By Jolinda Decad, Senior Research Consultant, CustomerSat, Inc.

We often feel compelled to prepare executive management reports and presentations that are exhaustive, by including all the data collected and all the analyses done. It’s easy to lose sight of your most important goal: presenting what’s most relevant, in an effective, succinct way that spurs action.

This article presents some tips for creating executive management presentations and reports that maximize the likelihood that the data will be easily understood and acted upon. It begins with some general considerations and then provides specific guidelines for organizing the content within each section of the report.

Five General Considerations

1. Know your audience.

Begin by understanding the reporting requirements of your audience. For higher-level executives, you need to consider:

• How do they like material presented to them?
• In a presentation, should you skip right to the bottom line or do they prefer to see information presented in stages, including the details and logic you used to reach your conclusions and recommendations?
• Which analyses are expected and must be included?

While it's ideal to build the story and then help the audience arrive at a "then obvious" conclusion, many leaders often have less than 10-15 minutes to spend on any topic, so the "call to action" in those cases needs to precede the data that supports the recommendations.

You also need to consider how your audience reacts to "bad news." You don't want to downplay negatives, of course, but you also don't want the negatives to seem overwhelming. It's best to present a balanced view of the positives and negatives. Begin with the organization's strengths from which it can build – before you focus on areas that require improvement. When preparing a presentation, consider discussing the more negative findings with the key managers who own the problems, so that they are prepared to support your findings and to assume ownership of the solution.

Timing can have a major impact on the acceptance of negative findings and management's willingness to act. Perhaps a manager has heard the same comments when calling on several major accounts, thus validating your research results and providing further insights into the underlying problems. Managers may become more highly motivated when their financials reflect the impact of the areas that need improvement.

2. Focus on the what – not the how.

Typically, a report writer or presenter’s role is not to solve the problem, but to define it clearly. Resist the urge to present a solution, although you might cite solutions posed by the survey respondents. It’s better to let the manager(s) who own the problem present the action plan.

For example, suppose survey respondents are complaining about the quality of support in the outsourced call center. They may say:

• "The agents’ English is hard to understand."
• "They don’t have the technical skills to provide a solution."
• "They follow a set script rather than responding to specific issues."

These customers may unanimously agree that the company should stop outsourcing. While it might be tempting to make that recommendation, that’s only one of several possible solutions which include improving the technical abilities and language skills of the agents.

Remember, your role is to describe thoroughly the customer issues and make recommendations of the areas to focus action, so that management can determine the correct path to take. (By the way, in the above example, you would share this information with the VP of Support ahead of time, so the VP is not taken by surprise at the presentation and is prepared with a plan of action.)

3. Drill down to the essentials.

It's easy to overwhelm an audience with too much information. After you complete your analysis, pare it down to the essentials, by imagining that you had only five minutes to speak or could present only one slide. This brief "elevator speech" should consist of your top research findings and the most critical, high-impact recommendations, based on your analysis of the key drivers of satisfaction and the pain points that the respondents are describing in their open-ended comments.

Even if you have 30-60 minutes for your presentation, this exercise helps crystallize your thinking and prepares you in case your time is cut short or you’re asked by the executive to get right to the crux of your findings.

4. Make it easy for your audience to follow along.

Extensive surveys with lots of detailed findings can be disorienting. A good solution is to organize your presentation or report into logical sections and start with an 'agenda' or 'topics' slide. Then, start each section with a distinctive and relevant title or heading. A logo or graphic can also be a kind of landmark, showing the audience where you are. In a long presentation, frequently mention which section of the presentation you're on.

5. Consider your "indirect audience."

A successful report will most likely cascade through an organization, reaching unexpected and unanticipated audiences. Make sure your report is clear as a standalone document. Eliminate jargon, abbreviations, assumptions, or vague terms that might confuse secondary readers or lead to incorrect interpretations. In addition, make sure that every table and graph in the report is understandable, in case it's copied into another presentation. Each should have a meaningful title and a source line provided just below it.

Specific Guidelines for Organizing your Report for Clarity

The main focus of a management report should be on the research objectives, executive summary, and recommendations. The methodology and demographics set the study in context and the key findings provide support for the executive summary and recommendations.

The research objectives delineate the major purposes of the survey, and establish the topics and organization of the key points of the report. The executive summary presents the story in a nutshell, organized by objective. Recommendations should flow logically from the summary.

The following outline generally works best, but confirm if it’s the most effective way to reach your organization:

• Research objectives
• Methodology
• Demographics
• Executive Summary and Recommendations
• Findings
• Appendices

Research objectives: These provide the foundation and organization for the presentation of the findings and recommendations. For a relationship survey, typical objectives include the following:

• Assess overall satisfaction and loyalty – and track changes over time
• Determine key drivers of satisfaction and loyalty, and assess the organization’s strategic advantages and improvement opportunities
• Identify key attributes and performance within each touchpoint
• Evaluate customer perceptions of the organization’s image and business value

Methodology: The methodology section provides the basic details of how the research and analysis were conducted, including:

• How and when the data was collected, the target respondents, survey topics, and who did the research
• The achieved response rate and level of confidence in the results
• Other essential information related to the analysis of the results, including metrics and standards that will be used to interpret the results, the major segments that will be reported on, and any weighting of the results

Demographics: Since the essence of your report is the conclusions and recommendations, include just a few critical details about your sample. Additional detail can be placed in an appendix.

