Feedback Action Management makes QuestBack Essentials - Essential

Two years ago I wrote post here about the importance of Action Management to customer feedback processes.  It was titled: "Turning customer feedback into action is the number one challenge for customer strategists."  The article referenced some work done by Walker Information Systems and pointed at an article written by them (click here to read my earlier post and the link to Walker's article). 

The point: Customer Feedback is a lot more useful if it is immediately actionable.

One of QuestBack Essentials' main advantages is that it makes customer feedback immediately actionable.
Kudos to QB for thinking that way as far back as 15 years ago. Their Essentials product uses a couple of different process mechanisms to make feedback actionable immediately. One of them is the equivalent to Walker's "Hot Alert" process. QuestBack calls it a "Notification", simply an e-mail that is automatically triggered to a given person based on criteria (a response profile) coming through the customer feedback instrument, which could be an e-mailed survey, a feedback form, a pop up survey or any other QuestBack created feedback instrument. Other process mechanisms include, all responses and manual inspection / selection of response to be acted on. As a result, QB Essentials is very flexible in how it helps organizations create action on received feedback.

In any case, the main issue most organizations have when trying to implement action processes on feedback is determining the combination of "feedback to be actioned" and "how to action it".  In other words, hot-alerting feedback for action only works if the "action takers" for that feedback are empowered to act on it in ways that help with the issue. This simply is not the case in most scenarios. So businesses continue to struggle with applying action management on their feedback, even when they have great tools to use like QuestBack.  

So what's different now?  Well, QuestBack is different.  Action Management has been improved in QuestBack Essentials and combined with a Case Management capability to allow customer feedback "issues" to be Highlighted, Status-ed and Actioned - all within the QuestBack Essentials platform. This capability allows new issues to be highlighted, internally discussed and disseminated, decisions to be made and actions determined.  All within short periods of time (minutes or hours potentially vs weeks or months today) To my mind, this is really cool stuff and very valuable potentially to call centers, sales forces, hr teams, etc. Really, any group of people in a business who have to react to the concerns of another group of people. And, it has "hot-alert" automated actioning too.  This combination allows an organization to standardize action taking on certain kinds of issues, while manually intervening on other issues and inspecting / organizing for yet additional kinds of issues - all at the same time.

Combined with QuestBack's Dashboarding capabilities, this lets companies inexpensively seek feedback, organize and implement follow-up actions and processes, report on feedback and actions, and Manage that feedback effectively based on surveys they do using QuestBack Essentials.

I think anyone looking to implement a closed-loop customer feedback process today would do very well to consider QB Essentials and its action management tools.

Stewart Nash
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash/

Continuous vs. Episodic Feedback - Continuous is better

I've recently received a number of survey requests. 

The requests are coming from companies that, apparently, are having business "issues" of one kind or another and are looking for feedback to help them address it. The issues range from "low open rates" on electronic content to subscription cancellations to non visitation to websites. 

It's a good thing that these businesses are seeking feedback. And, late is after all, better than never. The feedback these businesses get will help them address the problems they've noted. Though, their remedial actions will come a lot later and as a result be less effective for their businesses than if their feedback programs were continuous in nature. Furthermore, I can't help but think that if these businesses had on-going customer feedback programs, they probably wouldn't be experiencing the issues that created the need for the surveys they're sending out now. 

Continuous customer feedback is known to be better than episodic customer feedback for understanding customer experience. This doesn't mean that periodic relationship surveying isn't necessary. For most businesses, both continuous feedback surveys and relationship surveys are extremely important for understanding the overall health of the customer relationship.

Businesses that continuously collect, analyze and act on customer feedback are able to detect issues before they become widespread. This means that actions can be taken to mitigate or eliminate issues before they impact too many customer relationships. This often reduces direct costs and even more often avoids indirect costs (typically discounts given to "make things right" for customers impacted by issues).

Continuous analysis of feedback to detect trend changes is the key to a feedback program. After all, data is just that without analysis. Analyzing for change in NPS or CSAT scores, topic popularity, topic sentiment changes, etc., gives the Analyst the insights to visualize what issues might be cropping up in the business. The tools for generating these analytical insights are now both available and reasonably priced for most businesses.

I work with QuestBack AS for surveys and Etuma Ltd. for text analytics. Businesses implementing both are able to get continuous feedback process monitoring and analytics.  

Stewart Nash
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash