Feedback gathering from customers is important to any business. However, some of the questionnaires may consist of closed-ended questions, and you might not be aware that some people want to share constructive feedback for improvements.
Closed-ended questions are just limited to yes or no answers. While this is great, you might want to know the other way of doing things and how to analyze open-ended questions to make significant improvements in your business. There are a lot of pros and cons to the two kinds of questions, and here are some of them:
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What Clients Love About You
You might want to know about the factors that make customers happy. When you put their answers on an Excel sheet or a file, you’ll see more trends like “great customer service,” “delicious food,” “affordable prices,” “fast shipping,” “high-quality products,” and others on the surveys if you ask open-ended questions. This is more helpful than just the standard yes or no answers that might not tell you anything. Knowing your strong points and continuing to do them will result in an increase in revenue.
Areas where you Failed
Sometimes, many customers would switch providers or companies because they failed at something. You might want to get into the specifics before the churn by asking them open-ended questions. This will improve the retention, and you can make changes to meet their expectations. This is important because it costs more to get new customers than maintain the ones you have. Some of the things to do are the following:
-Let the responders answer in their own words. Any closed-ended questions will not offer any opportunities for the customers to have their voices heard. With the open-ended surveys, you’ll see more about their emotions and their thoughts about your service in this response. See more about an open-ended survey on this site here.
-Learn more information. There’s a wealth of information out there that you may not have even considered in the first place. Discovering new applications that can improve your services further or creating other features to make the products more marketable will be helpful, especially if you have a lot of competition.
-Qualitative and in-depth data. The closed-ended surveys only offer figures and, generally, statistics. This will answer the questions on what’s happening based on the ratings. However, you would want to know “why” something is happening and understand what you could do better with the open-ended surveys.
Improvements to Make
It might be challenging to read comments about your improvements, and you would very much like to read about your positive features. However, this is not how a business operates at all. You should want to know and ask if the new products and services you offer need improvement. It’s always helpful to listen to what others say and evaluate if their points are valid.
Analyzing your Results
Once you’ve established that open-ended questions are right for your company, it’s now time to analyze the responses that you have received. Here are some of the things that you can do to make things easier:
1. Encoding the Responses on Cloud
The Cloud will be able to discover buzzwords that are common in the responses. They are generally made to be structured software that determines the frequency of many mentioned words. You can utilize them to keep the phrases together as well.
2. Text Analytics
Text analytics is a helpful automation tool that can be applied to various surveys. They are known to get responses and feedback without requiring too much human intervention.
Other techniques are included in automated coding. This is when AI identifies and distributes some of the words in assigned buckets. This might be a time-saver, but it still needs review to ensure that everything is accurate. See more info about text analytics in this link: https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/definition/text-mining.
Some of the tools you might want to add are sentiment analysis programs. They will identify if a specific response is negative, positive, or neutral. This is a technique that’s very helpful when you want to know about the user sentiment on your social media posts.
3. Bucket the Responses
Open-ended texts are often coded into buckets. They will be given a numerical code in every response, and they can be a segment that consists of common words like “excellent customer service” or “fast customer response.”
Companies that are offering market analysis and research can quickly do several charts and tabulations that can help filter and manage customer responses. You can contact them to know more about what they have to offer and see the improvements in your business.
With this said, if you need help with the market research segment of your company, you can always reach out to the right team who will be able to recommend the best approach to you. They will know which methods and software to use, and you can rely on them to interpret the data you’ve collected to improve.