Episode 3 – Streamline, save time!

Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining me today for episode three of our Insights Boot Camp webinar series. For those of you who didn’t join our first two episodes, let me give you a quick introduction. My name is Tanja Kratz de Suarez. I’m a product marketing manager here at MarketLogic and your host of today’s session. I’m also joined by my colleague and customer onboarding expert, Sabrina Bushman, who will lead the platform demo later on. Before we get started, just a little bit of housekeeping. We are recording, these sessions and provide the link in a follow-up email so you can stream them at any time. We also have some time at the end for questions. So if you have any questions, coming up, just make sure you drop them here in your q and a chat box on your on twenty four screen. What can you expect in this boot camp series? We are covering four important topics in four episodes. Every episode explores a different use case that is well known to professionals like you in the field of insights and intelligence. In these crisp twenty to thirty minute sessions, we will highlight how the MarketLogic platform equips you to overcome your daily challenges and achieve better and faster outcomes. In the first episode, how to tell powerful stories, we have explored inside storytelling and how you can become a storyteller using our engaging and easy to use knowledge zones. In deliver insights faster, we showcased how to deliver fast paced market and competitive intelligence at scale. If you have missed, any of those episodes, I highly recommend you to watch the recordings. Today, we’re shifting our focus. While the first two episodes were about engaging your business stakeholders to inspire action, We’re now focusing on how you develop new insights by diving deeper into research management. Today, you will learn how to streamline and automate your market research workflows Joe you can do more with less faster. Next week in episode four, we focus on compliance and how you can deliver market research that is a hundred percent compliant with internal and external requirements and reporting obligations. Now this is especially relevant for highly regulated industries such as health care and pharmaceuticals. But before we get started on today’s topic, a few words on who we are for those of you who are joining today for the first time. MarketLogic is the market leading provider of insights management solutions with a goal to help companies to becoming insights driven. Our AI enabled insights engagement platform helps consumer focused companies equip their leaders at scale with the trusted insights they need to make smarter moves. For over fifteen years, we’ve helped hundreds of consumer focused brands across the globe transform into insights driven businesses. We’re supporting market leaders such as Tesco, Unilever, and Vodafone driving innovation every day with the support of MarketLogic. Now let’s get started with today’s topic, streamline, save time. The challenge that market, research function faces is the need to deliver more more and deeper insights faster than ever before while budgets and teams are shrinking. The lack of visibility of research that has been done or is in progress across markets and categories leads to duplicated work and thus wasted money. And there are big operational and financial efficiencies due to manual workflows, slowing down processes, intransparent internal approval and stakeholder alignment processes, poor supplier management. There’s no oversight over supplier spending, utilization of different agencies across regions and research types, and supplier performance, all of which leads to a poor economies of scale. And there is a lack of the standardization of best practices as they’re only being applied on an ad hoc basis across teams. To overcome these challenges, organizations must digitalize, streamline, and standardize the market research processes. Providing visibility and reporting on business wide research activities will help preventing research duplication. And there’s a big opportunity with automating workflows from approval processes to, codifying best practices and also in the, selection of suppliers. Now this is where MarketLogic insights platform can really help. It supports your entire market research process from start to finish to achieve end to end efficiency, bringing all relevant stakeholders from the business and the research agencies together in one platform. With our rich toolbox in the research management app, you can create different workflows tailored to the needs of the different teams, customize templates to empower teams to structurally follow best practices, automate approval processes, and efficiently collaborate with your agencies from the bidding process to commissioning and executing executing to making sure the final results are being made available seamlessly to enrich your knowledge base and to ensure that they’re being used again and again. Now let’s, jump into the platform to see hands on how, this rich research management toolbox works. Over to you, Sabrina. Thanks, Tanja. Hi, everyone. I’m Sabrina, and I have the pleasure of walking you through our research management capabilities today. I’m a customer onboarding expert here at MarketLogic, as you’ve heard. And that means that I have designed trainings and collaborated with many different customers on helping their insights managers to simplify and streamline the research processes. Now over the years, I’ve seen different approaches on running research, planning budget, working with external agencies. And what I have seen across those different realities is that a codified approach with easy to follow templates and clear responsibilities helps to not only increase the speed of conducting research, but it also makes for happier insights managers because they can rely on both the business as well as their external partners to follow the defined workflows and processes. Now for today, and let me switch over to my browser over here, we’ve identified two different use cases. Use case number one, we will focus on, yeah, really codifying research