Can Big Data be trusted to represent frontier market populations?

This week, at the WorldBank’s Big Stats meeting , they discussed the need for governments to look closely at how big data can be applied to official statistics. Big data allows for quick results that provide really interesting answers that come out of questions asked of unstructured questions. On the other hand, official statistics take sometimes years to compile, are often out of date, but are usually trustworthy.

But what happens when you look at frontier markets? Does big data still have the same appeal, since so much of it is dependent on tracking through social networks accessible by only some of the population?

Why do we trust Facebook with our data more than the government?

Do you trust Facebook more than the government? Facebook openly knows a lot about you, and much of it is information people would never report to the government. Don't believe me? Sign up for Wisdom on Facebook, and then do a data search using the Wisdom network: what you will see is an annonymized version of the info Facebook knows about you and

Making sense of CX, UX, and HCD

Every industry has its acronyms, and stakeholder experience is no different. I focus on CX (Customer, or Stakeholder Experience), but how does this relate to UX (User Experience), and the one probably best known in frontier markets, HCD (Human Centered Design)?

Remote monitoring adds potential to track results for a great experience

There is a great post on NextBillion.net that summarizes recent advancements M-health teams in frontier markets are making in what they call "remote monitoring". But tech firms have already learned that tracking key performance indicators and not considering customer focused quality indicators only gets half of the story needed to make lasting improvements. More after the jump.

Stakeholder Experience on a Shoestring

Ok, you are a frontier market company or a development organization trying to build stakeholder experience into your organization's DNA, but you don't have funds to allocate to it. Does this mean: no cash, no program? Of course not. Bob Hayz wrote a post on how startups can be customer experience focused on no budget, and we can talk about how his approach can be applied anywhere.

Stakeholder Obsessed

What do you think of the word obsession? Right. But in certain contexts, it's actually a great thing. Forrester recently tweeted that two thirds of recently interviewed CEOs want to make their companies "customer obsessed."

What is Customer Experience

What is Customer Experience? For starters, it is a discipline that has been around long enough to have its own experts, happy to give you a definition.  In the end, it is a discipline focused on looking at the way a customer engages with you from their perspective, and then improving upon that relationship for increased loyalty. The way that companies manage this is by defining what they want the customer experience to be for each customer, and then working to try to make that a reality.  A grocery store that is focused on customer experience is concerned not only with selling you that pear, but also on what brought you into the store, how you will consume their produce at the end of the day, and what needs to be done to make sure you will be back. 

The Customer experience discipline came out of industries such as banking and telecom, but as it becomes more accepted, it is now being applied in more diverse areas, such as government, B2B focused firms, and not-for-profits. 

I find the possibilities for applying customer experience in other areas to be a high impact proposition. For me, I often think back to my time working in emerging and frontier markets. Customer experience design is only beginning to reach some of these areas, and I think the potential for this approach in those regions can fundamentally redefine larger concepts, such as globalization, international development, and innovation for the poor.

Oh! If you are interested in some of those experts, and their definitions, here are a few to consider:

Colin Shaw http://www.beyondphilosophy.com/customer-experience/what-is-customer-experience

Bruce Temkin http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/free-book-the-6-new-management-imperatives/

The Forrester Team http://blogs.forrester.com/harley_manning/10-11-23-customer_experience_defined

Finally, a note about abbreviation: the industry abbreviation in English is CX, but I will usually write it as CE, since that translates better in languages outside of English.

Food Deserts and Pop up Stores

When I was in college, I worked with a group of about 20 4-7 year-olds in my hometown. Most of these guys came from housing projects I had grown up fearing, but once there, I realized how much potential was in the world, and not being properly cultivated. This job fundamentally changed my worldview on how people live, and I still remember that for all the discussions of world poverty, there are people living in any city in the US that probably don't have heat, maybe don't have windows during the winter, and may have kids that don't understand how they fit in.

Some of my favorite kids were part of one family. Evelyn, who was 5 when I started working with her, had baby teeth that had rotted down to nubs. The next year, when I came back to find that Evelyn's new teeth had come in, I realized that she had a second chance. But she had some rough barriers she had to overcome, one of which was diet. At that time, she got lunches from the city meals program. Often they got pizza hot pockets. But this was her "good" meal. I remember her brothers and sisters coming in at 7:30 AM with their breakfast--prepackaged cotton candy.

When we talk about food deserts, we often think of the heavyset people sitting in front of us in line at a fast food joint. But they affect many more people. I love the idea that they mention in this article, because if you can make fruit and vegetables something that is considered cool and a status symbol, and can bring it to the people who need it, you can perhaps make the Evelyns of the world have a better chance at tomorrow, and a better chance at positively impacting the world. It's like trying to six sigma society.