Qualitative Analysis Benefits

Continuing our discussion of what you can learn from your data, let's take a look at something interesting – the way that small issues can create major problems with your customer satisfaction data. When you collect data on satisfaction, you're looking at something subjective. While a person may view your business objectively as a "5" on a scale of 1 to 10, when reading a question about their satisfaction, they may "feel" it's a 6 or 7 or 3 or even a 10, based on the way that they answer survey questions and how they feel at the time.

A similar issue occurs when there is one thing wrong in your business that really affects the customer. Everything else may be perfect, but if that one thing is important enough to the customer, it can cloud the way that a customer sees your company. We see this with things like customer service.

Poor customer service generally causes someone to dislike every aspect of your business. It happens at restaurants all the time – the customer gets poorly treated by the person at the door, and they claim that they hate the décor and the food as a result. In reality, it was just the poor service they disliked, but it gives off this feeling as though everything else was worse as well.

For businesses hoping to find this problem item, however, survey data can present a bit of a problem. That's because on your end, you may not realize what the issue is. If the issue drags everything down – meaning the issue drags down unrelated things, like product quality, billing issues, etc., then it becomes hard to figure out whether or not there is a problem with every area of your company, or a problem with just the one item.

Like poor customer service affecting subjective evaluations of food taste, it's possible for one issue in your company to cause other things to appear to be issues. That's one of the reasons you may want to consider some type of qualitative box, possibly with survey logic designed to only show the box to those that have rated you poorly overall. See if you can get to the heart of the matter.

You may find that there is a common issue that all your respondents share that is only a single issue, and when it's fixed, your satisfaction scores increase across the board. It's not a guarantee, of course, but it is something that is genuinely possible.