One of the things I like most about my job is the variety of work I do and the range of organisations I work with. I spent the first week of this year working witha new client for me in a new industry for me: the gaming industry.
The client is big player in the gaming world providing services to hundreds of companies. They had designed and distributed a customer satisfaction survey and needed someone to help them analyse the results. That’s where I came in.
It’s almost always easier to get a specialist in for survey analysis, for three reasons:
- They have research and analysis skills
- To interpret the results: I could tell my client their lapsed customers were significantly more likely to purhcase a particular service offering from other suppliers.
- To handle the data: Very few ‘free to use’ or ‘inbuilt’ survey tools manage to provide easy to analyse data and even when they do the data can be hard to understand.
- They have access to specialist tools:
- In this case I used Q (a specialist research software) to categorise hundreds of text responses quickly. I could tell the client that communication is the most frequently mentioned issue respondents encounter when working with external agencies
- Q also allows me to create and compare lots of different groups of respondents based on how they answered so I could report on satisfied customers vs dis-satisfied customers; most valuable customers; lapsed customers; respondents who make purchasing decisions etc. etc.
- They are able to do the analysis more quickly than someone who is new to it, or inexperienced, because they know what to look for (and what to ignore); know how to present the information to prevent misinterpretation and they’ve done it all many times before.
In this case the survey was straightforward and later on this year I hope to work with the client again to design a survey that can be used to identify what drives customer satisfaction and to track satisfaction on a regular basis.
It’s always nice to get feedback feedback from the client who said:
“Susie (as ever) delivered a great piece of work for us – in this case a validated shopper segmentation that has proven a great hit with our client. As well as coming up with the ‘goods’ for us (and on a personal note) – Susie is also a real pleasure to work with”
Liz, Studio Head
