How do customers feel about your company? It’s probably not the easiest question to answer definitively. Customer opinions can vary greatly, and even those who have a positive view of a particular business may like it for different reasons. There are even many who feel that trying to quantify an opinion is missing the point. Even so, many subjective observations must be taken into account when making important business decisions.
Qualitative data is much different from quantitative data. In fact, when many people think of data, they only picture the quantitative portion of it. Quantitative data usually encompasses statistics that can be effectively measured with numbers and concrete metrics. Companies know exactly how much revenue they make, how much of a product they sell, or how many employees they have. These are numbers that aren’t exactly up for debate, so making decisions based off of quantitative data usually comes down to how best to use the numbers for future growth.
Harder To Use?
Qualitative data is much trickier to effectively utilise. By its very definition, qualitative data can have many different interpretations and no solid solution. Customer opinion, as referenced above, is just one qualitative factor. The strength of your brand or the morale of your employees are others. Many businesses have spent years trying to quantify the qualitative. Some examples of this include surveying customers to get their feedback on certain products and services. As can be imagined, quantifying an opinion is far from easy, which is why many surveys ask customers to rank their answers on a scale of 1 to 10.
Big Data Analytics
This process of quantifying the qualitative data has actually seen a boost thanks to the advances made in big data analytics. Big data has meant that companies can get a better measure of the qualitative data that’s been so elusive to them. Qualitative data often comes in the form of unstructured data, and analytics makes it possible to identify trends and patterns easier than ever before. With social listening, text analysis, and clickstream data, businesses can collect information that helps create a clearer view of customers along with their thoughts and behaviors.
To Be Considered
There are numerous factors that go into each business decision made with qualitative data, something to keep in mind as your company begins to use that type of data more often. The quality of the data has to be taken into account, as well as the source that all the information came from in the first place. Organisations also need to consider all the variables that play a role in collecting that data, as well as what instigating event lead to the data being generated. It’s true that qualitative data, even with big data’s growing influence, is still a highly subjective item, but the insights gained can be impactful in multiple capacities.