types, best practices, workflows with highly customizable templates that can be set up per project type. And then in the second scenario, we will take one step back and put ourselves in the shoes of the colleagues from the business side. So what if, for example, a marketer cannot find the information they need in the database? The platform actually supports them in creating standardized research requests, providing all the information that the insights managers would need to decide on whether to commission new research and who to collaborate with if that is actually the case. Now before we look at the use cases in detail, however, let’s just take a few moments to get a little bit of an overview of our research management module and have a look at an example project. I will jump into the application called Conduct Research. And what I land in here is what we call our project inbox. Now this inbox is designed to really provide visibility on on business wide research activities. And, of course, not only individual insights managers, but also team leads, heads of certain regions, or prod products can go ahead and filter along certain certain parameters of a project. So if you wanna know what has been completed already in twenty twenty three, for example, we have the filters here to help you find this out within seconds. And in addition to that, you can even download, a an Excel format and export over here where you have all of the metadata combined for further analysis Joe that, yeah, really all your your tracking and monitoring needs are met within our project inbox. Now I did say I wanted to show you a brief example. Let me open the US snack market project over here just so that you get an understanding of how a project is set up, essentially. So here, we we have the the different steps or phases of the project that guide all of the team members through the workflow, through the process, also with some visual completion signs over here. And, yeah, the the the project that you’re seeing here has been set up with a context. For example, we see a scope, financial information, the brief as well. But, of course, all of this is highly customizable and will, in the end, reflect your working reality to ensure that there’s everything that you need, that, people monitoring the the activities need, and essentially, also, what the stakeholders would want to know once this is completed and published. Maybe just one more note while we’re looking at this project. This can also be set up to have our automatic automated knowledge injection as part of it. This essentially checks from the database in real time whether we already have projects with a similar setup so that, yeah, duplication can be avoided at all cost, and any existing information can be considered, can be reused, can be built upon Joe that your team, can truly spend their resources on, yeah, strategically important topics without having to reinvent the wheel. Alright. Let’s go ahead and get started with our first scenario for today. If you recall, this is all about codifying research, best practices, workflows, and essentially saving as much time as possible. And we will do this by utilizing templates that prepopulate not only fields but really content input for, research projects, for the project types that they’ve been assigned to so that the insights manager really has to spend as little time as possible filling this all in. Let’s say in our scenario today, I have a recurring brand health tracker. It’s done every quarter, always with the same vendor. Specifications do not change. What I do is within the system here, I just go ahead and create a new project, give it a name, of course, and then I select the project type. Now the moment that I select the type, I’m immediately able to see that a blueprint is available for this. And by the way, you can, of course, have multiple blueprints per project type to really meet the needs of all your regions, of all your insights managers, and help them, yeah, to to reduce clicks wherever possible. I select my blueprint over here. I click on Create. And now I’m not only creating a project container, but I’m also already prepopulating a lot of the fields as we set. For example, step number one over here, phase one task and team. There’s no action needed from my side. The tasks, the milestones, even with dates, have already been added there for me. So I can move on to stage number two, the brief here immediately. In there, I would see a lot of the information is prepopulated. I’ll just go ahead and choose an end date really quickly. And then I move on to the project scope. Where I’m able to see that some of the scope has been prepopulated. Now in this scenario, we chose to leave the country empty because some quarters, we want to see different markets and compare them. And then others, one country is more than enough. So for this reason, we chose to to leave it empty here. But as we said, those templates are highly customizable, and you can also set up different ones per project types if this is what would help your insights managers. And moving on to the funding. So this is all about financial details and budget planning. I’m just very quickly filling this in with the the fiscal year funding source and then, of course, how much does this actually cost. And once I’ve added it in, I’m scrolling down to the project brief where, again, no action is needed. All of this is already prepopulated for me because the template knows exactly what I want to achieve, what my background and objectives are. That means I can already move on to tab number three over here, this supplier tab. And, of course, the the template also includes information about the preferred vendor. This is happening every quarter, so Kantar is involved every quarter with this. The only thing that I do here is I essentially invite a person from the the vendor from Kantar. I can either ask them to send me a proposal, or I just briefly upload it myself just for record keeping to make sure that everything is documented properly. And once this is done, I can essentially go ahead and commission them, which triggers this official email communication, letting