Something feels off — enquiries seem weak, a campaign isn’t paying back, sales dipped last month — and you want to know why. You know your business and what you’re after; Crunch knows how to count. The fastest way to an answer is to go one small step at a time, in your own words, and let each answer set up the next question. That’s how a good analyst works, and it keeps every answer short enough to check.
What you’ll need
Some data for Crunch to read — an uploaded file, your website or your store. If you haven’t set that up yet, start with Sign up and start on the free plan.
The five steps
- Trend — what moved overall? Start with the big picture: one number over time, such as enquiries or orders each month. This tells you whether something really changed, and when.
- Locate — where did it move? Split that number by something that matters to your business — city, product, channel — to find the part that behaves differently from the rest.
- Drill — which part exactly, and when? Narrow into that part until you can name it precisely, and pin down when the change began.
- Check — what rules each explanation in or out? By now you’ll have a few possible explanations. Ask for the one fact that would tell them apart.
- Conclude — which explanation fits the data better? Put your explanations side by side and ask which one the data supports.
By the end, a vague worry has a name: a specific part of the business, a specific time, and the explanation that fits.
How to ask
- Ask one thing per turn. A single question gets a single answer you can check before you build on it.
- Use business words — “enquiries”, “Android”, “Pune” — not table or column names. Crunch works out which data holds them.
Say what you already know, once
If a value means something special, or you know how two things map, say it at the start: “a rating of 0 means not rated”, “country code 1 is India, in rupees”. Crunch keeps it for the rest of the conversation, so you don’t need to repeat it.
When Crunch reads you wrong
Every answer starts by saying how Crunch read your question. If that isn’t what you meant, correct it in one line — “use the app the enquiry came from, and include web” — and ask again. See Correcting Crunch.
Related
- Reading an answer — what each part of an answer tells you.
- Correcting Crunch — how to put a misread question back on track.
- Slow, empty or “not established” answers — what to do when an answer isn’t what you need.