some different topics so that my colleagues can feel comfortable with asking questions about data when they’re sitting with clients and or other vendors and other partners. Um, so, and then they can also bring knowledge. I will have guests on the show from around the agency, from other vendors, from other agencies. Um, You know, we’re talking about what is the NPS score in the pharmaceutical sector? Is that important? We’re talking about what do you do with predictive models? How do you get good data for your artificial intelligence type mechanisms? So I’m doing these weekly coffee talk series, and it’s just I’m trying to keep it small because I really I want to engage and I want to understand what all of my colleagues need. in order to be successful at their clients.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. Well, that’s a great, that’s a great background. It sounds like a fun way to learn if I’m someone who’s trying to, you know, get, get up to speed on all that. And could you just spend just, uh, you know, 30 seconds or so sharing with us what the course at a high level, what the course at Michigan state that you teach entails?
Katie Manty: Yeah, absolutely. So the course at Michigan State as part of the Customer Experience Management Masters of Science degree is Data Analysis, Data Integration, and Data Visualization. And really what I’ve done in choosing the textbook that I did, which is Effective Data Storytelling by Brent Dykes, it’s about how do you use data to make those big asks. We do a little bit in data analysis and, you know, I try to enable the students with, they don’t have to become data analysts, they don’t have to become data scientists, but they should be able to speak it and they should be able to understand the processes that perhaps analysts and dashboard builders and data scientists need to undergo so they understand oh, why doesn’t the data just show up on my dashboard, right? There’s a process, and there’s data cleaning, and there’s data collection, and then storage, and then perhaps data unification. And there’s a lot of processes that have to go on underlying the data so that you can have good quality data in the dashboard. So that’s really, to me, the point of data analysis and data integration as we cover off on those topics. And then visualization. It is about half the class, because again, that’s really about thinking, how am I going to tell a story? How am I going to take the perhaps hours and hours of insight that myself and perhaps the team that I’ve requisitioned to do some analysis? How do we pull out the highlights? and kind of bring our audience or listener or senior leadership along to have that aha moment, as Brent Dykes calls it in his textbook, that we can share that. And it’s really data visualization is really about how do you help another person see that same aha light bulb go off to understand, oh, If that’s what happened, if sales is trending down, then perhaps this is what I need to do to course correct that as an example.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. And so we’re calling loosely calling this episode using data visualization to get executive buy-in. And I say loosely because we know as change leaders, as people involved in change management, we need to get more than just the C-suite on board with these changes. So using the data at the appropriate level, the appropriate way to tell the story. So I like to get definitions because guests like you come onto the show and We know you know what you know, and made to stick to call it the curse of knowledge, because not everybody knows what you know. So let’s level set a little bit for the audience and for myself. What do we mean by data visualization?
Katie Manty: Yeah, it’s a great question. So data visualization could be summed up as the art and science of taking lots of raw numbers and putting it into a visualization, putting it into a graphic, putting it into a trend line, um, or, or putting it into a bar chart so that visually, when you look at it, your brain quickly understands, oh, the Northwest region had the most sales last month, because I’m just looking at four bar charts next to each other. If you took the United States and divided it into four regions.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. So, um, what is the big deal? Why should this matter so much to CX leaders and to senior management?
Katie Manty: Because we know that we’re all strapped for time. And, um, you know, as a marketer, I constantly have to think about what’s gonna get someone’s attention. So putting reams and reams of numbers, right? If you think about you buy some media and you get 5 million impressions, well, okay, but what really happened from those 5 million impressions that perhaps I bought on Facebook or programmatically bought through a trade desk-like mechanism to find placement for my advertisement? What, what I’m trying to do is quickly be able to demonstrate how I spent this media money and what it led to. And I do that through some pictures, uh, versus, you know, if, if, if someone had to read five bullet points, they still reading words, even those of us that are subject matter experts, we got to read, we got to process, but a picture, the brain can process so much more quickly. And if we think about. you know, having to go in front of executive leadership. And sometimes you might get on the agenda for 20 minutes, but you know, it really means 10 minutes, right? Because things always kind of cascade or some other item comes up that the executive has to leave. So you have to be able to tell your story, uh, in as few words as possible, as quickly as possible and get to the action.