The demographics section should describe the characteristics of the respondents in a way that's meaningful to the organization. These might include the type of transaction (e.g., new sale, lost sale, renewal, cancellation) or the respondent's role (e.g., decision-maker, business manager, IT manager, etc).

Instead of reporting breakdowns by a multitude of variables, clarify by clustering the variables to form defined customer segments. For example, one CustomerSat client does a regular survey of its affiliates, as defined by number of offices, type of market, revenue size, region, etc. Instead of presenting page after page of breakdowns by each variable, an analysis revealed that 80% of the population fell into just four clusters – much easier for the audience to grasp.

For studies that report results over time, show the breakdown of the sample by time period. Then determine whether you can make overall comparisons across the entire sample, or if you need to confine your comparisons to each segment.

The demographics you report on should also relate to breakdowns the organization uses, e.g., country, region, management team, and division. These breakdowns will help you pinpoint where the organization has weak points.

Executive Summary and Recommendations: This is obviously the most important section of any report or presentation. It provides the high-level story, the distillation of results for upper management, organized by the study’s objectives; and your recommendations related to the priority areas of focus.

Executive summary: Begin with the key slide that represents your elevator pitch. In a presentation, if you have only one slide to present, this is it! It includes the key findings and conclusions you have reached.

For the remaining slides in the executive summary, try to use no more than one slide per objective. For each objective, provide the basic conclusion or insight; the high-level data that supports the conclusion; and one or two open-ended comments that provide a vivid sense of the "voice of the customer" regarding that issue.

Include industry benchmarks or the organization’s internal standards whenever possible. Don't make executives wonder whether an overall rating is good or bad – show the rating relative to outside benchmark data, relative to previous survey waves, and/or relative to their own organization goals. In addition to illustrating how your products and services compare with those of similar organizations, benchmarking data provide additional backing to your areas of focus.

Standards for an organization can be established after the first wave, so you can establish your internal benchmarks and then set reasonable goals for improvement.

Recommendations: Try to limit recommendations to the critical few focus areas that will have the largest impact on customer satisfaction. Follow them with less important recommendations but which are "easy wins" for the organization. The executives may even formulate their own recommendations based on the foundation you’ve set – following sound methodology, surveying the right customers, asking the right questions, and analyzing the data appropriately.

Findings: Never present all the data from a survey. In most presentations to upper management, you won’t delve into detailed findings, but keep them handy in case of questions.

Focus on the findings that tell the essential story and help "peel the onion" by drilling down to the most important issues. Zero in on systemic issues that cross all segments of the organization. These must be solved by the appropriate corporate or centralized group. Isolated issues are more appropriately handled at the local level.

Limit segment differences to those with statistically significant results – usually at the .95 significance level. This avoids drawing conclusions based on differences that are not significant or that aren’t meaningful. In cases of inadequate sample sizes, substitute the actual number with an asterisk. When someone sees a number, even once, they’ll often forget it was based on just a handful of responses.

For each research objective, present:

1. The overall, cross-organizational findings and quadrant charts. These prioritize where to focus action.
2. Significant segment differences until you’ve adequately pinpointed the core problem.
3. Verbatim comments, analyzed by theme, that support the quantitative findings. Verbatim comments provide richness in conveying the voice of the customer. They can also introduce areas of concern that were missed in the survey questions. Make sure the comments are articulate, brief, compelling, and represent your general theme.

Using the previous outsourcing example to illustrate this approach:

• First, present the worldwide results for the key drivers of satisfaction. Then, show that support is a primary driver of satisfaction and that support scores have declined significantly in the last year.
• Next, narrow the decline to just the U.S., showing it’s not a worldwide problem, but specific to one country (albeit a major market). Also, show how support scores have declined significantly since the outsourced call center was implemented.
• Finally, present verbatim comments showing that the main issue is outsourcing. Further, organize the comments into specific problems U.S. customers experience when interacting with the outsourced call center.

Appendices: Create appendices to contain very detailed findings that are not crucial to support the points in the executive summary or recommendations, but which are expected to be reported to management, such as more granular findings that require action at the team or district level. Another example might be an analysis of the verbatim comments that indicate other areas of concern to customers.

How CustomerSat Can Help

Preparing succinct, effective management reports and presentations can be a challenge. CustomerSat consultants are available to prepare your management reports for you, or your research consultant can offer advice if you opt to prepare the report yourself.

For details, and to discuss further, please contact your CustomerSat representative, email us at expert@CustomerSat.com, or call us at 650.237.3300.