Fuel better decisions by combining feedback data with business data
Discover how to tell richer data stories when you combine feedback data with other business data.
Calvin Yang
March 28, 2022 | 4 min read
The best decisions are made when you’ve collected all the facts to consider. When you’re making decisions about the customer experience or employee experience you’re designing, it’s critical to combine feedback data with the rest of the data that your business generates so that your decisions are fueled by a 360-degree view of your customers or employees.
Moreover, you need to empower teams across the business to easily leverage this data using the data visualization tools they use every day, such as Microsoft Power BI and Tableau, so that everyone drives decisions using accurate and comprehensive insights.
Digital transformation agency Ntara, for example, collects data from a variety of sources to get a holistic view of its clients’ business and customers. It uses SurveyMonkey Enterprise with Tableau to tie data sets together and better visualize insights.
Neil Owen, executive vice president of Ntara explained: “We can easily collect and organize our data using SurveyMonkey Enterprise, and derive actionable insights using Tableau’s reporting features and dashboard functionality.
“The marriage of these two platforms increases our team’s efficiency and ability to collaborate, and that provides real-time value to our agency and in turn, our clients,” he added.
The ability for Ntara’s employees to link feedback data with other business data within the dashboards they use every day enables the company to democratize critical business data across the organization. Samara Bolling, vice president of strategic services at Ntara, said: “The fact that you have a tool that both our analysts and marketing teams can use with ease is wonderful. Even novice users can go in and really understand what's going on.” (Read in-depth about how Ntara is connecting feedback data with its other business data at the SurveyMonkey site.)
The fact that you have a tool that both our analysts and marketing teams can use with ease is wonderful. Even novice users can go in and really understand what's going on.
Power thoughtful initiatives with rich insights
Ntara isn’t alone in reaping the benefits of combining critical business data to drive experience decisions. According to a Deloitte report, organizations that combine customer experience (CX) feedback with operational data into what it calls “OpCX” could help them better build loyalty and drive growth. According to the report authors: “By breaking down data silos across the organization and allowing for the use of advanced analytics tools, AI, and machine learning [OpCX] can connect, enrich, and contextualize CX and operational data sets that are not normally paired. In doing so, the [OpCX] framework can uncover insights, make recommendations, and improve CX at scale.”
In addition to enriching decision-making with comprehensive data, your analysts can uncover more compelling stories or unearth otherwise unseen insights when they can visualize and manipulate this data using their favorite analytics dashboards.
For example, Tableau users can set up a sync from any survey to automatically add new responses into their dashboards over time, and leverage the full force of Tableau’s advanced capabilities to analyze data. Users can compare feedback over time and segment data by desired attributes, such as customer spend, to identify correlations or patterns to drive targeted campaigns. The results would go a long way to helping increase profit margins and increase customer lifetime value.
Combine feedback data with business data to answer what, how, and why questions
You have rich insights already in all the applications that your teams use every day, including Microsoft, Salesforce, Marketo, and HubSpot. Combine these insights with feedback or experience data so that you can analyze not only what customers and employees did but also why and how they felt about the experience.
For example, your transactional data would tell you that there was an uptick in the number of international passengers traveling back to the U.S. just before December 6, 2021. Customer feedback data would tell you that a large percentage of travelers decided to rebook their flight so that they would return to the U.S. before the start of a new COVID-19 testing rule that came into effect on December 6. And you’d also learn from feedback from customers who flew on December 6 that they felt very worried about getting their COVID tests back in time. When you have that rich combined data, you can better design the customer experience for passengers and staff in the event of another change in travel testing rules.
Businesses that McKinsey found to be high achievers at analytics spent more than 25% of their IT budgets on analytics. Maximize that spend by giving your analysts the combination of feedback and other business data to analyze. With that data, you’ll deliver better actionable insights for teams to drive improvements.
It’s clear, the need for more comprehensive data is top of mind, especially for mid-market and large enterprises. Research from the Dresner Advisory Associates’ 2020 Data Pipelines Market Study found that 67% of enterprises currently rely on data integration to support analytics and BI platforms, and 24% are planning to in the next 12 months.
Learn more about connecting feedback data with business data to fuel advanced analytics at our SurveyMonkey Enterprise + Microsoft Power BI page, and our SurveyMonkey Enterprise + Tableau page.
Calvin Yang is a senior manager of product marketing at Momentive.
