Why is survey analysis important?

To understand the true voice of the customer, you must ask the right questions, informed by what you already know about each customer’s experiences. Next, you need to accurately interpret the customer feedback, using both structured statistical feedback and open-ended feedback, to inform your actions.

Best-in-class businesses survey their customers regularly and allow customers to voice their experiences in their own words. Multiple-choice surveys measure only the areas that the business determines are important. With free-form surveys, companies can uncover what is important to their customers.

ODA surveys highlights several process steps that are strongly associated with good financial and operational outcomes. In the surveys, we ask employees/respondents about a specific capital or human-resources decision their companies made in the course of normal business. We learn who is involved, what drove the decisions, how deep the analysis is, how unfetter the discussions, and how and where inefficiencies are playing the role in the firm. Respondents also describe the financial and operational outcomes of the decisions. In order to derive the right decision.

The results highlight the hard business benefits—such as increased profits and rapid implementation—of several decision-making disciplines. These disciplines include ensuring that people with the right skills and experience are included in decision making, making decisions based on transparent criteria and a robust fact base, and ensuring that the person who will be responsible for implementing a decision is involved in making that decision. Finally, although corporate politics sometimes seems to undermine strong decision making, some types of consensus-building and alliances apparently can help create good outcomes.