Turning Survey Data into Actionable Insights

What is most important to your customer base, and what drives their overall satisfaction? Undoubtedly, it can be difficult to know what customers are looking for from your business. Many factors go into whether or not a prospect will browse your products, make a purchase and, most importantly, return for future business. With proper survey development and survey data analysis, you can accurately uncover these key drivers.To identify what drives customer satisfaction, the first step is to ask your customers. The information gathered from surveys can pinpoint where to focus and will help with the strategic planning process.

Keep the following objectives in mind as you create the questions for your surveys:

• Find the Top Attributes. A variety of elements could be important to any given customer, but with a wide-spread survey you can discover which are important to the largest number of people. These top attributes will be the key drivers that you'll want to focus on improving and maintaining. If you run a shop, you may find the most people desiring "Pleasant atmosphere," "Good return policy," or "Large selection." If you're an online company it may instead be "Easy to navigate" or "Availability and helpfulness of customer service."
• Get a Rating. Once you know what it is that your customers deem important, you'll also need to know how well you're doing in each aspect. Have your customers rate how well they find your service in each attribute. The most important ones to focus on are the top-rated elements that your customers have found lacking from your business. That way you don't have to pour money and resources into every aspect of your company. Instead, you can target specific points that your customers actively desire, and potentially even move money away from the unwanted attributes.
• Calculate Importance. While everyone in your survey may say that they want "Good customer service," that may not be of greatest importance to them. It may not, for instance, affect whether or not they return to your business. Make sure that your survey asks customers to list desired attributes by their importance, so that you have the most specific information available.

Driver analysis surveys can be very simple or complex; however, analyzing the results is an intricate process. As a result, many organizations struggle to understand how to turn survey data into actionable insights. You don't need to spend a fortune trying to identify what makes your business lucrative and desirable to customers. The availability of survey data analysis software has made it possible to quickly visualize data in a useful, easy to understand way. These tools offer an affordable solution to glean the most important data from the people who use your services and make well informed business decisions.