Organizations that effectively use data insights across their organization are more competitive, and can grow more than 30% each year, according to a report by Forrester.
From marketing to product development, customer success to HR, leading companies are arming their teams with data insights to improve decision making. Organizations that have been successful in developing a data culture have strong alignment between data, technology, processes, and business stakeholders.
However, data doesn’t always move as fast as the business. The challenge is to make data easily accessible, relevant, and tied to organizational goals.
Marketing teams need to keep tabs on sentiment about their brand, products, and services. HR teams must understand candidate and employee needs to improve recruitment, engagement, and retention. CX teams need to improve the customer journey, from first contact to onboarding and throughout the lifecycle.
And IT leaders need to find ways to get data out of silos and into the hands of people who need it to do their jobs, while making sure they’re handling it safely and complying with the laws and regulations that are designed to protect it.
87% of customers say their employees were empowered to make better business decisions as a result of using surveys.
Traditionally, most organizations have made sure the appropriate people were armed with data like sales figures, customer profiles, and churn rates. While this type of organizational data can tell you what is happening in your business, it doesn’t always tell you why it’s happening.
Survey data, however, adds color, context, and sentiment. It answers the question of why someone takes an action, how they feel, and what they want from products, services, or a company. This contextual data leads to in-depth insights, and drives better decisions throughout an organization.
But like any business asset, survey data needs to be protected. You need to ensure privacy for your customers, employees, or anyone else. You also need to have data that can travel quickly, and get it delivered right to the people who need it most.
So how do you that?
Here are 4 ways to create the perfect environment for making data-driven decisions with surveys:
1.Integrating feedback into existing systems
Survey data is more valuable when it is connected with other data. Integrations allow organizations to make feedback accessible in existing workflows and within apps they use every day. Integrations with mission-critical systems, including Salesforce, Marketo, Tableau, and Power BI, allow teams to get the full story, spot issues more quickly, and take action to make improvements. And, instead of using manual processes to get data out of a survey system and into a company’s most used systems, integrations make it easy for teams to connect feedback to existing data and take action.
2. Gathering feedback throughout the customer (or employee) journey
Unlike one-and-done research approaches, surveys can be a continual part of the customer lifecycle and a valuable tool for all teams. Marketers can use survey feedback to build buyer personas, enrich leads, and segment prospects to deliver more personalized and meaningful experiences. Sales teams can get insights into purchase decisions with win/loss analysis, to better understand and address customer needs at all stages of the purchase process. CX teams can take a more tailored approach to problem resolution, and uncover upsell and cross sell opportunities for the individual customer. HR teams can follow a similar path and use surveys to help with talent recruitment, employee onboarding, engagement, and retention activities.
3. Sharing survey data across departments and teams
Too often, data gets stuck in siloed systems and can’t make the impact it should. Survey data is most valuable when it is shared and accessible not only to team members, but to groups elsewhere in the organization. Advanced collaboration capabilities make it easy for large teams to work on multiple survey projects and easily share results with stakeholders both inside and outside their group. Workgroups can allow teams to collaborate over survey creation, editing, and analysis and share the full benefit of insights.
4. Controlling data while supporting free and secure sharing
Collected data often includes sensitive information like customer, health, or employee data. While data is most valuable when it’s shared, it also needs to be managed so that it’s secure, compliant, and can work for anyone in the organization. Centralized administration capabilities can provide a single view of all data being collected within an organization, and offer control and visibility into who can access what data, how, and when it’s being used.
You can support all your organization’s survey needs from one platform. Find out how in the guide, How best-in-class organizations drive growth with surveys.
