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.