Some early returns on Action Tracking and Management Survey

In my last post I included a link to a survey I'm doing on action tracking and management practices employed by enterprises.  The survey is a non-scientific poll of several hundred people in organizations I've worked with, who mainly have mechanisms / processes in place for gathering feedback from customers, employees and other constituents or stakeholders.  In addition, I've made the survey available to a couple of LinkedIn groups where customer surveys are a regular topic of discussion.  My assumption is that the data I collect will be a reasonable representation of the practices businesses employ for tracking and managing feedback.  But caveat emptor.

So far, and based on a very limited sample, a couple of things stand out. 

-  About 70% of the respondents consider their feedback process to be a "feedback management system".  This number surprised me a bit.  It seems low, given the widespread use of web, and phone based surveying systems.

- Of the 70% who indicate they have a feedback management system, roughly 70% indicate their FMS has an "Alert" capability.

- Of those, a little more than half indicate that their alert process is "Valuable" or "Extremely Valuable".  Versus the entire surveyed group, this sub-group represents a little less than 40% of the total.

-  The sub-group indicating that they receive significant value from their Alert Process also indicates that their FMS generates "specific alerts that auto route to specific individuals".  So, the value of feedback based alerts seems to correlate with their placement into the hands of an assigned individual. Which isn't surprising to me. 

-  Of the group indicating they have a feedback management system, slightly less than half indicate that they "track all actions taken".  Other data I've collected in the past has indicated that "closing-the-loop" on customer feedback had a variety of challenges.  It would seem to me that one of those challenges is clearly the difficulty of keeping track of actions taken subsequent to receiving feedback.

When I get more data from the survey I'll be posting a link to the data.

Learning more about Action Management in EFM procesess

Action Management and Tracking in EFM systems

A number of EFM tool vendors and consulting organizations have really been beating the drums lately on the topic of Action Management.  So, I thought I'd post on the topic and ask for feedback from interested parties.   So, I've built a survey on the topic.  If you click the link below you can take the survey.

https://web.questback.com/demo_nash_stewart_qbbostonusa/action_mgt/

What is Feedback Action Management? 

My definition:  "Any process designed to follow up, track, report on, or otherwise manage alerts and associated feedback generated by a feedback management system."

So, what constitutes an "Alert"?

My definition: "An alert is an automatically generated message or event coming from a feedback management system that is based on specific feedback from a survey respondent (or other "inputter of feedback")."

Research from Gartner Group and others has consistently shown that organizations generally are ineffective at taking action on customer feedback.  Typically, the research shows 10% or less of the organizations polled as taking any follow up action on customer feedback.  Yet, industry marketing touts the benefits of taking action on customer feedback.  And, the EFM industry is undoubtedly growing at a fairly rapid pace.  And, has been for several years. 

Clearly, taking action on customer feedback is a desired course of action for businesses.  But, there must be a major challenge with it for so many enterprises to not be doing so.  In my experience, enterprises struggle with managing customer feedback generally, except where that feedback is very focused.  Customer service processes for instance, where most businesses today do some type of post-interaction survey related to completed transactions.  In my opinion, the reason this application of Action Management works is that it is typically driven by the enterprises CRM system and is managed using the CRM system's tools.

In more complex feedback processes where action taking is harder to assign or the action that might be taken is harder to determine, I think enterprises still have major struggles managing feedback.  The reason is lack of system support for the management of Actions. 

It's my belief and experience that EFM tool vendors are working to add useful Action Management capabilities to their tool suites, so that action management can be effectively applied beyond the customer service domain.  I'll be very interested to see what the survey produces for results.

Comments on Gartner's VoC Thinking

  

Gartner recently published a research report (# G00201380 if you're interested) outlining their CRM team's thoughts on the importance of VoC initiatives to the various constituencies that make up the CRM universe (Sales, Marketing and Customer Service). After reading the report I thought I'd share a couple of comments.

Of Gartner's 5 "Key Findings", two stand out as being closely related to "closed-loop" feedback processes:

• "Over 90% of organizations fail to get back to the customer after a customer service survey".
• "Failure to act on the customer's voice defeats the point of listening".

Of Gartner's recommendations one seems particularly relevant to these two key findings: 

• "Create a mechanism for the timely distribution, tracking and action of relevant insights from aggregated VoC data to each stakeholder in the organization, from the frontline customer agent to the CEO".

In my opinion, A "mechaninsm for timely distribution, tracking and action of insights" is a Feedback Management System.  Gartner implies that you have to create your feedback management system.  Or, have one custom built by an integrator / consultant.  However, and fortunately, there are a number of commercially available feedback management platforms that are relatively easy to set up and implement with internal resources and minimal vendor assistance.