More on Operationalized Research

In my last post I talked about concept, and reality, of operationalized research and how it's changing the EFM marketplace.  But I was a bit disjointed in my presentation.  So, I thought a little  clarification was in order.

The key concept: The more rapidly an insight can be discovered and acted upon, the more valuable the discovery/actioneering mechanism is.  My contention is that EFM tools that automate insight discovery and action processes are more "valuable" to a business than those that require manual intervention in insight discovery or insight action-eering.

I closed the post with the statement: "By applying operationalized research capabilities to social media based feedback, businesses will be able to accelerate their understanding of prospects, customers and markets".  My thought was that speed of insight discovery and action-eering is even more important when the feedback source is a social media channel.

As many of my customers can attest, I've been very exited about QuestBack's new ability to implement it's Ask & Act process on Facebook based feedback (More info on QuestBack Social Insight).  Businesses that use QuestBack to implement "Act" processes on Facebook  feedback can designate staff to receive "rules" based insights using QuestBack surveys running inside Facebook via a Facebook application.  Those people can then immediately act on those insights with actions taken being delivered via Facebook messaging or e-mail. 

The words "research" and "operational" are not typically used in conjunction.  They in fact connote different processes.  But, QuestBack, and to be fair, a few other EFM vendors have succeeded in developing solutions that allow research to be "operationalized" using social media.  Businesses or membership organizations with Facebook strategies could benefit from deploying this kind of solution, as it will help them utilize staff more effectively, respond more rapidly to issues and opportunities in their markets and promote their responsiveness to customers.

Operational Feedback as Strategic Input

I've been posting recently on the topic of Operationalizing Market Research.  My focus has been on how research approaches and techniques can be applied to generating operationally significant insights (meaning useful for solving day-to-day business challenges).  In this post, I thought I'd take the opposite perspective and talk about how tactical or operational feedback processes can provide strategically valuable insights.

I work regularly with businesses to help them build and benefit from "closed-loop" stakeholder feedback processes.  In my experience, with my own clients as well as with other organizations where I'm familiar with their feedback management processes, I see the primary goal for feedback being operational in nature. i.e. Specific feedback is desired for a specific purpose.  And granted, much of the value that stems from that feedback, whether customer or employee oriented, is tactically useful, identifying a need for some type of short-term response and providing enough data to contextualize the action required.

Yet, I believe that operational feedback, if correctly designed and implemented, can and should be a strategic input too.  Take for instance customer satisfaction surveys.  In C-Sat surveys, lots of operational data is collected, disseminated and acted on, usually by account managers or customer support, with action triggers being based on responses to satisfaction or loyalty questions.  In C-Sat surveys other questions normally are asked about "drivers" loyalty or satisfaction. Product or service "quality", "effectiveness vs. competition", "value" or other characteristics are asked about so as to provide context regarding possible reasons for a satisfaction or loyalty rating.  This additional contextual data provides the required insight about customer issues or opportunities that dictate how a response to feedback should be formulated and implemented at an operational level.  However, in this example, the operational feedback becomes strategically valuable if two things occur:

1. Feedback data on "product/service quality", "effectiveness vs. competition", "value", etc. is connected with customer information like "account category", "industry", "geography", etc. 
2. If feedback data is gathered (and connected) regularly over time.

By doing these two things with operational feedback, strategic insights result.  For instance, "unsatisfied customers" can become "unsatisfied large customers in industry A and geography B who find "quality" to be poor, "competitiveness" neutral and "value" low.  Though there is operational insight in this example (we need to talk to these customers right now!), if this data were to persist over multiple survey cycles and across more industries or geographies, a strategic challenge (or challenges) would be highlighted. i.e. Are we marketing to the right customers? Are we devoting the right mix of resources to the Product or Service we sell?  Etc.

Strategic insights have long been the province of market research organizations.  With the broad deployment of EFM tools for operational feedback, data is now being collected on an operational basis that with a small amount of effort can be transformed into a strategic input to be used by senior management.  All that has to happen is for companies to pay attention to it.  And, use products like QuestBack that facilitate the transformation.