Surveys, emails, and social media monitoring are all helpful in gathering guest feedback. Two of the most common and effective ways to measure guest satisfaction are Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.
While CSAT surveys are mostly used to measure short-term customer satisfaction after a meaningful interaction with your company, NPS measures brand loyalty over time. Both offer valuable insight into your guest experience and whether you’re meeting guest expectations.
Customer survey findings are essential to improving your company — but analyzing them isn’t always so easy. You may be sending different surveys at the same time and receiving dozens or even hundreds of responses in return. That’s a whole lot of data to sift through.
If you’re wondering how to make sense of it all, these 10 tips will help you analyze and apply your customer survey findings.
- Package your results into a survey report
- Clean up your data
- Ensure your data is statistically significant
- Analyze quantitative data first
- Leverage statistical analysis
- Follow up with survey respondents
- Compare your data to industry benchmarks and past findings
- Share guest survey findings with the right departments
- Use your guest survey findings to create customer experience goals
- Use survey findings for your marketing strategy
1. Package your results into a survey report
The most efficient way to present your findings to your teams is through customer satisfaction survey reports. This report will present all the data collected from your customer surveys in a single place. You should use visuals like color-coded charts, graphs, and illustrations to make the findings easier to digest. Overall, a customer satisfaction survey report gives you and your employees a high-level view of business performance at several key metrics.
Here are five tips for presenting your survey findings:
- Write a short survey summary to hook the reader and persuade them to keep reading. The summary should state the main purpose of the report and a couple of key findings.
- Highlight the main takeaways right off the bat.
- Break up big blocks of texts with plenty of visuals. Graphs are especially useful for comparing different metrics.
- Create a presentation to go along with your report. This makes it easier to present the findings at an in-person meeting with your team.
Highlight actions for each department based on the survey findings.
2. Clean up your data
Maybe a guest got lazy and left a few questions blank. It happens. But their blank responses have no value and should be removed from your set of data. Before you start analyzing your survey responses, make sure to remove all incomplete or unreliable data that can skew your results.
3. Ensure your data is statistically significant
This is a key first step to ensure your data is statistically valid. Statistically speaking, the less feedback you receive, the less reliable your data will be. If only 5 out of 100 customers responded to your CSAT survey, you probably won’t get far with their responses.
For your survey data to be considered statistically significant, the number of guests who respond needs to be large enough to accurately represent the population being surveyed. You can use a sample size calculator to ensure that your survey data pool is big enough to provide accurate results.
For example, let’s say you want to survey an audience of 10,000 people. For a confidence level of 95%, or a margin of error of just 5%, the ideal sample size would be 370. You can use the calculator above to find the sample size that would work best for you.
4. Analyze quantitative data first
It’s much easier to spot patterns and changes to your CSAT and NPS scores in quantitative data. Quantitative data is numerical data that represents a certain quantity, amount, or range.
Asking guests to respond on a numbered scale provides more insight than a simple “yes” or “no” answer. For example, in your NPS survey, you ask guests how likely they are to recommend your attraction on a scale of 0 to 10. This allows you to find a numerical score and track it over time.
As for the Customer Satisfaction survey, asking guests to rate their level of satisfaction from 1 to 5 will show you how satisfied they actually are. For instance, instead of answering with a “yes,” some guests might actually rate their satisfaction as a “3” on a numbered scale. This will show you that there’s room for improvement.
Another benefit of quantitative data is that you can use survey software to organize it into graphs, charts, and interactive dashboards. This way, you can quickly spot trends in your survey responses. This first analysis will give you a good idea of how your guests are feeling about your tours or attraction.
Then, you can follow-up with open-ended questions to gather qualitative data, which can bring more insight into the initial findings.
5. Leverage statistical analysis
Statistical analysis will help you identify meaningful trends in both your quantitative and qualitative data. The following analysis methods can help you dig deeper into the root causes of your survey responses:
- Key driver analysis: Determines the key attributes of your customer experience that are influencing your guests’ responses.
- Cluster analysis: Identifies whether there are clusters, or groups of similar guests, that share the same responses within a large pool of data.
- Sentiment analysis: Automatically analyzes open-ended responses as positive, neutral, or negative.
6. Follow up with survey respondents
NPS survey respondents are categorized as detractors and promoters. Detractors are dissatisfied with their experience and therefore leave negative reviews. Meanwhile, promoters are happy customers that become loyal fans of your brand.
Detractors help you identify areas that need improvement. Following up with them is key to understanding more about their experience. Sure, you’ll learn a bit from their review, but an in-depth conversation will give you greater insight into the situation. You can then use this insight to find solutions.
Too often, brands only focus on negative reviews. Yet there’s value in following up with promoters, too. Promoters are your most loyal customers, and they deserve to be noticed and appreciated. By giving all your respondents attention, you’ll encourage more reviews and feedback in the future.
7. Compare your data to industry benchmarks and past findings
Where do your CSAT and NPS scores stand among your competitors? Comparing your scores to industry benchmarks helps put your findings in perspective. For example, travel websites have an average NPS score of 32 — meaning that if your travel site has a score of 35, it’s performing above average.
It also helps to look at your company’s historical data from similar surveys done in the past. Have your CSAT or NPS scores changed over time? Mapping these changes out on a graph can help you better visualize your progress over time.
8. Share guest survey findings with the right departments
CSAT and NPS surveys can help you pinpoint what areas of your business can be improved. Sharing the findings with the right teams will ensure these changes are put in place.
For example, if you received complaints about your email customer service, you’d want to share this information with your online customer service team. Then, you and the respective departments can start building an action plan to tackle those issues.
The best way to share your survey results is to package them into a report. The report can be emailed or handed out to the right staff members and should include a short survey summary highlighting the key takeaways before delving into an analysis of the findings. At the end of the report, spell out the next steps each department should take.
9. Use your guest survey findings to create customer experience goals
Your survey results will show you what you’re doing right — and where your customers think you can do better. Based on their feedback, you can brainstorm new customer experience goals that will make their visit even better.
For example, if your NPS surveys show that customer loyalty is low, you can come up with ways to improve that. You may set a goal to create a customer loyalty program the following year. Or you may drive loyalty through a special email marketing campaign that sees to re-engage previous guests.
10. Use survey findings for your marketing strategy
The more you get to know your customers, the better you’ll be able to market your experience to them. Your CSAT and NPS analysis will show you what customers love most about your tours or attraction. Try highlighting these features in your next marketing campaign.
For example, Southwest Airlines has kept one of the highest NPS scores in the travel industry by focusing on the issues that matter most to its customers. This includes low fares, free checked bags, and excellent customer service, all of which are apparent in the airline’s marketing strategy. Tour and attraction operators can do the same.
***
The customer feedback you receive is valuable information that can help shape the future of your company. Make sure you’re putting all that data to good use.
