OK, so you’ve set up a system to record customer feedback – what next? Well, you probably need to analyse the data with a tool but the question then becomes, “which tool?”
There are a range of options from the familiar, the free and the downright expensive. The following post offers a thumbnail review of three software packages. I’ve added a subjective summary rating to each of them as follows:
- Usability: 1 (difficult to use) – 5 (easy to use)
Appropriateness for a small tourism business: 1 (not at all appropriate) – 5 (highly appropriate)
Power: 1 (better than a calculator) – 5 (could probably help you predict what socks a particular customer segment will wear – and all in three key strokes).
Excel
The advantage of Excel is that most people have it and are (to a degree) familiar with it. Assuming that it is as ubiquitous as I imagine, this also means that any company wishing to use it to analyse feedback data will not have to invest afresh to get hold of it.
As a package, it’s probably much more powerful than most people realise. The disadvantage of excel compared to other statistical packages is that its shortcuts aren’t obvious to a non-advanced user. For example, pivot tables are great ways to tabulate data but they’re a bit fiddly to learn.
- Website: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/FX100487621033.aspx
Price: £0 (assuming the business owns it already)
Usability: 2
Appropriateness for a small business: 4
Power: 2
Free alternatives to Excel: OpenOffice, Google spreadsheets .
EPI Info.
EPI is a free stats tool whose primary intended use is among epidemiologists but which can be easily adapted to work in a variety of situations. It is by no means as full as SPSS but, nevertheless, it still packs a punch. I’ve used it in the past on customer survey data and can affirm that, set up right, it can munch data in no time at all.
A downside is that it is clunky and takes a while to learn. If you have techie inclinations (and free time) this isn’t a bad thing (and the supporting document is clear and gives and excellent introduction to the product) but I appreciate that it isn’t for everyone. In some respects though, it offers useful shortcuts to operations that take a while in Excel.
- Website: http://www.cdc.gov/epiinfo/
Price: £0
Usability: 3
Appropriateness for a small business: 3
Power: 3
SPSS
SPSS is the Rolls Royce of stats packages and I would suggest that it probably represents overkill for a small business. If you know what you want to do (i.e. have some knowledge of what statistical processes would really benefit your business) this package is great but you probably need to have collected a lot of customer records for it to become worth your while. One aspect I would mention in this regard would be the classification trees package that really helps you hunt down and predict niche and profitable market segments.
The downside to SPSS is that it is expensive and, as such, probably not recommended for small businesses unless they are really serious about analysing their customers and have a lot of customer records with which to work.
- Website: http://www.spss.com/
Price: £1000+
Usability: 4
Appropriateness for a small business: 2
Power: 5
All three of these packages will enable a business to identify its profitable/troublesome/growing customers/issues/opportunities but they all have a downside as well whether that is cost, time required to get the most out of it or general usability of the product. My feeling is that many businesses have perfectly adequate tools but often lack the time to develop them and so the real issue is not one of what package is best for customer data but rather what training would be best to enable business owners work with what they already have.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 10:10 am and is filed under Research tools, Tourism market research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.