Contextual Insight - The Basis for Taking Action on Customer Feedback

Don't do statistical analysis based Customer Feedback Management. 

Every now and then someone produces a really insightful analysis that is both relevant to business managers  and captures the essence of your particular company's solution, in this case QuestBack.  Bruce Tempkin of Forrester Research - via his Blog, Customer Experience Matters, has done just that. 

In the post below, Bruce makes the point that contextually relevant customer feedback doesn't necessarily need to be proven statistically significant to be both highly valuable and immediately actionable.  In fact his point is that contextually relevant feedback, when delivered to precisely the right individual, is both very valuable for its insight and immediately actionable, without any statistics based analysis focused on key drivers.  It's a great read.  I encourage you to visit his blog for the whole article.

http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/market-research-needs-less-statistical-analysis/


"Contextual Insight" - The Key to effective feedback management systems

Bruce Tempkin - The respected Forrester Research analyst coined this term in a February post on his blog - "Customer Experience Matters".   He defines it as:

Business Context + Relevant, timely data = Actionable insight

Some examples of contextual insight might be:

• An indicator on an information request form suggesting a short term need by a prospect, when delivered to a salesperson
• A "detractor" rating given by a client on a net promoter survey and delivered to an account manager
• An "unsatisfied" rating given by a visitor to a web-site, when viewed by the web master

Contextual insight is always feedback, filtered by some characteristic in the data giving it business context. It is always insightful to a specific role in your enterprise, if delivered in a timely fashion to that person.

Achieving Contextual Insight without in depth statistical analysis.

Customer insight has typically been the province of market research organizations. But, market research organizations aren't often equipped or structured to rapidly generate and deliver highly granular, context relevant, data to business end users. In fact their processes often mitigate against doing so.

But, Business still needs actionable, context relevant and timely insights about customers and prospects.

Feedback Management technology makes Contextual Insight actionable. It allows businesses to pre-determine who should receive specific of feedback and when. Techniques include automated role notification (alerts) and CRM based task assignment. Most feedback management applications include some analytics capabilities which enable rapid, though not automated, action taking on feedback. Most feedback management applications dovetail with more traditional market research tools. And, therefore can be viewed as complementary to the marketing research function.

Some applications (like QuestBack) include the ability to synch up survey based feedback with customer profile and actor profile information.  This allows really powerful alert processes to be fully automated once a survey process is in place.