Issues vs. Cases for managing Actions on Customer Feedback

Sophisticated enterprises have long employed “Case Management” within their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms to document and resolve customer support / service issues. But, today many of these organizations also use CRM Case Management to manage customer relationship feedback. The question is: Should they? And, is there a better way to structure the action management process spawned by customer feedback?


Most Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) systems can generate an e-mail “Alert” based on input from customer survey respondents. The the most obvious way to “manage” these alerts is to create “cases” in the CRM system, where the system then assigns tasks to relevant people in the enterprise – usually in sales and support.

It seems to me that CRM based Case Management is inefficient for managing customer feedback driven actions. Though certainly some customer feedback should spawn a "Case". 

First of all, a lot of survey based customer feedback doesn’t really require management with a “Case”.  It may only require a simple follow up call or e-mail from a sales representative, or an accounts receivable clerk. An EFM system “Alert” that creates a task or event which is then tracked and managed probably would be more effective as well as less a costly approach. Especially since significant parts of an organization (accounting?) may not even have access to, or be trained on, the use of CRM systems.

Secondly, there is the difficulty of changing customer surveys after they've been integrated into the CRM system. This "hard coded integration" of customer surveys makes changes (a necessity as the business changes) complex, expensive and driven by the information technology organization. An exact opposite approach to how customer feedback management is typically deployed.

Is there a way to create a simpler, less expensive and more flexible process for managing customer feedback driven actions? I think there may be. And, the technology is called Issue Management. Issue management currently is mainly employed by software engineers for managing the change process for software during development. It is a “Case Management Lite” approach both from a technology as well as a cost perspective.

There are a number of low cost commercially available issue management systems that I believe would work well as action management tools, if integrated with EFM systems. The cost to achieve a fully managed “closed loop” customer feedback process using this approach would be much lower than it is today, in the neighborhood of $20,000 per year versus the current cost of $50,000 and up (sometimes way up).