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.