Progressive Distributor - Translating customer research into action

Translating customer research into action

Few companies can afford to conduct customer research simply for the sake of possessing information. Here’s advice to make your research worth the effort.

by Jeff Grimshaw

My youngest brother, a doctoral student at the Eastman Academy of Music in Rochester, N.Y., recently led me on a tour of the enormous “special collections” library where he works and conducts research. The school stores tens of thousands of objects, including hand-lettered fourteenth-century hymnbooks, a baseball bat Willie Stargell once used to conduct a symphony, and boxes upon boxes of notes and personal effects left behind by the world’s most famous — and most obscure — composers and musicians.

With its vast resources and reputation, Eastman can acquire information simply for the purpose of possessing it. I suspect that many items in the collection will never provide a whit of value to music researchers, but the school has the luxury of gathering and storing them “just in case.”

Most distributors operate under much different constraints. I’ve yet to come across an MRO distributor (or any other kind of business) that can afford to conduct research for the sake of research, gathering customer survey data simply for the purpose of possessing information.

We also know, however, that many companies that invest in customer satisfaction research aren’t exactly sure what to do with their survey findings. Unfortunately, without the ability to translate the results into action, customer research findings will do you just about as much good as Claude Debussy’s margin notes, souvenir fans from Wagner’s Bayreuth opera house, or some other esoteric treasures in the Eastman collection.

Best practices
Some companies are better than others at translating customer research into action. What sets them apart? Companies that extract the most value from their customer satisfaction research share at least three critical traits.

1) Best-practice companies simplify and demystify their research findings.

(Researchers, take note: As you set out to share your results with colleagues and enlist their assistance to translate findings into action, remember that, because you conducted the research, it is almost inherently more interesting to you than it is to anyone else.)

Here are three quick tips that will help you effectively communicate research findings in your organization:

Use graphs to illustrate findings. Use text to interpret them. A reader can look at a graph and quickly see how many respondents were very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied and very dissatisfied. The accompanying verbiage (whether written or spoken in a presentation) does not need to restate that information. Instead, the words you string together should answer the “so what?” question, capturing the main points and identifying what your audience should take away from your presentation.

Don’t choke your colleagues on decimal dust. Is there really any added value in knowing that 76.44 percent of respondents are highly satisfied, compared to knowing that 76 percent of respondents (or for that matter, three-fourths) are highly satisfied? Reporting decimals instead of rounding often lends survey findings a sense of precision and specificity that is unwarranted. They also may overwhelm your audience.

Describe the findings with simple, straightforward sentences and active rather than passive verbs. Researchers across a variety of fields traditionally use passive sentence construction as a means of demonstrating their objectivity. Instead of using the active voice to say, “We interviewed 100 people,” they use the passive voice to say “Interviews were conducted among 100 people.” But no matter how important customer satisfaction is, most people cannot digest a report or presentation that is filled with passive sentences. So give yourself license to talk about research like a businessperson, not like an academic.

2) Best-practice companies identify priorities.

Suppose your research indicates that while your company has numerous strengths, there are a variety of areas in which your customers tend to be less than completely satisfied.

You have limited resources, and can’t possibly focus as much attention as you might like on all the different areas of weakness. How should you set priorities? Best-practice companies perform analyses that reveal where they can target their improvement efforts in order to exert the strongest possible leverage on overall satisfaction and loyalty.

A popular approach is to plot each factor measured in the survey on a graph in which one axis is importance (“How important is this factor to customers?”) and another axis is performance (“How satisfied are customers with the way we’re delivering this factor?”).

After plotting each attribute on the graph, you can partition the graph into four categories (See the chart above).

The attributes in the upper left quadrant have high importance but low performance. These should be your top priorities.

Reinforcing and maintaining high-performance, high-importance attributes typically receives secondary priority status. Additionally, low-performance, low-importance attributes should also receive secondary priority status.

High-performance, low-importance attributes warrant the least amount of attention.

How do you determine the importance of each factor? With the right statistical software (such as SPSS), you can conduct correlation or multiple regression analyses between each factor and some important overall variable, such as customers’ ratings of overall satisfaction or loyalty.

If you do not have access to this type of statistical analysis, an alternative is to include importance ratings or ratings of the ideal company in your survey. These types of questions directly ask customers to tell you which factors are more important than others.

For example, you might say, “Here is a list of traits or characteristics that the ideal MRO distributor might possess. While all of these traits may be important, please tell us how important each one of them is to your organization. Please use a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 means it’s one of the least important traits an ideal MRO distributor would possess and 10 means it’s one of the most important.”

Respondents then rate the importance of each factor listed. Later in the survey, ask respondents to rate your company’s performance across the same set of factors.

3) Best-practice companies involve employees at all levels in the company’s efforts to translate the findings into action.

This is hard to do when employees believe that the company’s efforts to measure customer satisfaction are isolated and a function of management’s “flavor of the month” approach to quality. They assume that “this too shall pass” and concern themselves with the research findings only to the extent that the numbers immediately affect their compensation or standing.

In best-practice companies, however, employees care about and act upon customer research because they know the research effort reflects a broad, customer-focused corporate strategy (e.g., “We’re going to achieve competitive advantage by delighting our customers”).

They understand the company’s commitment to premier customer service because top management has established a two-way dialog and provided ample opportunities for employees to ask questions about what the strategy means and how it affects their work. And they believe the strategy is real because top management has made and implemented highly visible decisions (among them, the decision to conduct customer research) that reflect the company’s customer focus.

When employees understand and believe in the strategy, they are primed for involvement. For example, some of our clients hold roundtable sessions in which employees meet in their respective work groups to identify:

• their key strengths and weaknesses, based on the most recent customer research;

• the barriers that stand in the way of improvement; and,

• at least three tactics to reinforce their strengths and address their weaknesses.

They are constrained, however, by several important rules: All of the tactics they devise must be concrete and measurable. And, one or more members of the work group must take ownership for each tactic to oversee and ensure its implementation.

Remember, customer satisfaction research is only a means to an end, and not the desired end. Collecting and analyzing data can be challenging, but it is only a warm-up to the real work of translating survey findings into actions that enhance satisfaction and loyalty. Clearly communicating about your research findings, identifying priorities and involving employees in the process will help your company maximize the return on its research investment.

Jeff Grimshaw is senior project director at CRA Inc. in Valley Forge, Pa. He can be reached at 610-983-9335 or at jgrim@cravalleyforge.com.