We’ve covered a lot of ground so far in our series on customer feedback for auto dealerships. Our last two articles discussed the high-level strategy and nitty-gritty details of setting up your customer feedback survey. Now, as the data from your surveys start to pour in, you’ll need a solid plan to analyze customer feedback so you understand what customers are telling you and can act on it. This article will share our top tips for analyzing customer feedback and making sense of your data. Let’s dive in!
10 Tips to Analyze Customer Feedback
Customer feedback analysis is an important part of gathering customer data; unfortunately, it’s not always given the attention it deserves.
Too often, when business owners run a customer feedback survey, they just glance at the responses and perhaps talk about one or two survey answers. Then it’s set aside as they move on to the next project. Many don’t mine the data for the ‘gold’ it contains, which is a real tragedy. Not you, though! With these tips, you’ll learn how to analyze customer feedback and use customer data to gain insights and improve your auto dealership.
Here we will focus on how to analyze qualitative customer feedback (like open-ended questions) because this information is rich with data but harder to interpret. You can use traditional tables and graphs to summarize the answers for close-ended questions (like yes/no, rating scales, etc.).
1. Gather the Customer Data in One Place
We mentioned this tip in our article on creating a customer satisfaction survey, but it is so important that we must state it again. Your customer feedback may primarily come from a survey, but when you find feedback in other places (for example, on a review website, on social media, in an email, or on a call), you’ll want to add it to one combined file. This will facilitate your customer feedback analysis and ensure that nothing is missing.
2. Sort Out the Junk
There will be a lot of sorting and categorizing as you analyze customer feedback, but the first step is to sort out the ‘junk’ from valuable input. More specifically, by ‘junk,’ we mean unactionable survey answers.
Actionable feedback is specific and relevant and can lead to specific actions, strategies, or changes in your dealership. Unactionable is the opposite. It lacks specificity and may express an overall impression of doing business with you, which isn’t very helpful. For example, “The car buying process was wonderful!” Sure, this is great to hear! But you can’t really ‘do’ anything with it because the respondent didn’t give specific details about what made the experience great. You’ll want to focus on actionable customer data for your customer feedback analysis. You can move unactionable responses to another tab in your file or gray them out to indicate you won’t be using them.
Pro Tip: If you are seeing a lot of ‘junk’ answers to a specific question in your feedback survey, it might be because you have not worded the question in a way that directs the customer to give detailed, helpful information. Review your survey and adjust the language or add follow-up questions if needed.
3. Rate the Sentiment
With the helpful and actionable customer data identified, the next thing to do is to rate the sentiment of the customer data. This is a simple way to quantify something qualitative in nature. In essence, you will take what the customer said and decide if it is positive or negative. You can classify it into two groups just like that, or to be more precise, you may create a five-point rating scale, where five is very positive, 1 is very negative, and 3 is neutral.
4. Categorize by Department
Another helpful step in your customer feedback analysis (and one of the simpler things to do) is categorizing the response to which department it relates. For example, the customer’s answer may be about sales, marketing, finance, service/parts, customer service, etc. You may be able to categorize a response into one department or several. Doing so will ensure that you can deliver the feedback to the relevant people in your dealership.
5. Categorize by Topic or Theme
As you analyze customer feedback, you’ll then want to pull out the main topics or themes of each customer’s response. This will require you to read the customer data and start creating categories that make sense based on what the person said. Start by thinking about topics or themes from a broad, high-level perspective and build out categories that make sense for multiple responses (as we’ll be looking at trends later). Each piece of customer data may have one or more topics or themes.
6. Subcategorize
When it makes sense, it’s also helpful to subcategorize the survey responses to look at the specifics. For example, you may have categorized the topic of one person’s response as relating to your ‘inventory.’ Still, if they were talking about vehicle colors specifically, you could then subcategorize the answer under ‘colors.’ This example helps illustrate that the initial category should be general (and perhaps applicable to many customer responses), whereas the subcategory is more specific.
7. Identify the Root Cause
Another helpful step when you analyze customer feedback is to identify the root cause of the person’s response. For example, if a person complains about the salesperson’s knowledge of the inventory, you could identify the root cause as a lack of (or insufficient) training. Meanwhile, if someone has complained about waiting a long time on hold, the root cause could be a staffing issue or inadequate technology (not having the proper business phone system to handle calls). As these examples demonstrate, identifying the root cause means going beyond what the person says and using your knowledge of the dealership to determine why the problem is happening.
8. Look for Trends
As you analyze customer feedback and apply the categories mentioned in 3-7 above, you’ll want to look for trends – feedback that is repeated in the customer data and which emphasizes the main problems (or successes) of your dealership. When looking for trends, you can look across the entire dataset to get overall themes. For example, you may discover that training is a problem across many departments. You can also look at trends for each department to assess the commonly-mentioned strengths and weaknesses of each department in your dealership.
As you continue to collect customer data regularly, you can also look for time-based trends. For example, you may notice that the sentiment of feedback related to your service/parts department is improving over time and then reflect on why you see the change. Did you start a new training program? Hire new employees? Get new technology? Always look for a reason for the trends you see in the data.
9. Summarize the Data
Now you’ll want to take what you’ve learned from the data and summarize it so you can decide how to act. What is the data telling you? Create a summary for the entire dealership and an outline for each department. Include the overall sentiment, the main topics and themes, root causes, and trends. Use quotes from individual customer responses to illustrate points but keep your summary high-level and actionable.
10. Inform Your Teams
Finally, you’ll want to share the summaries (and perhaps the individual data) with the appropriate people and departments within your dealership. Call a meeting to discuss customer feedback and brainstorm how you can address the concerns. Take some time to celebrate wins and highlight strengths too!
A Note on Customer Feedback Analysis Software
The above tips teach you how to analyze customer feedback manually. However, customer feedback analysis tools will automate the process for you. Check out this article to learn about many options.
From Customer Feedback Analysis to ACTION!
When you analyze customer feedback, you will have a clearer picture of what works well in your auto dealership and what needs to change. Follow the tips above and gain actionable insight from your customer data! But after you’ve completed your customer feedback analysis, you’re not quite done yet. The final step is to figure out how to act on the feedback you’ve received. Stay tuned as we discuss this topic and finish this series next time!