How can comment cards and internal feedback surveys be more usefully analysed?
In the first part of this post, I questioned whether customer comment cards really deliver useful benefits to tourism and hospitality businesses.
One of the reasons for the question is that I think often, far more effort goes into collecting and recording information than systematically analysing it in any depth. In other words, there is more effort in capturing the data than ever goes on evaluation or acting on that information.
My other concern is that comment cards and internal feedback surveys are often promoted as a customer research cure-all, when in fact they are best used as part of a wider suite of business intelligence and customer research.
Of course, comment cards can provide important guidance on operational development priorities and give insight into the needs and priorities of customers. But without systematic recording and analysis, it is easy to get tricked by the brain, which fixates on a few regularly heard comments and can misguide you as to the real issues within the comment cards and feedback surveys.
So, here are a few tips as to how I go about getting more from customer comments cards and feedback surveys. I won’t get into the in depth analysis we do with SPSS or postcode mapping – I’ll simply stick with what a business can do fairly simply, just using Excel.
Building a high impact “snagging” list
1) It’s useful to start by systematically recording all the comments in an Excel spreadsheet (if at all possible, record verbal and online ones too). If the comments can be traced to a specific date and time, it is worth noting this too, as the issues may lie with a specific member of staff, or only occur at peak or quite times.
2) On a seperate page of the spreadsheet, it is worth aggregating the comments, noting their frequency of occuance during the period of analysis.
If you keep the format the same across periods of analysis, it is then simple to compare changes and benchmark progress over time. Using the IF function together with conditional formatting lets you add in an automatic indicator that helps you clearly identify problem areas.
The Excel IF function can also be used as handy alert feature that highlights whether a change has exceeded your specified “tolerance zone”. This can be used to highlight issues that have seen a significant increase in occurances.
3) Personally, I also think its worth rating issues according to overall impact on visitor and ease/cost of rectifying. Again, you can use the IF and conditional formatting to help those high impact issues really leap out at you:
This makes it easier to see the less obvious problems – for example, look at all the warning signs being triggered for food choice in the visual example above.
This hard evidence, opposed to simply gut feeling, makes it possible to more strategically prioritise improvements. My advice is get past what your gut or brain tells you and let the data have a chance to speak as well.
4) Frequent analysis (weekly, or monthly) means not only do you keep on top of data, but quick fixes can be identified and rectified straight away. It also avoids the situation where comments cards pile up and analysis gets put off.
Some Excel tips
If you’re not familiar with using IF, conditional formatting or some of the other nifty features that help analysis in Excel, I would suggest you check out some of these posts:
Conditional formatting, at Life Hacker
The IF Function in action at Experiements In Finance
Displaying images based on conditional results at ExcelTips
and, just about everything on conditional formatting, aslo at ExcelTips
Ratings and cross-comparison
If the customer feedback surveys or comments cards require the customer to rate their experience, then it is also possible to for a business to start internally benchmarking performance based on those ratings scores. Again, here are some of my tips, that require nothing more than Excel.
1) To make it useful, the analysis needs to focus on meaningful trends in the data, rather than asolute numbers. (After all, a score of 4.5 is completely meaningless, unless contrasted with last month’s score of 3.8 or last week’s score of 5). Just as in the examples above, it helps to use conditional formatting and IF alerts to highlight when scores change by more than a pre-defined percentage. This will make the non-obvious leap out and not leave your brain misguided by the things it thinks it encounters most often.
2) It is also often useful to cross compare customer rating information with additional data sources.
For example, many businesses find that satisfaction dips slightly when they reach capacity and this may not be of concern. They may simply want to be alerted when both satisfaction and revenues or spend per head fall.
Likewise, a business may not want to simply rate staff’s service performance on the feedback scores alone, but cross reference them with (for example) the value of their tips. If a staff member’s tips and customer services scores fall in parallel, this is likely to indicate a bigger problem than the occasional poor score on a comment card!
Again, Excel lets you automate this kind of alert with the IF Function. You can, of course, also use a graph to visualise the two different data sources.
As before, it is generally more useful to look at trends, rather than absolute numbers . To avoid analysis paralysis, or its more virulent cousin “death by data,” it is worth looking at only a small handful of key ratios and comparisons. Focus on those that you can do something about.
And so to conclude
These are just a few of my tips – I’m sure other people have their own that really work for them. And that is the important thing.
Ultimately, useful analysis is tied to measuring what matters to your business and what is actionable. Nothing is gained from reporting on comments cards simply for the sake of it.
Of course, customer comment cards and feedback forms remain an important tool, but they are useful only if effectively analysed (as opposed to simply being inputted, or worse still, sitting on a shelf).
And if you can’t do anything with the data, save your efforts and don’t collect it! Ultimately, even the best analysis is only useful only if a business is prepared and able to act on the issues raised.
This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Opinion, Research tools, Tourism market research, Visitor attraction 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.