Structured vs. Unstructured Data: Why they’re both important to understanding Customer Experience
*This article has been written by our Senior VoC specialist @Liz Nath.*
Customer feedback data can be categorized as structured or unstructured. Structured data typically comes from responses to a scale question in a survey; such as an NPS or CSAT rating. While unstructured data is almost everything else — text, audio, video, etc. Both are essential to uncovering how customers really feel about our products and services.
Structured data
Until recently, structured data is the only type of data that companies would capture from customers. Everyone has experienced receiving an email asking you for feedback after purchasing something online, or a little popup survey on a website asking you to rate your experience. Your answers to these questions are aggregated and used to help the company spot issues or pain points within their journeys.
Here are some examples of structured data:
- NPS (an overall relationship metric)
- CSAT (a transactional metric used to assess each product or stage of a journey)
- Customer effort score (CES) (a task metric used to assess specific customer tasks/actions)
- Key drivers such as speed, transparency, quality, professionalism
Tracking customer loyalty and satisfaction metrics such as NPS and CSAT and other key drivers over time, allows us to track our performance and pinpoint areas of strengths and opportunities. Structured data is easy to capture, easy to analyse with statistical tools, and easy to correlate with other business or financial metrics.
Unstructured data
Analyzing unstructured data manually is hard work; it requires hours of reading, coding, and categorizing data. However, with recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, it is much faster and easier to surface insights from unstructured data.
Here are the most common examples of unstructured data:
- Text
- Audio
- Video
- Call centre recordings
- Interview transcripts
- Chatbot transcripts
- Social media comments
- Google reviews
Unstructured data is valuable because it tells us about our customers’ experiences in their own words. This brings useful insights to marketing and communications to ensure we speak the same language as our customers. Analyzing unstructured data also allows us to catch emerging trends that we might have not yet identified in existing CX or UX metrics. In the ever-changing economic conditions that we currently face, new customer needs and concerns are emerging every day, and we will be able to respond to them if we have insights from unstructured data at our fingertips.
Once we are consistently collecting and analyzing both types of customer feedback data, the next step is to merge them together and produce easily digestible and actionable insights that are relevant for each level of the organization. This is the aim of our Voice of Customer programme led by the CXM team.
Optimizing and harmonzing our services is one of the 7 key strategic pillars contributing to Randstad’s aspiration to become the world’s most equitable and specialized talent company. In order to do that, we need to gain a deep understanding of our clients and talents.
