Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge and Selection:

Mind-mapping is a simple, yet exciting tool, that I love working with. In my job as a customer life cycle  marketing manager in a telecom company, I am faced with diverse business challenges, which cannot be  demystified or deconstructed using structured and logical thinking process. That is why the mind  mapping tool is a very effective tool that I have used often to tackle complex and dynamic business  challenges.

One such business challenge is to figure out actions and interventions to engage customers, and to  convert them into brand advocates over time. In order to do so, customer retention and churn  management becomes critical. As a starting point, I therefore, need to identify why customers stop  engaging with a brand and attribute these factors to relevant segments of customers, to understand  what the primary reason churn is at the customer level.

While MI-based analytical models can predict the propensity of a customer to stop using a brand, it fails  to attribute the reason driving this behavior within the customer. And since there are multiple reasons  why a customer is not engaged with the brand, the problem is complex and cannot be linearly plotted.  This is why mind-mapping technique is particularly suited to understand and deconstruct this business  challenge.

The mind map is basically a non-linear, visual diagram for representing keywords, concepts, ideas and  activities that are linked or related to the central concept or topic of discussion. It helps the users build  an intuitive framework around the business challenge and plot all the elements in a connected manner.  Once the mind map is created, the next step is to categorize or group these thoughts and figure out core  insights, emerging from this visual plot.

The tool is very user friendly and helps the audience to branch out their thinking, without losing their  focus or connection to the core subject. It can be used both to represent logical flow of thoughts and  random (yet linked) repertoire of ideas.

Application:

I primarily use this tool in workshops with multi-disciplinary and cross-functional audience. For this  challenge, a diverse group of team members (cutting across marketing, finance, customer experience,  sales, IT and technology) was invited to identify the key triggers & influencers behind customer  behaviors and purchase decisions.

The exercise started off with placing the core business challenge (in the form of a trigger question in the  center of the workspace). Then, every member was given colored paper / post-its and markers to put  their thoughts and build a combined mind map. Once done, the teams reflected on the ideas that were

plotted and clubbed them into categories. At this stage, certain core insights or patterns start emerging.  And then, we would apply the next round of mind-mapping to each of these emerging patterns. This  process is repeated several times, to build around the different concepts to deconstruct these into the  most basic of elements.

Insight and Approach:

Through multiple rounds of this cycle, we were able to zero in on the 3 core insights, triggering and  driving customer purchasing behavior and brand affinity. And we were also able to create surrogate  behavior / data sets that would indicate the presence and degree of influence of these 3 core insights at  the customer level.

This clarity of the key drivers and translation to application (with help of design briefs – in the form data  sets) helped me and my team to design relevant offers and interventions to keep the customer engaged  and excited about our brand and products, and in the process, convert them to brand advocates.

Using this tool and the ultimate output, I was able to improve customer retention rates by more than  25% within a year, which resulted in an incremental annual revenue of USD 250 Mn. As a company, we  also ended up being the leader in Net Promoter Score (an indicator of brand loyalty) in the industry for 4  consecutive years.

