Act before you think?

If someone asks me what Big Data buys you, I almost always reply with "speed".

Big Data solutions allow us to act rather than think.  As an innovation guy and a follower of Lean Startup model, I am all about speed.  Fail fast forward, learn you way, etc.  This is the polar opposite of most BI and business processes.  I'm not interested in models that explain what happened after the fact, but in tools that allow me to shape outcomes.

I was recently approached by a business partner, looking to solicit feedback on our call centers.

As chance would have it, we were in the final stages of getting our call center data (Genesys) into our data store (S3) and Hadoop cluster (EMR).  As is normally the case, we weren't really sure what we'd do with it ... just that it would be interesting to have.

Anyhow, after a bit of fiddling we were able to tie the call logs (collected every 15 minutes) to our student records and had an avenue for polling our students.  Our business partners were thrilled.  They had our call center team working on popping voice call backs, but the project was flailing.  Even more, we were skeptical that we'd get good interactivity by 1) asking for call back permission and then 2) calling students back with a phone survey.

So we got going, literally just putting together a daily csv that we sent to someone to manually email links out.  Next we automated the pushing of the "survey list" to our outbound mail provider.  Feedback was coming back, in droves.  On top of emailing, we started pushing the survey links directly to the activity streams of students (on our Social Portal).  It turns out these students were over 2x as likely to complete surveys.  Finally we started survey students who we had called (outbound calls), "did we call at a good time", etc.

The voice callback survey project I mentioned earlier is still not live, frankly it is already irrlevant.

Please note, we did absolutely no analysis before we stated polling surveys.  We made no predictions, and had no expectations.  At the last minute, almost on a lark, our business partner suggested a free form text feedback block.  So much good feedback started coming back we had to enlist a "fixer" to deal with student issues.

We are literally "saving" students who were ready to throw in the towel, call the BBB, etc.

All because we didn't wait.  Having put the data together in an operation-able format, we were able to get out the door in a few days and then iterate and improve.  Next we are going to pull in the survey results and use them to create a real time success dashboard.  Which departments, teams, advisors are doing well?

We may need to revisit the old adage, "think before you act".