Integrating Social and Behavioral Data at Microsoft

For Reed Cundiff, General Manager of
Customer and Market Research at Microsoft, the
key to progression in the insights industry all starts with your outlook - 'having
that growth mind-set to be able to say: there is opportunity space to learn and
grow'. We caught up with Cundiff as part of The Research
Insighter series of interviews, to discuss the current big 'opportunity
space' within integrating data collected from new sources.

When trying to understand the often
overwhelming amount of social and behavioral data being collected, Cundiff has
approached it humbly, realising he and his team would have to learn 'sometimes
from our failures and sometimes from our successes'. It can start with
something as simple as 'being comfortable with a variety of different
approaches' and knowing 'where the bar is and what success can look like.'

At Microsoft they have spent several years
trying to understand their social data, 'not
just to understand volume metrics, but how what is going on in social can
relate to and, ideally, predict what is happening in the offline world'. Unpicking
the social sphere is challenging enough, but using that data to then predict
changes in the offline world is the Holy Grail for many working within insights.

For Cundiff the rewards of success are
clearly worth it: 'One of the things
we've been able to do is look at social volume and sentiment within a given
category, targeting specific products, to be able to get a sense of what the
future purchase intent and sales will look like for that product and that
category as whole.'

Alongside social insight, Cundiff is now
able to 'gather data around how people are using our products at a pretty
significant level of depth', which has revolutionized how Microsoft measure
customer satisfaction.

He explains: 'A typical product
satisfaction survey would really skim the surface in understanding the stated
behavior that folks have with a product as complex as Microsoft Office' If we
are able to combine the behaviors that people opt in to share with us to get a
sense of how they are using the product every day, and link that with a survey
that talks about their thoughts and feelings on that product, then we are able
to get a much more rounded picture of, not just how they feel and what they
think, but how their product interactions reflect that.'

The results have 'enabled our product
satisfaction research to go much deeper in prescribing what we think we need to
build into the products, where we need to fix our customer experiences and how
we need to engage with customers even more generally.'

Though Cundiff and Microsoft have clearly had
successes, it is typical of his approach to insights to remain focused on the
bigger picture: 'We have to view it as a journey, not simply as a project that
will get graded A-F at its conclusion.'

Watch
the full interview below:

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