Why linking Snap survey data to your database can give you so much more

Let’s imagine you’re a Gold Card holder of a hotel chain and travel on business around Europe regularly. You’ve used the hotel chain for years and just book into their hotel wherever you travel. The hotel chain looks after you well. It gives you some free luxury weekend breaks in recognition of your loyalty. Then, you check in to one of the chain’s hotels and it’s a disaster. There is noisy machinery outside your room, the wifi do

esn’t work, the toilet doesn’t flush and the air conditioning is fixed at freezing. What’s more when you complain to the manager, he seems offhand having had a day of complaints about the noise. You decide to stop using this hotel chain and move to a competitor.

Will conducting a survey help?

Just after you check out having been refused a discount, a survey pops up on your phone asking you if you had a great stay. You give the worst scores you can as you sit in the taxi heading for the airport. You feel slightly better. The results, perhaps collected using Snap, will possibly show a lower score than average, but if the noisy machinery is only there for one day, your bad experience may be no more than a blip and will probably not be noticed.

Looking beyond aggregated data

The reason that your data is likely to be ignored is because most market research looks at results at the aggregated level. In the hotel where you had the bad experience, results may be looked at over a period like a month and your experience may register as an insignificantly small percentage of dissatisfied customers. And, even if it did show that there was a high level of discontent, the manager may be sacked but this would not stop you moving to a competitor.

Looking after each customer’s experience

Now, let’s look at another scenario. Let’s say that two minutes after you completed the survey, your phone rings. You answer the call and you find that you are talking to the hotel’s call centre. The person introduces herself and is already aware that you are a Gold Card holder who has booked hundreds of nights in the hotel chain over recent years. You are ready to vent your anger and you immediately explain why your visit was so terrible and why they will never get your business again. The call centre lady apologises and says that the charge for the room has already been refunded and offers you a free night at a hotel of your choice. Suddenly, things seem OK. You decide that you have over-reacted and you will stay a loyal customer.

What was the value of that feedback?

It’s hard to quantify the value of someone being able to ‘fix’ that problem. It might have cost the hotel chain a small amount to keep you as a customer, but if they have got business from you for the next five years that will pay itself back in no time. In this case, survey research has gone beyond giving insight, it is allowing you to deal with the individual customer better.

How Snap handles the individual customer experience

The tools that Snap has available allow integration with customer databases. This means that data can be read from a customer database and/or fed back to a customer database. Alternatively, an email can be sent to a call centre or some other central point where customer feedback from a survey means that action can be taken.

Reading data from a customer database

There are many reasons for wanting to read information about a potential respondent from a database. It means that you can use the database information as controls on what you ask a respondent. For example, if the respondent is a Gold Card member, you may ask some different questions to an infrequent customer. Additionally, you might want to verify some information about the customer.

Feeding data back to a customer database

Having collected the survey data from an individual, you might want to take some action. It may be immediate action as in the above example, it might be to add some of the information to the customer’s profile so that you can handle that customer better, it might be track a customer’s behaviour or usage of your product. Whatever the reason, it means that you can look after your customers better and offer them a better service whilst giving you a second chance to resolve problems.

The payback

We have heard of examples where the survey research has paid for itself by the retention of just a small number of customers who may have been lost. Snap can mean that you get more than just tables and charts, although there are plenty of tools for aggregated results and reports both as electronic files or displayed online.

The technical bit

The ways that you do this are described in this link. Use the ‘You Ask, We Answer’ form on our website if you want specific help or someone to help you.