Root Cause Analysis (RCA): get to the core of your customer's needs

When conducting research, you often need to ask many questions to your customers to get to the core of their needs. However, long questionnaires discourage your respondents, and they cannot always express their true feelings or complaints. The Root Cause Analysis can help. 

CYS has developed a method based on the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) that is often used in IT, to map the drivers of your customers. But it can also be used in employee feedback or any other target group. How this works, you can read in this blog post.

What is Root Cause Analysis

What is RCA? Root Cause Analysis is a method to figure out why a problem occurred, and it helps to discover: 

1. what happened
2. why it happened
3. what can be done to reduce the likelihood that it will happen again? 

Root Cause Analysis in feedback

The root cause analysis is a highly valued method to map the drivers behind customer or employee KPI’s, like:   

• Net Promoter Score 
• Customer Satisfaction Score  
• Customer Effort Score 
• Employee Energy Pulse Score 

This analysis allows you to get to the core of satisfaction problems. It shows you what is driving your customers or employees and gives you a chance to fix what’s wrong.

Thanks to the root cause analysis, you not only know the needs of your customers but also why they have those wishes and what follow-up actions you can take.

Root Cause Analysis steps in CYS software

Let’s show an example of how it works with the software of CYS. Let’s say you are using the KPI Net Promoter Score to measure Customer Experience and want to know, based on the feedback of your customers, what your organization needs to do to improve customer loyalty.

The NPS questionnaire with root cause most customers of CYS are using, look like this:

1. The first question is the KPI question, in this example the NPS question:
   Based on your experience, would you recommend our  product / service / company to your friends and family? 
2. The second question is an open question and asks your respondents to write down their primary thoughts in order to substantiate the score they have given for the first question:
   Could you share with us the reason why you feel this way?
3. With the third question the ‘story’ will be categorized in two consecutive steps:
   Which of the factors mentioned below best captures your explanation?

Examples Root Cause categories

After customers have given your product, service or company a score (question 1) and written down their primary thoughts - the ‘story’ - to substantiate the score they have given (question 2), the root cause categories are listed (question 3). The second category the respondent can choose from depends on the category one that is chosen.

For example, in a survey of the maintenance department of a car company, the first root causes can be:

• Maintenance
• Making the appointment
• Service
• Price and invoice
• Accessibility

When the respondent chooses the category ‘Maintenance’, the second root causes can be:

• Quality of maintenance
• Parts availability
• Cleanliness of the car after delivery
• Speed of service
• Communication regarding maintenance

Analyzing the Root Cause

Suppose most detractors (respondents who rated the NPS question with a 0 to 5) select ‘Maintenance’ as first, and ‘Communication regarding maintenance’ as the second Root Cause. This means the most important driver for customers to not recommend the garage to friends and family is the communication regarding the maintenance.

Another example: most promoters (respondents who rated the NPS question with a 9 or 10) of store Y select ‘Maintenance’ as first, and ‘speed of service’ as the second root cause. That means that the most important driver for customers to be loyal to the garage is the speed of the service regarding maintenance.  

By combining the root cause categories with the ‘story’ of question 2, you know exactly what you can do to increase customer loyalty.

Up to 64 categories

With CYS software, you can define up to eight categories for the first root cause, and eight categories for the second root cause. Thanks to this, up to 64 categories can be assessed, including the needs per category and even per employee.

The priority matrix tool automatically generates priorities to improve customer satisfaction, for all organization levels. And the open answers help employees to understand the emotion of the customer.

This way, each employee can be given insight every day regarding individual customer satisfaction, loyalty, or service orientation and thus follow up on these to improve the KPI’s.

Summary

Long surveys discourage your respondents and often have a low response rate. Thanks to the unique method of CYS, based on the root cause analysis (RCA), you only have to ask three questions when conducting research to get to the core of the need of your customer, employees, or any other target group.

In this blog post, we explained the meaning of RCA, and how the root cause analysis method helps you to identify exactly what you need to do to increase customer satisfaction or employee satisfaction.