Some expressions are tossed around, only to trend until they die out. Although there is a rather quiet minority that disagrees with us, “Data is the new oil.” At ExAM HQ, we’ve been thinking this way since day 1 and have leveraged the power of data in surveys, inspections, and audits to improve decision making, performance management, and continual improvement programs in order to drive game changing customer experiences. You need look no further than our mantra, “Better Data, Better Cloud” to see our core values and objectives at work.
To be clear, this is in response to what we see as the real needs of stakeholders across industries, use cases, and problem statements – namely, to rapidly gather and consolidate information in order to make better and more strategic decisions.
The best way to make decisions is…
Making decisions doesn’t have to be difficult. You just need to figure out the information you require, access it, and then use it to guide you in making the right choice. Of course, making a decision doesn’t guarantee the desired outcome, but it often does make its realization a lot more likely. It is worth drawing attention to outcome bias here, so that we don’t confuse great decision making with great outcomes. Unfortunately, because many of us struggle with the up-front process of decision-making, we are left with little faith in the outcomes.
Setting the stage for making better decisions involves the following steps:
- Frame your decision and articulate your range of choices/options
- Determine the information you require to choose between the options
- Consider how accurate your information needs to be
- Walk through each possible scenario/option and then create a hypothetical outcome
- If possible, model scenarios based on how different data might support different outcomes
If only we knew a little more…
We will never know everything we need to know to make a so-called “perfect decision,” and, even if we did, we would still sometimes end up with bad outcomes because the world can be a cruel and unfair place. Accordingly, ExAM was purpose-built to significantly reduce the time it takes to make important decisions by offering our customers with more and better-quality information.
The reality is that decisions are made with bad, incomplete, or missing information because of the systems we use. Rather than make changes to the existing decision support system (on the grounds that they are too costly, too hard, or will take too much time) a company’s management team often decides to use the information it has as opposed to the information it needs. Not surprisingly, this often results in sub-optimal outcomes.
Choose better information…
It’s hard to beat the tools available on Salesforce’s platform to consolidate information, augment it, and start making better decisions. Even if some of your decision making stack isn’t in Salesforce, migrating it in or putting it in a format that can support decision making in Salesforce is easy because of their commitment to open APIs. If your system lives natively in Salesforce, all the better. But no matter where your information lives, ExAM can help.
Our basic process addresses data gaps by (1) making it easy to ask the questions you need to know and direct them at (2) the people you need answers from, so that you can (3) get the information into a system that will help you to support good decision making. Our app enables you to collect data from surveys, web forms, and inspections quickly, easily, and without having to write code. Need more reasons why you should try our product?
The following is a list of the 10 ways ExaM can help managers make better decisions.
10 Ways ExAM Helps You Make Better Decisions
ExAM Command Console
ExAM…
- Helps you to ask better questions so you can get better information
- Offers 30+ question types to enable you to solicit feedback to facilitate analysis
- Collates information across channels (e.g., SMS, the web, Salesforce, and email)
- Enables you to harness the power of Salesforce as a CRM to create distribution groups that help you to reach the right people so you can get the right answers
- Leverages decision trees and tools that enable you to ask better questions based on the answers you have received from prior questions
- Empowers you to map the data you receive directly to “Objects and Records” in Salesforce, so that you can rapidly update the information you use to support decision making
- Permits you to assess anything in Salesforce, so that the information you have is in the context of any Salesforce object or record
- Provides real-time insights on the information you are gathering via ExAM Insights, without having to build any custom reports or dashboards
- Arms you to make quantitative judgements in order to support ongoing decision-making processes
- Enables you to update the questions you ask in real-time in order to adjust to evolving decision-making landscapes
That being said, like any other tool, ExAM is only as good as the questions users ask. That’s one of the reasons we offer sample templates on our site. Over the past X years, we’ve gained a lot of experience asking questions on a depth and breadth of topics businesses need answers to.
From the simple:
- Would my customers recommend me to someone else?
- Is the customer who just contacted the help desk satisfied with the result?
- Do you still want to be subscribed to my newsletter?
To the complex:
- What contact centers should we close?
- Are people following proper hand hygiene at our facility?
- Are the properties in our portfolio adhering to quality standards?
Are you ready to start making better decisions? Reach out to us today to schedule a demo or discussion.
