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Affairs Database
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Database Analytics: Developing Strategic
Value
From a Consumer Affairs Database
Category: Food Product Manaufacturer
Methods: Database Analytics, Geospatial Analysis,
Data Cleaning, Customer Loyalty, Customer Satisfaction
Summary
A major international manufacturer of a food product sold in grocery stores
had a database of consumer contacts going back several years and consisting
of several million records.
The Consumer Affairs department believed the database was underutilized as merely
a tactical resource for dealing with consumer complaints and inquiries. The
department wanted to develop the strategic value of the database and also wanted
to improve methods used to deal with consumer inquiries and potential problems.
Using sophisticated data cleaning and exploratory methods, geospatial analysis,
and standard market research analysis methods, Decision Analyst was able to
illuminate patterns in the data that impacted product development and testing,
and target marketing. In addition, Decision Analyst was able to develop a metric
with trigger points to aid in spotting and responding more quickly to developing
issues.
Strategic Issues
Sales strategy, new product development, packaging, distribution, etc., within
consumer packaged-goods companies is dominated by marketing departments. However,
our client’s forward-looking Consumer Affairs department, with its wealth
of data on consumer behavior and attitudes toward the company’s products,
believed that its databases could, and should, have value beyond the handling
of consumer complaints and inquiries, even to the extent of influencing company
direction and new product development—if used more intelligently.
The Consumer Affairs department also wanted to raise its profile by turning
an underutilized resource into a valuable, essential component of the company’s
strategic planning.
Additionally, the department wanted to find the key drivers behind satisfaction
with customer relations, products, and company loyalty.
Research Objectives
Major objectives of the analysis were:
- To discover ways in which data gathered by the Consumer Affairs department
could be used to form tactics and strategy for the company as a whole.
- To construct a metric to better track the level of complaints, inquiries,
and praise contacts, and compute values for trigger points that would signal
a need for closer examination and possible initiation of action steps in response
to developing issues.
- To analyze key drivers of loyalty and satisfaction (both for the products
and for how complaints, inquiries, or praise contacts were handled by the
call center).
- To explore and analyze complaint rates by geography and mine any usable
insights.
Research Design and Methods
The data consisted of two sets. The first and largest set comprised about three
million records, gathered over a period of several years, of consumer-initiated
contacts to the Consumer Affairs department. Contacts included complaints about
product quality or experience with the products, inquiries about various aspects
of product components or safety, and praise for products or for the quality
of experience with the products. The second data set consisted of three years
of results from a yearly survey of a random sample of contacts from the larger
data set.
The analysis progressed in five main stages:
- Data processing, quality evaluation, and hygiene
- Exploratory data analysis
- Threshold analysis in the transactional data set
- Key driver analysis of satisfaction and loyalty in the survey data set
- Geospatial (GIS) analysis of the transactional data set
Results
A metric was constructed that would act in near real-time as a reliable early-warning
system to alert the Consumer Affairs department when an issue was developing
with any of its products. The metric was designed to be implemented separately
for complaints, informational inquiries, and praise, to allow the manufacturer
time to craft the appropriate response before the issue became national in scope.
The metric was designed to signal three levels of urgency, ranging from "there
is a potential issue" to "this needs attention by top management now!"
Key drivers of consumer loyalty and satisfaction (with the manufacturer and
its products, and with the Consumer Affairs department) proved to differ among
business units and product type, as well as contact type, allowing the manufacturer
to adopt a more varied approach to handling consumer contacts.
Geospatial analysis of consumer complaint rates elicited prime opportunities
both for target marketing to a certain demographic segment and for development
of a new line of products for the segment.
Copyright © 2010 by Decision Analyst, Inc.
This case study may not be copied, published, or used in any way without written permission of Decision Analyst.
Database Analytic Services
For more information on Database Analytic Services, please contact Rod Carver by emailing rcarver@decisionanalyst.com
or calling 1-800-ANALYSIS (262-5974) or 1-817-640-6166.
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