Root-cause analysis (or RCA, as it is popularly called) is an investigation businesses do to identify the underlying cause or insufficiency that triggered a loss or created a problem in the business. The activity entails defining the problem and backtracking to events that led to the problem. It is a reactive analysis.
Why conduct RCA?
Although businesses strive for zero churn, they somehow end up having at least one disappointed customer. The reason could be higher price points, poor quality of service, competitors offering better, lack of process adherence, delay in shipping, or more. Whatever be the reason, customers walking out from your business is a problem and has to be addressed.
There are different ways that businesses handle this investigation like conduct exit surveys and interviews, make a post-exit call and understand their point of view. They note down these individual reasons and work on them individually; churn by churn. But, this individual action will lose focus on the larger picture. For a business to address these churns and losses, they have to discover the common negative triggers and see in what ways they were and are affecting the business. In other words, weigh-in the ramifications—collectively.
Root cause analysis in VoC
There can be multiple reasons as to why a business is in a pickle: whatever be it, the result is often negative. So, VoC in Zoho CRM identifies all the negative states in the database as a first step.
Step 1: With its ability to categorize the sentiments as positive, negative, or neutral, VoC will pick the negative responses from the customer feedback.
Step 2: It then starts to analyze the events that went haywire after uttering these negative intonations and backtrack the events that caused them.
Step 3: As a result of this activity, VoC buckets all these negative triggers—in other words, root causes as Lack of innovation, glitch in the product, delay in response, poor service, product pricing, crossing deadline, lack of follow-ups, requirement mismatch, or others.
This is the technical know-how. Using these intel, VoC will empower you with various analysis. You can build custom charts based on these RCA analysis to understand the implications of these root-causes on your business and devise problem-solving steps.
Business scenarios
Amongst various possible analyses you can conduct RCAs for, here are some example.
Loss of revenue analysis: Zyolt is a real estate brokerage that helps homeowners sell their properties. Their revenue is the sum of commission the agency won after the successful sale of properties, thus it is important for them to nail each one of their listings. Losing out on an opportunity for them means loss of reputation, a hefty commission, and ultimately—a part of their revenue. Thus, to avoid this pitfall, to not to repeat, they take their RCAs very seriously.
Here's how VoC can help them.
- Build a chart focusing on the customers. VoC will work on the customers' module.
- Use their responses, deals, and events as related information to capture customer behaviors.
- Measure being the sum of deals. This is to find the sum of each deal that is affected by each cause.
- Group these measures by top five root causes that caused these lost deals.
With these intel, Zyolt can be sure of what are the negative triggers in their business, how they are affecting the business, and address them accordingly.
Delay in delivery analysis: Zarrow is a new-age quick commerce store. They source and deliver all sorts of products customers are ordering. That said, time and convenience are important denominators for them, and any discrepancy will cost them the customer itself. Thus, the business will keep analyzing these trends by running a cohort of their customer churns.
This is how they can configure:
- We are tracking customer churns. So, let's work on Contacts module.
- To track the churned customers based on their responses, we choose VoC Responses as related module.
- Measure is what we are measuring—the trend of the number of churning customers as a cohort: Count of Contacts.
We now have the control (Module) and the measure (Measure) - To group the chart means to distribute the count of contacts by RCA values.
How to conduct RCA investigations: Creating custom dashboards for RCA
RCA factors mentioned above are factors identified from customer responses, thus they are available to group when VoC responses module is selected as a related module.
You can create RCA charts using the following components: Charts, Table, Cohort, Anomaly, KPI. Based on what you'd like to find and how you'd like to interpret it, you can choose the component and get started with it.
- If you'd like to know the stats, you can choose from charts, KPIs.
- If you'd like to follow the root cause trend, you can choose cohort
- If you'd like an exhaustive display of numbers, tables will be a good choice to conduct RCAs.
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here to learn more about creating custom dashboards in VoC.
Acting on the RCAsAlthough, RCA is a reactive analysis that monitors lost deals and churned out customers, to be able to act on their records can still recover or reattract them. For they might have had poor customer experience, by reaching out to them with tailored reconcilation will give your business a considerable reputation.
With using root cause parameters in the cross-module filtering of advanced filter, you can look at all the customer records that have expressed a certain disappointments.
If the churn is due to delay, you can offer a free shipment if they order a next one. If the deal is lost due to poor pricing, or technological limitations, product glitch or other infrastructural problems, the business can learn from these comments and come with amendments. The opportunities to learn, correct, and implement are more with RCA—you can recover customers, you can streamline your business and RCA is how you can do it to understand the causative factors in your business.