Customer Analytics For Dummies (2015)

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Conducting a Gap Analysis

A complementary approach to the top-tasks analysis is a gap analysis. With a gap analysis, you understand how important customers find a feature and how satisfied they are with it in completing their tasks. If you have an existing customer base of people who have experience with a product (or competitive product), a gap analysis is what you need.

A gap analysis is a survey using two sets of items to be rated: importance and satisfaction.

Keep it to a smaller set of features or tasks than the top-tasks analysis, because you’re asking participants to rate each item twice.

To conduct a gap analysis, follow these steps.

1. Have customers rate how important a particular function or task is, using a numbered scale anchored with Not at all important to Very important.

A 7-point scale is popular, but almost any number from 5 to 11 will work.

2. Ask customers to rate how satisfied they are with the same features using the current product.

Use the same numbered scale from Not at all satisfied (1) to Very satisfied (7).

3. Use the following formula on each participant’s task/feature scores: Importance + (Importance - Satisfaction).

This will reveal the “gap” or opportunity for improvement. This formula provides both a prioritization of features and also gives a higher score to features that are rated higher in importance.

An example of tasks and functionality for a web-based email system and some sample data are shown in the following table. Notice how the feature “Add contacts to an address book easily” and “Search for messages older than 6 months” both have the same “gap” in the Importance - Satisfaction column. But because adding contacts was rated as more important than searching for older messages (a 7 versus a 4), it gets a higher priority score (a 10 compared to a 7).

Mapping Business Needs to Customer Requirements

Techniques like the gap analysis help prioritize the features from the customers’ perspective. But it’s also important to consider the organization’s priorities. One such technique is Quality Function Deployment (QFD). QFD is a structured way to prioritize features, functions, or even website content by taking into account both business priorities (the voice of the company) and the customer/user priorities (the voice of the customer).

QFD separates what you do from the how you do it. In the rush to complete long lists of feature requests, it’s easy to lose sight of what customers need.

The QFD’s main output is a decision matrix, which looks like a house (see Figure 13-3). You might hear “house of quality” used interchangeably with QFD.

The following sections show you how to build a QFD, using an example of a website redesign for a multinational electronics company that sells through channel partners.

This is a simple QFD that balances the internal need to build and improve with a clear prioritized top-tasks list of customers. It helps narrow the scope and improve the quality of redesign.

You can build a more advanced QFD by incorporating competitive information, specifications, and positive and negative relationships between the “How’s.” Adding each of these parts to the house takes extra time, but it can be worth it depending on the complexity and consequences of the project.

Figure 13-3: House of quality components from a QFD process.

Identifying customers’ wants and needs

Brainstorm as many possible features, functions, and task-based activities that customers would want to do. Look at the competition, survey and interview existing and former customers, review call center data, and interview stakeholders. These are your “What’s.”

For an informational-based website, most customer requirements are the tasks that users attempt, so a good task analysis can help identify these.

Here’s a selection of some tasks from the B2B electronics website:

· Find detailed technical specifications (like CPU and power consumption).

· Find and download drivers.

· Contact a salesperson.

· Have a personalized profile to save products I’m interested in.

· View products for an industry (for example, entertainment or medical).

· Share my purchase with others.

Identifying the voice of the customer

Ask customers to tell you what they think is important, not what you want them to think is important. An essential part of this step is realizing that everything can’t be important. If you ask customers and users what’s important, they will often tell you everything is important. You need a way to force users to choose which tasks are really important and which features are nice to have.

You can get sophisticated with conjoint analysis, but the fastest and easiest way to get a forced rank is to run a top-tasks analysis or a gap analysis, as explained in the previous sections.

Use the average importance rating or the percent of users who pick each task as the weights in the QFD. Use higher numbers to indicate higher importance, so if you use ranks, reverse them so a “1” represents the least important. The following table shows the relative rank and the percent of users who picked the task as one of their top five (out of 35 possible tasks) in a top-tasks survey.

Rank	% Who Picked	Tasks (the What)
1	80%	Find detailed technical specifications (like CPU and power consumption).
2	73%	Find and download drivers.
9	27%	Contact a salesperson.
19	1%	Save products I’m interested in to an account page.
12	13%	View products for an industry (for example, entertainment or medical).
25	1%	Share my purchases with others.

Identifying the How’s (the voice of the company)

Either use existing lists of enhancements and fixes or generate a new list based on the customer rankings.

The following are some example “How’s” for the electronics website:

· Integrate Facebook and Twitter into the product pages to promote sharing.

· Improve the search function and search results.

· Integrate product videos.

· Provide 3D rotation of products.

· Add a customization feature.

· Add a Filter by Location.

· Integrate detailed product specs and drivers from the main product page.

