Conversations with corporate researchers
Kerry Sette
VP, Head of Consumer Insights and Research, Voya Financial
Prior to your position at Voya Financial you worked on the agency side. What are some of the challenges that you’ve faced moving to a client-side research position? What aspects have been rewarding?
Moving client-side after over 15 years in the agency world has been extremely refreshing although it was a huge shift for me. At first, I was a bit apprehensive about working in only one industry. However, my current work at Voya spans across many categories – retirement, life insurance, annuities, employee benefits, investment management – focusing on a variety of customer constituents, both B2B and B2C. Of course, each comes with a variety of business and research challenges, so it keeps me on my toes! In addition, Voya is a relatively new brand that has achieved tremendous success in terms of awareness growth. Currently, more than half of the consumers that know Voya recognize that we are a company who serves the retirement market. However, through data-driven insights we can continue to bring the brand to life in more ways that resonate with all of our target audiences.
At first, one of the biggest challenges in making the transition to the client side was the volume of internal meetings … now I know why my old clients were so busy! After being in my role now for over a year, I’ve learned that there is much more planning, preparation and collaboration with cross-functional teams. In addition, the research and insights required for each planning stage are not just focused on brand, advertising or PR, they are relevant for all that we do. This might include things like customer experience (NPS); CRM; prospecting; sales enablement; product and solutions development; thought leadership; or the many other important corporate initiatives I’m involved with. One thing that has been extremely rewarding during my time at Voya is seeing how insights can impact the many different parts of the organization. There is always a need for brands to put customers at the center of all they do, especially in today’s world where disruptors are setting the bar high for brands. Thus, through our research at Voya, we strive to make it easy for our customers to do business with us. We continuously innovate, refine and simplify our products, services and processes in order to improve customers’ lives. Our goal is to make every interaction with Voya a positive experience, from the very first touch point.
What are one or two strategies for motivating marketing researchers who prefer quant-based methods to use and be comfortable with qual?
The financial services industry is certainly one area where folks prefer to have quantitative data for most of what they do, which is great, especially since I consider myself a classically trained quant researcher. However, I always say that quantitative research is the best solution for finding how much or how many. For example, “How many customers would prefer this product feature?” On the other hand, qualitative research is ideal for understanding the what and the why. This would include questions like, “What are customers thinking or feeling?” Of course, qualitative research is always ideal when we can’t predict the universe of responses or when you have a topic that has been researched in many ways, but there isn’t much by way of context to tell you how or what to specifically improve. It’s true that you have some open-ends in any quant survey which provides some context. However, let’s say you hear that in order to improve the experience, simplifying language is a recommended improvement area. While that is great feedback, it’s not clear on what specific language is being referred. Instead, I look at it this way – in the advertising world, it wasn’t just my job to tell a creative director he had to improve consideration and purchase intent for the brand. I had to provide direction and recommendations for doing this and identify the context for how to better connect with consumers and breakthrough in a fragmented market. To do this we would say you need to hit on these three key messages that will resonate and in this order, include a specific type of lifestyle imagery to connect with the audience, and so on. I look at my research at Voya in the same way. Qualitative research provides the context to better connect with consumers and improve how we can best market our products and services.
My primary strategy since joining Voya has been to simply show them what qualitative can do. Since joining the company, I’ve conducted many focus groups and online bulletin boards. My latest approach has been to build an ongoing feedback loop, a qualitative community for real-time consumer feedback. The demand for insights has been incredible since the launch of this initiative as we’ve been sharing insights across the entire organization. It’s truly a win-win for both our insights and research team at Voya, as we continue to obtain real-time feedback from consumers, while continuing to keep the customer at the center of all that we do.
Talk about a recent win for your team and what you learned from it.
Prior to Voya, I had quite a bit of experience working in CRM and building consumer loyalty models. However, I was never fully responsible for leading all customer experience programs across the entire client organization. I think a big win for our team this past year has been elevating the importance of the customer experience throughout the organization. Our brand is the promise we make to our consumers and the experience is how we keep that promise. This starts with having our internal business partners recognize that the customer experience numbers in our Net Promoter Score (NPS) presentations represent the cumulative effect of all aspects of the customer’s journey. While most companies tend to optimize functions within individual departments, they can often lose sight of the end-to-end journey. However, all stages of the customer journey must consistently operate with the end-to-end customer experience in mind. This requires everyone to have access to that customer data as well as accountability and collaboration across different departments and functions. As every moment matters, every touch point is an opportunity for our brand to keep (or break) our promise to customers. Thus, we must provide consistency with every interaction throughout the customer journey.
Given the trends we see among U.S. consumers, it’s clear that today, meeting customer expectations isn’t good enough. It’s trust that begins with keeping promises, which ultimately strengthens into loyalty by consistently exceeding expectations at every touch point. By maintaining more loyal customers, they will expand their business with us, cost less to support and most importantly become our brand advocates. I think our customer experience programs play an even greater role in terms of operationalizing the data across the organization, which ultimately provides us with a strong competitive advantage. One of our business partners even started a promise keeper recognition program to celebrate individuals on the team that help keep the brand’s promise. It is extremely rewarding to see that research can have this kind of impact on the entire organization.
You work with B2B and B2C MR, serving end-clients, distributors and intermediaries. What advice would you give to someone starting out in a B2B2C researcher position?
First, never stop asking questions. Immerse yourself in the businesses by learning about the history of the category, government regulations, products, different levels of service you offer, pricing or distribution channels and learn what makes each constituent tick. It’s also important to get your hands on as much data as you can about the population – both primary and secondary. Know your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and know their value proposition. Talk to as many colleagues as you can across the business, in different functions and at different levels. This will offer you a variety of perspectives on the strengths and challenges within the business and provide direction on how you can contribute to research that will help find untapped opportunities. Moreover, it’s critical that you utilize the insight from colleagues and business partners to challenge conventional thinking. I am also of the mindset that if there is a will, there is always a way, especially when it pertains to gathering customer insights. So, even if you don’t own the end customer, there are always opportunities to find out what they want and ultimately how you can better serve their needs and create an emotional connection with them.
What new methodologies would you like to explore in 2017 and why?
When it comes to trying new methodologies, I always want to know the benefits over other tried and true methods, especially if there is an additional cost involved. That being said, we have been incorporating more and more non-conscious techniques within both our qualitative and quantitative research. While I was an early adopter of hypnosis in focus groups back in the early 2000s. Today, I am most impressed by the blending of methods. For example, combining non-conscious and implicit techniques – eye-tracking, bio measures, priming, etc. – with behavioral tracking, such as digital, and traditional self-reported measures. In addition, combining non-conscious/implicit techniques like priming with discrete choice or conjoint. These techniques are especially important as you get into the world of behavioral finance research. I love that they allow you to compare what consumers say vs. what they do and isolate the variables that truly matter. I’m also always looking for new, innovative ways to use older methods, like utilizing Bayesian network modeling in helping to determine the prioritization of messaging in advertising.