them know, hey. It’s time for the next iteration. We’d love to, yeah, to to see the the next quarter’s results, basically. There’s no action needed for me in field preparation. Everything’s prepopulated because nothing changes regarding the the design of the study. And then for me as an insights manager, this is already it. You can see the the different stages of the research have been completed. And now I’m just gonna sit back back and wait for Kantar to actually upload the results here in tab number five. And once this is the case, I will receive a notification. I can review them. I can, of course, comment on them if I have a question or if maybe something doesn’t look right. But most of the time, of course, I’m gonna be happy with them. I have been working with Kantar for a while on this. So all that is left to do for me would be to rate, to assess the project in general, the supplier specifically in here, and then publish it out to the larger community so that it’s part of the search area. It appears on the Joe page. And, yeah, people know that the the the the next quarter of the brand health tracker is now available. Alright. Let’s go ahead and turn to our scenario number two, the the last use case for today’s demonstration. And if you recall, we said we really wanna take a step back and essentially show you a different way that this this research management workflow or process can also start. We see this actually with many of our customers that often research requests actually come from the business side of the house, and they’re then landing on the desk of insights managers who review and decide whether this is something that should be commissioned. And to just, yeah, put ourselves into this little scene for today, I’m coming back to the Joe page here. Let’s say that I am a marketer. I’m a marketer. I’m working on a new campaign. I’m interested in information about purchase drivers for for, plant based food, but not only from vegetarians or vegans, but also flexitarians. So what I will do is I will go ahead and start a conversation with DeepSights over here. DeepSights, of course, the first, yeah, AI assistant that that helps to to harness the power of generative AI in leveraging your organization’s insights. And I’m just gonna go ahead and fire off the the search over here to see if there’s any information available on my topic of interest. Now I can see a result over here and answer within moments. I like the content, but I’m immediately spotting that this is actually from January of twenty nineteen. So as a marketer, I’m thinking, might there have been some new development developments, new data points that I would also like to see? So I’m deciding to actually submit a new research request here. This is a a very common way of the the research workflow to be kicked off. And, of course, we want to ensure that everything here lives, is documented, and plays out in the same platform. So whether a marketer starts a new research request or someone from the insights team wants to create a new project, everything happens in the exact same space. And even if I’m, as an insights manager, asked to review a a research request and decide whether it should be turned into real project, All of this happens on the project inbox that we’ve seen earlier today. So let’s switch gears. I’m, again, putting on my insights manager’s hat over here, and I’m coming back to our research inbox that I was mentioning. Of course, each time I receive a research request, I receive an email notification. I receive an in system notification. But I can also find all of my requests here right in the inbox. In fact, of course, I could also filter for them. If I filter for the project type, there is one specifically for research request available. In here, I can see the request from the marketer earlier that wasn’t finding the right information on DeepSights. And what I can do now as the insights manager is I just click on the request name over here, and I’m able to immediately review all the information that the marketer has provided for me. Now this way, I’m able to, yeah, very much decide what info I need as an insights manager because, of course, again, the the templates here and the the fields that need to be filled in are completely flexible, highly customizable, and can reflect whatever would help your insights managers while, of course, also enabling and empowering your your business users to send all of the request that they think makes sense. I just review the information at hand. I can see the scope here that the the marketer is, yeah, is envisioning. I can see who the request is from. So in this case, Mariah Carey, and then, of course, most importantly, the brief here toward the bottom. Once I’ve reviewed everything, I have, yeah, two choices. I can either immediately turn this into a proper project and decide to go ahead with the the request. Or if there are some clarification needed, I can also go ahead and start a conversation with the person who has requested this from me. You can see for each field here, it’s actually possible for me to go ahead and click on the comment icon. And once I do, I can just use the add icon to tag someone. Of course, I’m gonna go ahead and tag the person who requested this from me. I will let her know, what my question is, what I need to have clarified, or to tell her some limitations, some ideas that I have. Once I have posted my comment, the person I have tagged is notified. They can respond to to the comment immediately, and we can ensure that we have a a meaningful conversation exactly where questions arise and where discussion should live instead of maybe email chains or separate Slack or Teams messages that might get lost. So we always have everything, yeah, properly documented here. If then my, my colleague from the from the marketing team, the requester, responds to my question. I feel like I fully understand what what they wanna achieve here. I think it’s a good idea. All I need to do as the insights manager is turn this into a real project and not just a request brief. And I do that by going ahead and changing the project type over here. If I change it to the project type of