Mark Slatin: So let me double tap on that to highlight to pull gems out when guests hit on them so we can pause a little bit and and share with the listeners. Two things. One, I heard is that recognizing that executives have a limited amount of time. One of the biggest mistakes that I’ve made multiple times, and I confess right here on the show, is I have put 10 pounds into a five-pound sack, gone into a meeting and not timed it well, not anticipated technology issues on the front end, and then end the meeting mid-sentence and, okay, your time’s up, Mark. much better off, and there’s a lot of wisdom from a lot of pain from both of us here sharing, is that you’re better off leaving some extra time for Q&A. That’s where the real value of it is, because you’re going to have some questions. And I think it’s a little bit of the Mark Twain syndrome. I would have written a shorter book, but I didn’t have the time. So it takes more work to do exactly what Katie does And, and I love what you said about, you know, trying to empathize really with the audience and say, what is it that would get them activated, you know, moving toward action. So, so that was, that was really powerful. I think the second thing is, what was the second thing? The second thing was, you know, you talked about the, the both sides of the brain here. And utilizing the fact is that I think we as One of the mantras that we’ve heard over and over again as CX programs fail because we don’t prove the ROI of CX I would I like to use the word value of CX more than ROI Because ROI is taken to mean literally a mathematical equation a financial equation That looks at the return on investment the reality is there’s a huge, huge emotional aspect to what gets leaders and other people to move into action, right? So I’m going to pause on that, but there were two good points. Pause on that and let you respond, being in the world of data visualization, talking about the impact of this emotionally.
Katie Manty: Yeah, it’s a good point. How do you, How do you work towards someone’s heart? It is what we’re saying with the art of it. You’ve got to do your stakeholder analysis, your audience analysis. What are their incentives? What’s important to them? And that’s really what you’ve got to present. Because I’ve spent it too, Mark. I’ve spent, you know, you spend weeks doing analysis, really trying to get into what are these customers doing on these channels and what are they reading? And you’re like, oh my gosh, there’s so much good stuff here. And there truly is. But as we were talking about, you’ve got to understand the different levels of stakeholders that you’re talking to. So if you’re talking to executives, drilling into, oh, efficacy and safety content is what oncologists love to read. You know, that’s maybe a quick intro, but you don’t got to go into the weeds of all of it, but you’re talking about, hey, we reached 94% of our target list, and we need this much more money to get two more percent, right, to meet them where they are. Like, that’s what you’ve got to take your story, and you’ve got to understand the incentives of people in your audience, and you’ve got to speak to that, right? So it’s really know the heart and science, the art and science. what you’ve got, you’ve got to talk to to their rational and irrational emotions, just like you’re saying, I think you’re right.
Mark Slatin: So we’d like to save people pain in the show. Multiple times, it’s from my pain and the mistakes that I’ve made and sharing my failures so they don’t have to. But often guests share, you know, other mistakes or other challenges or problems that we can avoid as leaders. And one of those I want to ask, and I guess there’s a couple, at least you already pointed out, but some of the missteps when it comes to data visualization. So I assume that based on what we just talked about, one of them is you know, not being succinct and clear about which data you want to share. And, and I think maybe even piggybacking on what we just talked about, maybe failing to make an emotional connection with the data.
Katie Manty: Yeah, that that could, that could totally be it, right? Because You’ve spent so much time or I’ve spent so much time in the weeds that I get it. But yeah, I’ve got to try to remember, oh, I’ve got 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes max of this person. How do I bring them to what’s most important to them and realize I’ve got to say no to some details? That’s really hard when you’re a detail oriented person. You’ve spent, you know, weeks looking at the attribution of this ad over this ad on this particular marketing channel. You’re trying to really understand the whole customer journey, but you really, you got to figure out the summary. I think some of the common myths that I see are that people are going to come to your dashboards. They’re going to read your reports without some handholding. And what I’ve seen to be successful is have regular sessions and get people comfortable with the dashboard and being able to interpret it, because that’s where a lot of the mistrust will come from, too. If someone doesn’t truly understand the data that’s showing up in a report or a dashboard or a visualization, then they’re not going to use it. The other one, too, is I think really understanding what data is in said dashboard or said report or said visualization. Um, again, I know I’m, I’m really marketing focus, but a lot of the work I do is around omni-channel marketing or awesome customer experiences. The two can often be synonymous, but if you think about all the different channels to a marketer or an executive, well, aren’t they all in the dashboard? And sometimes they’re not sometimes there’s reasons that, well, we couldn’t get the vendor to put it into a certain file format. We’re working on it. You know, if you want to make a call to said vendor CEO, please do, right? If that’s your ask, perhaps you’re, you know, you’re, you’re doing that. Um, sometimes you don’t have it at a individual level that you’re trying to report at again, like with Facebook, Facebook’s never going to share that Katie clicked on an ad. They’ll, they’ll share something like, Moms who live in the suburbs of cities click on certain ads, but they’re never going to share at the individual level. So if I’m showing some chart around how I’m able to get people like Katie to click on things, and I don’t have Facebook in there, but executives and marketing leaders are like, but we’re spending money on Facebook. They’re assuming it’s part of the mix. So you have to be really clear You have to always be footnoting and helping people understand this is what’s in this picture. This is what’s in this picture. And then you have to watch yourself that you don’t get into trouble showing those same two pictures at the same presentation, because then, you know, it’s apples to oranges and you may lose your audience. So I think some of those are the common myths is being able to explain the data and assuming that people are using the dashboards or the reports dashboard.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. As you think about all that you’ve done, what are some examples of where you you think the examples or the illustrations have gone really well? What are some kind of real world examples?
