Defining Your X-Data Strategy

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Businesses have collected data from transactions that are completed to add to the archive of their knowledge of the customer. This data, known as operation data or O-data, forms the basis of creating a better customer experience with the business. The hope is that by inspecting this data, a company can adapt its customer-facing operations to increase the value of interactions with the consumer. However, this data leaves something out that is of great importance to the business, the employee experience data.

Employee experience data, also known as X-data, is usually collected via surveys within the company to find out how employees feel about customer interactions. Human resources departments can utilize this X-data to increase employee retention and address issues within the employee's environment. A majority of HR departments for companies running SAP mention that their strategies stem from improving the employee experience. To this end, SAP has leveraged its recent acquisition of Qualtrics to improve the employee experience through the analysis of X-data.

Don't Bite Off More Than You Can Chew

Qualtrics isn't an intuitive solution for monitoring and changing O-data and X-data. At the moment, trying to incorporate Qualtrics without having a set roadplan in mind will lead to disaster. Instead of trying to capture all the x-data and compile it alongside the O-data, businesses should consider starting small. Eventually, as more data points get added in, the pool will grow as will the insights it generates. X-data most commonly comes from surveys. However, in planning an X-data analysis system, a company should have a clear goal in mind when putting together a study for employees to take part in. Additionally, actions should be made based on the results of that survey. If the company fails to address issues, employees will begin to doubt the effectiveness of these surveys.

Monitor Data Privacy and Security

Answering a survey about the work environment can be hazardous to one's continued employment at a business. The issue of data privacy and security is of the utmost importance if the company is to get honest answers from its employees who could be too busy playing online games. While anonymity could be an option, anonymous survey information leaves out a lot of the data that may be required to help with generating insights. Companies have a duty to employees that take part in these surveys to keep their personal information safe, not only from external intruders but from those within the company which they may be critical of. SAP Qualtrics offers a built-in robust data security methodology. Businesses that prefer to use their own third-party analysis tools can develop their own security paradigms for passing data through the API of those systems.

Analysis of Data to Produce Insights

Like other analytics systems, the SAP Qualtrics module allows for the processing of rich data to offer insights to the business on which it can potentially act. To achieve this, however, the system needs access to rich data to process. Meaningful analysis can only derive from a system that has enough data to ensure the ideas it offers are justifiable and make sense in the context of the business.

A Few Points to Note

SAP Qualtrics is a brilliant method of combining O-data and X-data, but a business needs to have a plan in place lest it ends up playing tic-tac-toe with its employee data. Survey design must focus on the insights the system needs to get to create meaningful output. The information the business needs should inform the questions that the surveys ask. Anonymity has benefits to keeping data safe, but it also opens the door to multiple submissions and even breaks the link between X-dat and O-data. Ensuring secure practices when operating with data is a far better practice than trying to implement anonymous surveys. Finally, try to combine as much relevant data into the study as possible. Make sure your initial data points are collected to avoid having to bombard users with multiple surveys. If you subject customers and employees to enormous amounts of reviews, you may risk them falling prey to survey fatigue, and answers you get may be unusable.