my choice, I’m gonna go in this case with specific target group insights, Then you would see how the research request, the brief tab here, is turned into a proper project with all of the phases and stages that we have seen earlier. And here, I can, of course, now start complementing what Mariah, in this case, has already submitted. I can I can, add an individual milestones and tasks? If anything here in the brief is maybe missing in my opinion because I’m the one always talking to external research agencies, to the vendors, then, of course, I can also add this in and just follow the normal workflow and process until everything’s done, completed. I’ve received final deliverables, and I can publish this so that Mariah and anyone else can find it in the database in the search area for the upcoming projects. Exactly. So this is what I wanted to show you today. I know quite a lot of input. But but to, yeah, maybe recap the the the the key learnings over here, this is all about saving time, streamlining, standardizing, and making sure that everyone involved in the research process, whether it’s the the external agency, whether it’s the insights manager, or even someone from the business, feels empowered and knows exactly what is expected of them at which point in time. And with this, I will hand it back over to Tanja. Thanks, everyone, and hopefully see you next week for the last of our summer boot camp webinars. Thanks, Sabrina, for walking us through the process. Now let me summarize with the key takeaways. Start streamlining and automating today. The technology is here to help you. It can be a big time and cost saver bringing it all together in one platform. You may wanna start one area, for example, a certain region or business unit. You’ll set up the workflows that ease collaboration, increase visibility across teams, and automate parts of the process where possible. Adapt as you go and replicate with the next region or business unit. And remember to involve your business stakeholders. Invite them to collaborate in the tools so that you move away from different channels, different tools that really drive these inefficiencies. Second is codify best practices. Enable best practice sharing across regions, BUs, and research types. Build them into your workflows and templatize your briefs so that they can guide your insights colleagues in the process and involve your suppliers. Now this really has two benefits. On the one hand side, there is less friction in the process if your agencies work directly with you in the workflows, in the tools. You can even offload, you know, some of the responsibilities by having your agencies making the results available in the system, freeing up time on your end. Now on the other hand, there are big benefits on the procurement side. So with the supplier agencies onboarded, you can easily gain transparency into supplier spending and performance, helping you to better manage your supplier relationships. So for example, oftentimes companies operating in multiple geographies and sectors end up with different supplier terms. But thanks to the transparency, better terms can be negotiated, leading to cost savings. Your procurement function will love this. Now we have a few minutes for questions, so let me check here the, q and a box. Can you request multiple proposals from vendor agencies? Yes. The bidding process involving multiple agencies is fully supported in the tool. Of course, that also means that, the agencies involved, don’t have visibility of one another. Only the commissioned agency would then have access to the project and will be able to collaborate in the tool. Now to help in that process, you can also create rosters of approved vendors so your teams have, guidance on what agencies to work with based on pre agreed terms. So as an example, for a concept test in the region Europe, you should work with these five preapproved vendors, and that list can look different for a different region. I see another question on vendors. I see a challenge in getting research agencies use another system to run research. How is your experience? What’s the best practice to increase adoption? That’s a good question. So many vendors actually appreciate a single place to collaborate in a project from the RFP submission to the brief on designing the field work to then uploading the results to making them available to, the wider business. We work with over six hundred research agencies, and there is a big interest of these organizations in making their own work visible and impactful. Also, you know, they are included as an important stakeholder group in the onboarding to ensure that they are empowered to work in the tool, and many of our customers actually mandate, their supplier organizations to use the tool in their contracts. That means that an agency would only receive payment when the results, have been made available. So this also really helps to drive adoption. Good. Now before closing the session, I’d like to give a quick outlook on what we have in the pipeline to support the research process. In the future, you will be able to run desk research within the tool supported by the AI summarizing your existing knowledge from internal and external sources. This is going to be a big time saver in understanding what’s already available to help informing your research agenda. Already available today is our AI assistant for trusted insights called DeepSights. You have seen this earlier in the demo by Sabrina. Just ask natural language questions to get immediate answers that are based in your knowledge and data. That means you get answers that you can trust. So no hallucinations, that you may have experienced actually yourself in using other public AI tools like ChatGPT. This wraps up our third episode of this webinar series. Please do join us, next time, August twenty ninth, for our last episode of this boot camp series. We’ll be in contact via email with the recording in case you want to rewatch at any point. If you have any follow-up questions, please do reach out. You see the contact details, here on the slide. Thank you so much for joining us today, and, see you in our next episode. Bye.