ABSTRACT
Summarising data through descriptive statistics such as averages, percentiles or variances does not add new knowledge but merely summarises what you already know. This chapter introduces basic inferential statistics, a set of methods for finding patterns in data to create new knowledge. Technical professionals often focus on the tangible aspects of services and measure performance in physical units. Technical data does, however, only tell part of the story of the customer experience. Analysing customer surveys requires different techniques to analyse data compared to physical processes. This chapter discusses how to use surveys to learn how customers experience services and demonstrates some techniques to explore this type of data using the R language. The learning objectives for this chapter are:
Understand the principles of measuring the customer experience with surveys
Assess the reliability of surveys with a correlation matrix
Assess the validity of surveys using factor analysis
