What's Wrong With Taking Survey Data at Face Value?

I’ve been designing survey questionnaires and analyzing the data for so long that I often forget that some people may not be doing the deep dive and asking the hard questions of the data they’ve collected and for which our clients hire us (thank you, you know who you are). Maybe a little exploratory analysis, a tad of correlation, a glance at the verbatim comments and we’re done until the next time. Did we do a survey? Check. Did we do anything with it? Sure, sort of. Do we have a deep understanding of what the data means? Well….

What’s worse than not gathering intelligence from customers and employees?

Coming to the wrong conclusions!

I’m reminded of this fact by two articles I read last week: In This Case, Let’s Examine Dissatisfaction in the February issue of Survey magazine and Guest Perceptions on Factors Influencing Customer Loyalty in the current issue of the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.

In the case of customer dissatisfaction, the article suggests several calls to action:

Understand whether you have a category problem rather than a brand problem. In other words, your competitive space may allow easy switching with or without loyalty programs so make sure you know what your issue is before investing in programs that will not alleviate it.

Your market strategy will drive a customer’s perception of satisfaction. If you are a low cost provider, you have accepted that a lower level of quality and service is part of the equation. The danger zone you could find yourself in is in trying to be low cost while also attracting a customer who looks for a different level of product and service.

Benchmarking. I’ve never been a fan but lots of companies do it and the swirling vortex that you get sucked into is that you compare your performance to companies who target different customer segments.

Dissatisfaction may not arise from what you do but rather what other, similar companies do that you don’t do. Customers constantly evaluate decisions based on alternatives; some amount of dissatisfaction arises with your product and service even if you are executing your strategy perfectly.

My suggestions for arriving at the best conclusions possible from your data analysis:

• Keep your strategy upper most in mind when designing the project and return to it often when analyzing data. This means knowing who your competition is; who the ideal customer is and what your competitive advantages are.

• Design survey questions to be particular rather than general. The more generic the question, the less likely it is that you have actionable data and the more likely you potentially are arriving at the wrong conclusions.

• Don’t confuse happy with satisfied. If you want to meet a customer’s needs, you are aiming for satisfaction. If you want happy, that’s a whole different level of expectations.

• Perform data analysis from several different perspectives. Not all survey questions should be treated equally in reaching conclusions.

I’ll write more about the last topic next week.

Segmentation: Not For Customers Only

These days, most of us know that if we aren’t segmenting customers in order to understand needs, retention patterns, expectations, profitability and so on, we can’t draw a straight line between our revenue generators and the results we want to achieve.

I’m reading an excellent book by Jac Fitz-Enz titled The New HR Analytics and, no, it’s not for HR practitioners only otherwise, I wouldn’t be reading it. The book is essential reading for those responsible for delivering results. Isn’t that all of us?

Dr. Fitz-Enz suggests that organizations are at the last gasp of the Industrial Age in terms of how we plan our workforces, improve our processes, use data and design our work. Trying to steer a new course using old thinking isn’t going to get us where we want to go. For example, he recommends capability planning, not workforce planning to support a business strategy. Workforce planning involves filling the same kind of jobs with broadly the same skill sets as we have now. Capability planning involves segmenting current and future skills into four categories:

Mission Critical: These skills are key to ongoing success and are necessary in any function; what Fitz-Enz calls a “make or break situation”. (Think David Petraeus)

Differentiating: Based on your current strategic direction or one that you want to execute on, what capabilities will give you a competitive advantage? These skills are similar to Mission Critical but not identical as their impact on the business is unique. (Think Steve Jobs)

Operational: What skills do you need or will you need to keep the company functioning? This is capability without which you would be less efficient, less productive and less effective.

Moveable: This is a critical segment. As the environment and a business’s response to it changes, the work changes but skills often don’t keep up with the change. The result usually is a build up of unnecessary costs and when they become a significant enough drain on results, leaders are faced with massive lay-offs and costly re-structuring.

Thinking "capability" and not "workforce" shifts the paradigm in terms of how your business acquires and builds necessary skills. You may hire Differentiating skills but bring in some Mission Critical skills on an as needed, project-by-project basis. You may outsource some of your Operational skills and will need to look long and hard at Moveable skills.

This is not a once-in-a-while event; it’s an ongoing process of scanning, evaluating and updating your game plan.

There is a growing body of opinion expressed by thought leaders like Jac Fitz-Enz and others who believe that what has worked in the glory days of the Industrial and Information Ages will not work in this Knowledge and Innovation Age. Tomorrow is already here; we should be asking the right questions about our capability and skills; otherwise, we run the risk of becoming irrelevant.

Are you caught between the Industrial and Innovation Ages? Have you started building capability or are you filling jobs?