Katie Manty: Yeah, you think about. Kind of, you know, like Answering being able to answer questions. So let’s let’s talk about customer experience and trying to understand Why why did our NPS score drop? last month or last quarter Why are people unhappy so we might go and look at a bunch of call transcripts or trap transcripts and we might look at Why are people chatting with us? Why are people calling us? Why are they emailing us? Being able to look at categories of content and try to understand, hey, they can’t figure out, I’m in banking or investment, and people can’t figure out easily how to deposit their mobile, how to deposit a check. Or they can’t figure out, what do I do with my dormant 401k? How do I kind of take that out of the 401k stance that it’s in and put it into a rollover IRA? And if you start to really drill down and you look at some of the data associated with why people are calling and you say, oh, they’re looking for instructions. So then you go and find out, oh, the instructions are three pages deep, three clicks in. So perhaps if we figure out how to put those two clicks above and the users can see, oh, this is how I deposit my mobile check. You know, that perhaps drives down service needs and perhaps then hopefully brings back up an NPS score. So that’s examples of where it worked well. We’re really trying to search and do analysis to understand where are those customer pain points, and then making a fix and measuring it again and hopefully seeing downstream impacts.
Mark Slatin: Yeah, Katie, can I just affirm that example you just shared and add one other dimension to it? In the master class that I developed called the Trusted Guide Roadmap, we talk about several different ROI models. And one of them has to do with cost efficiencies around channel switching. And so what I imagine in the example you just shared is that you identify a buried set of information that a customer might want that you could bring it up. So not only do you improve NPS, but you could potentially avoid channel switching to a more costly channel, like a call center, for example, speaking to a live person, when the person really just wants to self-serve and work their way through it seamlessly. And you can then demonstrate both the point of frustration for a customer, but, you know, hopefully senior management can see, hey, you know, it costs us 10 times on average, a transaction for people to deal with the call center versus to self-serve.
Katie Manty: Absolutely. And I, um, in luckily in my career, I have been able to make the case and show that I’ve saved multi-millions in, um, driving people to self-serve. So I certainly encourage all of your listeners and everyone in the customer experience industry to, to, to think about that. You’re not only improving the experience, but you’re, um, saving the company money.
Mark Slatin: Well said. Well said. Excellent. Um, I could talk to you all day, but we do need to land the plane. So I would like to end with the question that I asked my guests, which is what advice would you give to a 20 year old self?
Katie Manty: Yeah. I, I, I wish I had kind of thought about data storytelling early on in my career and just being able to, um, do awesome presentations where I’m thinking about who is my audience and I’m thinking about what their incentives are, as we said. You know, I took Toastmasters later in life. I should have done that earlier. Loved that because that does all of those things we’re talking about and was a great basis for getting ready for storytelling. Um, and I think it’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s no, it’s knowing your audience. And just as we said, it’s, it’s knowing what their incentives are that are going to help you be impactful and, uh, show the, the hard work that you’ve done, but show the pieces of the hard work that matter to, to that person you’re speaking to.
Mark Slatin: Excellent. What a pleasure. What a pleasure to have you on the show, Katie, can you tell our audience if they would like to reach out to you, what would be the best way to get ahold of you?
Katie Manty: I’m a regular LinkedIn reader and checker. Please, you can easily find me, Katie Manty. There’s not too many of us. You’ll find me. I’m happy to meet and consult and share my wisdom and learn from others too. There’s so many groups out there of work that we can do in the marketing arena and the customer experience arena and the data strategy arena. LinkedIn is best for me and I do actively use the email in LinkedIn.
Mark Slatin: Excellent. We’ll have that in the show notes. Katie, just proud and privileged to be on the same faculty as you.
Katie Manty: Me as well. I mean, you’re doing an awesome job with all these hundred plus podcasts, Mark. That’s quite a feat. Thank you.
