Gartner research continues to show that "actioning" of customer feedback is still not a widely adopted business practice, with only about 15% of customer feedback generally receiving follow up action. Five years ago the percentage was roughly 10%. Clearly, businesses have been somehow unable to make full use of the technology. Being personally aware of companies who do take full and continuing advantage of EFM I know that, generally speaking, today it requires a large ongoing investment of time (both management and staff) and money. But, that it is ultimately worthwhile.
Since EFM's value proposition has always been largely based on enabling value creating actions to be taken on received feedback, the question is: Why is "actioning" of received feedback such a big challenge for businesses implementing EFM? I think its an important question because becoming "customer centric" is such a major goal for businesses today. And, customer centricity relies largely on being able to act on issues or concerns expressed by customers through feedback.
After several years now working with businesses implementing EFM I think I understand the challenge. I see the actionability of customer feedback as being of two kinds, the "immediately obvious" and "not so immediately obvious". Both kinds of feedback are typically represented in any batch of received customer feedback.
Immediately obvious feedback equates to an NPS "detractor" or a "very dissatisfied" customer in a customer survey. Or, to a problem "ticket" post, request for information, request for contact, etc. from a person via a web-site input form. It's "immediately obvious" that some kind of follow up needs to take place to a specific person. Contacting the person and trying to "fix" their source of dissatisfaction or otherwise act on their feedback is operationally easy. It's a matter of getting data to the right people with instructions on how to follow up. QuestBack, for instance, automates this process out-of-the-box. Other tools do it through CRM integration. The point it that is isn't difficult to achieve in most instances.
Not so immediately obvious feedback falls into the category of things like a low ratings for product functionality, business practices, business partners, sales/support people and the like. Taking action on these kinds of issues, and many others besides, requires cross-functional decision making, and more importantly, additional data. For instance: Is a product functionality issue the result of a poorly designed product, improperly trained users, new capabilities introduced by a competitor or something else? It usually isn't clear until more analysis of data is performed.
Actioning "not immediately obvious" kinds of customer feedback requires additional data in order to put customer feedback into context and to identify what the action should be. CRM, ERP, HRM, Finance or other systems are usually the source for this additional data. Pulling data from multiple data sources and doing analyses typically requires time and resources. So, when it is done, its a "project" that someone has to budget for, staff and fund. This process of performing the additional analyses and presenting results explains why businesses largely fail to act on "not immediately obvious" customer feedback. It just takes to long to develop the analyses, present them and make decisions about how to act.
Real-time Data Analysis and Visualization may solve the feedback non action problem
Web based data analysis and visualization tools have begun to get popular over the last couple of years. These solutions allow a business to pull together data flows of customer feedback, behavior and other data (like benchmarks) and extract the key information from each into Dashboards that present information a manager needs to see in order to determine action.
Analysis dashboards also allow data to flow to managers in virtually real time. With web services APIs into EFM, CRM, ERP and other systems data can just flow into the dashboard. This makes analyses rapidly visible by the correct audience.
In my opinion, these new data analysis and visualization tools will combine with EFM to ultimately "fix" EFM's non-action problem. In all the companies I know where EFM is a success, a lot of work has gone into these types of analyses that combine customer feedback with behavior, benchmarks and other data. Just with heavy I/T involvement. Something that isn't needed with these products.
At QuestBack we already partner with a couple of data analysis and dashboard vendors and we may partner with more of them over time (as a reseller that won't be my call). But, contextualizing "voice of the customer" using dashboards makes so much sense to me that I'm surprised more companies aren't looking for this capability as part of their EFM solutions.
Since EFM's value proposition has always been largely based on enabling value creating actions to be taken on received feedback, the question is: Why is "actioning" of received feedback such a big challenge for businesses implementing EFM? I think its an important question because becoming "customer centric" is such a major goal for businesses today. And, customer centricity relies largely on being able to act on issues or concerns expressed by customers through feedback.
After several years now working with businesses implementing EFM I think I understand the challenge. I see the actionability of customer feedback as being of two kinds, the "immediately obvious" and "not so immediately obvious". Both kinds of feedback are typically represented in any batch of received customer feedback.
Immediately obvious feedback equates to an NPS "detractor" or a "very dissatisfied" customer in a customer survey. Or, to a problem "ticket" post, request for information, request for contact, etc. from a person via a web-site input form. It's "immediately obvious" that some kind of follow up needs to take place to a specific person. Contacting the person and trying to "fix" their source of dissatisfaction or otherwise act on their feedback is operationally easy. It's a matter of getting data to the right people with instructions on how to follow up. QuestBack, for instance, automates this process out-of-the-box. Other tools do it through CRM integration. The point it that is isn't difficult to achieve in most instances.
Not so immediately obvious feedback falls into the category of things like a low ratings for product functionality, business practices, business partners, sales/support people and the like. Taking action on these kinds of issues, and many others besides, requires cross-functional decision making, and more importantly, additional data. For instance: Is a product functionality issue the result of a poorly designed product, improperly trained users, new capabilities introduced by a competitor or something else? It usually isn't clear until more analysis of data is performed.
Actioning "not immediately obvious" kinds of customer feedback requires additional data in order to put customer feedback into context and to identify what the action should be. CRM, ERP, HRM, Finance or other systems are usually the source for this additional data. Pulling data from multiple data sources and doing analyses typically requires time and resources. So, when it is done, its a "project" that someone has to budget for, staff and fund. This process of performing the additional analyses and presenting results explains why businesses largely fail to act on "not immediately obvious" customer feedback. It just takes to long to develop the analyses, present them and make decisions about how to act.
Real-time Data Analysis and Visualization may solve the feedback non action problem
Web based data analysis and visualization tools have begun to get popular over the last couple of years. These solutions allow a business to pull together data flows of customer feedback, behavior and other data (like benchmarks) and extract the key information from each into Dashboards that present information a manager needs to see in order to determine action.
Analysis dashboards also allow data to flow to managers in virtually real time. With web services APIs into EFM, CRM, ERP and other systems data can just flow into the dashboard. This makes analyses rapidly visible by the correct audience.
In my opinion, these new data analysis and visualization tools will combine with EFM to ultimately "fix" EFM's non-action problem. In all the companies I know where EFM is a success, a lot of work has gone into these types of analyses that combine customer feedback with behavior, benchmarks and other data. Just with heavy I/T involvement. Something that isn't needed with these products.
At QuestBack we already partner with a couple of data analysis and dashboard vendors and we may partner with more of them over time (as a reseller that won't be my call). But, contextualizing "voice of the customer" using dashboards makes so much sense to me that I'm surprised more companies aren't looking for this capability as part of their EFM solutions.
