Goodbye, 42-tab spreadsheet of customer satisfaction data.
Hello, results.
What happens when your business grows so fast that your critical satisfaction survey tied to incentives swells from one document to seven and the resulting data fills 42 spreadsheet tabs? See how this leading manufacturer of windows and doors rolled seven disparate, data-thick surveys into one tidy, accessible satisfaction system.
A 42-Tab Static Spreadsheet of Customer Satisfaction Data? Or a Single Dashboard with Limitless Views of the Big and Small Pictures?
High stakes: consumer satisfaction tied to incentive compensation
This global purveyor of wooden windows and doors—a name known throughout the industry for product innovation and outstanding consumer service—takes consumer satisfaction seriously, tying satisfaction survey results to incentive compensation at all levels, from the production floor to the executive suite to the boardroom. Because the stakes are high, the company’s Consumer Insights team relentlessly tracks, manages, and reports survey data—a fairly straightforward task for just one survey gathering data on just one brand sold through just one channel.
Market changes: business expansion turns one survey into seven
To capture a broader sweep of the burgeoning window and door market, the company morphed from a niche, single-brand, single-channel player to a multi-brand, multi-channel provider with a growing product portfolio. The Consumer Insights team’s survey became seven surveys, reflecting multiple sales channels and product categories. Adding new ones was easy: the team had no trouble managing the multi-survey, multi-modal data collection effort on the front end. On the back end, however, the effort—reporting the raw data—was another story.
Outdated system: manual, data-heavy reporting hampers action
The Consumer Insights team continued to track survey results manually with a spreadsheet that grew, over time, into a 42-tab monolith. The team communicated results using static monthly reports that were as difficult and time-consuming to compile as they were to understand. And managers found it cumbersome to work with individual surveys, which were scanned and uploaded to an FTP site.
The complexity of the survey instruments and the need for historical reporting made matters worse. Each completed survey included data about a unique combination of elements: customer type, sales channel, location of sale or service, division, brand, product, and stage in the customer life cycle. The company rolled up all the survey data into one composite corporate score, weighing the different survey types according to each year’s business mix. To ensure the accuracy of historical comparisons, it applied each new year’s weighting mix to previous years’ data.
By this point, explains the firm’s Consumer Insights Manager, “…we mainly used data from only three of our survey questions—overall satisfaction, likelihood to recommend and likelihood of repurchase—because the 42-tab spreadsheet reporting tool was so cumbersome. The Medallia solution is one of the best things that ever happened to this company.”
New era: consumer satisfaction data that’s easy to track, understand, and act on
Today, thanks to Medallia, the 42-tab spreadsheet is a relic. The process of tracking, reporting, and, more important, improving consumer satisfaction is more efficient and effective. Today, all touchpoints—all divisions, brands, sales channels, and branch locations—see and are held accountable for their contributions to the consumer experience. Employees visit one Web address for access to all seven surveys, individually or combined into one data set, as needed. Users can filter data along any relevant dimensions, including: division, brand, product type, consumer type, sales channel and branch location. They can slice and dice the data in ways that make sense to them, with relevant information pre-highlighted.
System users today appreciate their newfound ability to focus on improving rather than tracking their scores. They also like the automated weighting process, which allows them to adjust the business mix easily in response to environmental changes, and the real-time access to full individual surveys, which gives them the ability to act quickly when consumers express dissatisfaction. That’s critical for a growing, profitable firm whose vision lies in “satisfying…consumers better than the competition.”
