Orange embraces the digital age for superior market insights

I was lucky enough to join Russell King, Director of Group Brand & Customer Experience Research at Orange, to present at ESOMAR Congress 2017. During our presentation, we talked about our journey together in solving some of the critical challenges that Orange’s research team faced, while also helping them fulfill their company goals and objectives.

First, Russell took the stage to talk about how our project with them came about in the first place. He said it all began when Orange decided to improve tracking based on principles that were uncovered through a benchmarking exercise with other leading global brands. What he found through this exercise were some core themes - including speeding things up to create time for researchers to really think about the business insights behind the data. In addition, the company needed a solution that fit its goals in a global marketplace. As a telecommunications company offering mobile, fixed, and TV services to 29 countries, Orange operates in a highly competitive and fast-paced industry. They wanted to “know before anyone else,” and the right approach to research could help them get there, so they set the objective of delivering the right information to the right people at the right time.

Russell found that Infotools was the perfect partner to help them deliver on these new research goals and could help them swiftly and nimbly garner insights from data to keep a competitive advantage.  

I then presented to the audience on the details of our partnership and solution development, and how we poured our expertise into removing the mundane tasks of the researcher by using technology like automation, which we believed could uncover insights more quickly while reducing error. It turns out we were right.

We took Orange’s objectives and created solutions dubbed “Power Stations,” which are fast and responsive, based on fully trusted data, and well-designed to engage users. A real understanding of Orange’s company culture and overarching objectives was kept top of mind throughout the development process so that our team could take our skills and experience to move out of the realm of “commodity” and make Orange’s job easier.

As you can see in the attached slide deck, our solution delivered on Orange’s needs in several ways:

• Automation that does mundane tasks quickly and accurately to free up humans to do more thinking, plus delivers faster results
• User experience and interface so that all Orange stakeholders can not only get what they need but actually want to use the solution
• Create opportunities for story-telling, so that all users can access data, create their own stories and reports, plus deliver them immediately

Some commentary from Russell that I thought perfectly covered some of the details on how the solution works is here: “We’ve worked with Infotools to fully automate the process [of putting open questions into global tracking studies] and integrate the output and every individual response into the Power Stations. We use automated translation and machine learning to generate our topics and themes, which means we have dramatically increased the value and business impact of open-ended questions – we now have 12 times the volume that we used to have for no greater investment.

While text analytics is not new, what is extraordinary is that themes and verbatims have been integrated directly into the Power Stations.  This allows anyone at Orange to directly interrogate and assess the interplay between the themes, verbatims, and other survey variables such as NPS groups, all at the respondent level.”