In our last post we highlighted the importance of understanding how your business is performing, which areas have the greatest impact on overall satisfaction, and which of these areas you should focus your efforts on. This technique can equally be used in customer or employee satisfaction research, as well as operational research.
Once you have identified and prioritised the broad key drivers – i.e. those at a macro level – the next step is to drill down into each of these.
Fine tuning your market research analysis
The same approach as used to examine the macro drivers and to prioritise their importance needs to be applied to their drivers:
Step one: conduct some regression analysis/modelling to provide a relative importance percentage score/value for each attribute that impacts overall satisfaction.
Step two: use this modelling to identify what areas are really important to your customers and look at this in relation to your current performance in each of these areas.
Step three: use a priority matrix to identify areas of Primary Focus – i.e. areas that are important, but that you are performing badly in. Note, there might be areas that you a performing worse in, but that are of less importance to your customers. Don’t be distracted. Remember that these things have less impact on overall satisfaction.
Step four: use this information as a ‘guide’ (remember there are no ‘absolutes’) for your decision-making and action plans across the business.
Step five: critically, you need to continue to measure in this way to see how iterations you make impact performance and satisfaction, and to inform future innovations.
It is only by embedding these types of measurement activities into your business, so that it becomes a matter of habit, that the organisation will truly experience the real benefit. You will be able to make better business decisions every day and on an ongoing basis as a result, thereby driving better commercial performance.