Operationalizing Research - EFM's Changing Landscape

The EFM marketplace has recently undergone lots of change.  Companies are merging, the technology itself is evolving to new platforms like mobile and social media, the model is migrating increasingly to "do-it-yourself" vs. outsourced, new technologies like text analytics are being incorporated into EFM and integration with other "cloud" technologies is accelerating.
  
All this has me thinking about the nature of feedback, how it's being used by businesses and how that is changing.  In my experience businesses work with two types of feedback, operational feedback, and for lack of a better term, "research" feedback.  I think that the changes I've outlined have blurred distinctions between the two.  And, that this will have a substantial impact on how businesses work with feedback data of all kinds in the future.

To me, operational feedback differs from research in two key ways: 
- The business need to take follow up actions on it. 
- And, its usefulness in building KPIs.   
Otherwise, operational and research feedback don't differ much.  Of course, it's arguable (and maybe true) that operational feedback is not accurate enough for scientific conclusion.  But, it seems to me that it can be made much more accurate by adding more "background" variables prior to solicitation (to establish population differentiation).  And, by managing respondent populations with filters afterwards (on the assumption that enough respondents participate to provide enough data). 
At the end of the day both types of feedback are simply data.  What typically differentiates research from operational feedback is not the feedback, it's the depth of analysis applied to the data. 
Looking at the many recent marketplace changes, EFM vendors focused on operationalizing research appear to be having success.  I think the business need to quickly understand and act on insights derived from complex combinations of feedback and "background data" is driving that success.
 
I believe social media is extending this market trend.  By applying operationalized research capabilities to social media based feedback, businesses will be able to accelerate their understanding of prospects, customers and markets.  And, to therefore "compete" more effectively.  If I had to guess, I would say that businesses will migrate to EFM vendors who can help them operationalize social media derived feedback.

Facebook based - Closed Loop Feedback

A couple of weeks ago I posted a note about QuestBack's new add-on module for collecting feedback from an organization's facebook friends.  As I have been learning more about the new QuestBack Social Insight product for facebook, I've become more impressed with its capabilities.  In particular, QuestBack's ability to "layer" a closed loop process on top of facebook derived feedback. 

Think about it, today you need to have people paying attention to your facebook page simply to respond to feedback.  With the new QuestBack product you can ask people to give you feedback, then rely on QuestBack to automatically route that feedback to the correct people in your company.  And, to provide the mechanism for actually "closing the loop" with facebook based feedback providers.  In my mind a pretty cool new capability. 

So how might this new facebook feedback mechanism be deployed?  A couple of ideas immediately come to mind:  Customer Support, Lead Generation and New Product Development.  With QuestBack running on a facebook page, customer support requests can be taken and processed via a quick web survey. The loop can be quickly and easily closed when a support rep gets the QuestBack notification and replies by e-mail from within QuestBack.  Same thing with leads.  Your sales guys will love it.  New product or service ideas can be collected and presented quickly and easily to product management people, who can then "close the loop" by entering into a QuestBack based dialogue with the facebook "friend" who provided the feedback.

Up until now, closing the loop on facebook based feedback was time consuming and expensive.  QuestBack makes it just another part of your closed loop feedback process.