Building the relationship between the customer and company voices

Next determine how each “How” impacts each customer “What,” using the following scale:

· 9 = Direct and strong relationship

· 3 = Moderate relationship

· 1 = Weak/Indirect relationship

· Blank = no relationship

The 1's, 3's, and 9's are mostly a convention and help accentuate the differences when you prioritize. Place each value in the cell where the “What” and the “How” meet, and leave the cell blank if there’s no relationship.

In the example, “Integrate Facebook and Twitter buttons into the product pages” has a strong association with “Share my purchases with others.” Something like product videos will probably have a modest impact on detailed specifications because users could view the products to get a better sense of size and even see what external ports are supported.

Figure 13-4 shows the “What’s” and the “How’s” and the relationships between the two in the cells, with higher numbers indicating a stronger relationship, and blank cells meaning no relationship.

Generating priorities

Multiply the importance by the relationship and add up each sum in the “How” columns. The sum of each column represents the overall magnitude that each feature/function will have on the customer. Higher numbers represent more of an impact.

Figure 13-4: A QFD example with the Customer Requirements ( the “What’s”), the importance of each (Weights), and the voice of the company (the How’s) across the top.

The actual value of each of the totaled columns is less important than the relative ranking, which the tool also calculates. For example, “Find detailed technical specifications” (a “what”) has a weight of 80 and “Improve the search functionality and results” (a “how”) has a strong relationship of a 9. This cell generates a score of 9 × 80 = 720. “View products for an industry” (a “what”) has a weight of 13 and has a weak relationship with “Improve the search function and results.” This cell has a score of 13 × 1 = 13. The search feature raw score is found by adding these two cell scores, 720 + 13 = 733, which is the second-highest score relative to the other features considered.

Examining priorities

You should see gaps between features. The two highest ranked features (integrating the product specs and improving search) are well above the next five. A blank row means that a customer want isn’t supported. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it’s a low priority task. In this example, none of the new features supported “Contact a salesperson.” Assuming adding the contact information doesn’t introduce new problems, it would also be a good addition to the redesign.

Measuring Customer Delight with the Kano Model

Differentiating a product from the competition often isn’t about just meeting customer needs — it’s about exceeding those needs and expectations.

Beyond a set of expected features, some features so exceed expectations that they “delight” customers into purchasing, repurchasing, and recommending a product. The Kano model helps differentiate between features customers expect and features that delight customers. For example, customers expect cars to be reliable and include features like power steering, radios, and air-conditioning. Up until the early 1980’s, cup holders in vehicles were after-market add-ons. Cup holders, and the total number of cup holders, became a feature that delighted customers, so they were integrated into minivans and then to every type of car.

Named after Japanese professor Noriaki Kano, the Kano model is based on asking customers two questions about features. Features are categorized into one of six groupings.

· Delighting: The feature provides extra satisfaction when present but does not harm when absent.

· One-dimensional: The more of the feature the better.

· Must-Haves: Lack of the feature would lead to dissatisfaction.

· Indifferent Attribute: Customers don’t care about the feature and it neither increases nor decreases customer satisfaction.

· Reverse: Including this feature leads to dissatisfaction.

· Questionable: Conflicting customer responses make it unclear whether this feature adds or detracts from satisfaction.

Here are the steps to take to understand what customers expect and what delights them:

1. Aggregate the features in a similar way as you do for a gap analysis and top-tasks analysis.

The features should be articulated in a way that is meaningful to a customer, so avoid using internal company jargon and acronyms unless customers also use them.

2. For each feature, ask participants two questions.

The first is called the functional question: What are your feelings when the feature is included?

The second is called the dysfunctional question: What are your feelings when this feature is NOT included?

For both questions use the following 5-point response scale:

o 1 = I like it that way.

o 2 = It must be that way.

o 3 = I am neutral.

o 4 = I can live with it that way.

o 5 = I dislike it that way.

3. Tabulate the responses.

Table 13-1 shows how to score the responses to assign them one of the six categories. For example, if a customer responds to the functional question toward a feature as “I like it” and responds “I can live with it that way” for the dysfunctional question, the feature is a delighter. In comparison, if a customer responds to the functional question toward a feature as “Neutral” and responds “I like it” for the dysfunctional question, the feature is a reverse (less of it in the product).

Assessing the Value of Each Combination of Features

A more advanced method that identifies both the value (called the utility) and the optimal combination of individual features is called conjoint analysis. Where the Kano analysis identifies which features delight or dissatisfy customers individually, conjoint analysis identifies how the addition and reduction of features presented in more realistic combinations will lead to more or less interest in purchasing a product.

A conjoint analysis uses more advanced statistics and is usually done with software from companies like Survey Analytics (www.surveyanalytics.com), QuestionPro (www.questionpro.com), or Sawtooth Software (www.sawtoothsoftware.com).

To conduct a choice-based conjoint, you enter all the features, including price, into the software. These features are presented to customers in a survey format and the pairing of features helps identify how much each feature contributes to likelihood to purchase.