How to use data automation tools to streamline your analysis process

Data automation tools such as Relative Flow will save businesses time and effort in organizing qualitative data. That was the key takeaway from Relative Insight’s latest Spotlight Series webinar.

The session saw Relative Insight’s Head of Product, Ollie Reihill, and CTO, Phil Greenwood, outline the challenges involved in the text analysis process. The pair highlighted the manual, time-consuming tasks that litter the path to vital business intelligence — and how Relative Flow removes these obstacles.

During the 30-minute event, Ollie and Phil talked about common barriers when organizing qualitative data and how Relative Flow helps businesses overcome them. They also highlighted additional benefits that data automation tools offer to organizations, such as improved data security.

You can watch the full webinar on demand now using the banner below. Or, continue reading this summary to discover how you can remove these blockers from your workflow.

Introducing Relative Flow

Ollie and Phil took the opportunity to showcase Relative Flow throughout the webinar. The pair presented an overview of how this extension of the Relative Insight platform creates streamlined workflows. They also highlighted examples of how existing Relative Insight customers are using it to do the heavy lifting in their analysis process.

The pair demonstrated how Relative Flow automates data entry and extraction. They explained what happens to the data during a ‘flow’, including auto data uploads, data preparation and analysis, plus data visualization. This process is always-on and is lightning fast.

Phil cited the example of a US retailer that needed to analyze 17 daily surveys. Manually processing and analyzing data on this scale before Relative Flow was a huge undertaking. Using Relative Flow, we helped the business automate data upload and organization, meaning that all surveys are seamlessly uploaded and ready to analyze.

Additionally, the company had a reporting period unaligned with regular financial quarters. Phil outlined how the team ensured data is aggregated and segmented in line with the retailer’s reporting period.

Ollie outlined how a well-known international airline uses Relative Flow to streamline its analysis of passenger NPS surveys. Its analysis incorporates splits by seat type (economy / business / first), then differentiating between promoters and detractors.

Having to create these segments manually was time-consuming drudgery. Therefore, the airline uses Relative Flow to automatically upload and create these segments for each survey.

The operator also conducts longitudinal analysis on key themes contained within these surveys. It uses Relative Flow to automate the identification of these themes. Combined with the platform’s Heartbeat tool, this allows the airline to track key focus areas in real time.

Automated data entry & automated data extraction offer added value

In addition to streamlining how companies organize qualitative data, implementing automated data entry and automated data extraction offers further benefits. Ollie and Phil talked through these in detail.

Data automation tools offer improved security

Using data automation tools to transfer survey responses and other qualitative data between platforms makes the process more secure.

Human intervention represents the most insecure part of data management. By enabling automated data entry using a secure file transfer process, humans no longer have to manually download and upload text data files across platforms — removing a key security vulnerability.

Simple scheduling increases convenience and reduces limits

The larger the data size, the more challenging it is to organize qualitative data. Often you’ll upload a variety of text data files all at once; this can extend the data loading process, particularly if you then have to add segmentation to these large files.

Ollie highlighted that automating data loading using Relative Flow enables you to keep text data manageable. For example, if you’re conducting a daily pulse survey, uploading each automatically upon completion – rather than loading multiple surveys at the same time when you come to analyze them – greatly speeds up the process.

Scheduling works in combination with automated uploads. Ollie noted that a flow can be adjusted to fit users’ timelines, ensuring that data is in the platform and ready to analyze at your convenience.

Remove the stress around organizing qualitative data

The first step of a journey can be the hardest. Beginning an analysis process with laborious, manual data organization makes getting started seem much more daunting.

Relative Flow enables you to ‘set-and-forget’ the pre and post-analysis tasks. This means you can focus on the most valuable aspect of the process: the analysis itself.