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. 

Feedback Management and Social Media

A lot of pundits have positioned social media almost as an alternative to feedback management for "Voice-of-the-Customer" (VOC) initiatives.  And, especially so, when combined with text analytics solutions.  Its always been my theory that social media and feedback management were entirely complementary technologies that when properly integrated would add real value for businesses, and especially for B2C businesses.

To my mind, for businesses, the strength of social media is its ability to "find" new customer populations, new needs for existing products, new problems to address, etc.  And, to have those communities self identify their needs and wants.  It gives companies a real-time mechanism to monitor opinions and ideas.

The challenge has always been in qualifying those needs, wants, issues, challenges, etc., as well as quantifying them within their prospect and customer profiles.  i.e. Does a facebook fan's "like" really mean anything to the business.

QuestBack may have a solution to the qualification/quantification problems with social media.  They have introduced a "Social Insight" product, which allows companies to combine social media and feedback management to collect structured feedback from within social media platforms.  The press announcement can be found here: http://www.questback.com/about-us/activities/press-release-questback-launches-social-media-insight-tool/

Should be very interesting to see the effect that this product has on the market.

Is Your I/T Department the Key to Your Feedback Management Solution?

All two way communication is feedback

One of the things I've come to realize about feedback management is that almost any two-way communication is potentially feedback generating in some way.  Under this standard hardly any feedback that could be captured in a business actually is.  Now, I grant that it would be overwhelming, not to mention pointless, to try and capture all the feedback that a business could conceiveably capture.  I merely point out that most organizations don't think about feedback from a "Big Picture" standpoint.  Most only look at feedback in the context of a very specific business problem, often one caused by a lack of specific feedback. 

Very few  businesses (I've never heard of any) try to break down their feedback into all the different kinds of feedback they get (or should get).  They don't collect and organize enough feedback to really understand what's happening with their businesses.  As a result, most still react too slowly to change. And, when they do react they often overreact. The lesson: more frequent and timely feedback helps an organization learn sooner and react better to business change. 

What's needed is a methodology for understanding an organization's feedback management needs.

Given that no one I've seen has proposed a comprehensive methodology for understanding a businesses needs for feedback, I think that the approach QuestBack has come up with is worthy of a discussion. 

QuestBack has coined the term "Event Driven Feedback Management".  Event Driven is a way to break down the "Big Picture" - the overwhelming amount of feedback a business receives - into those highly manageable and very valuable nuggets of knowledge that are distillable from the daily life of a process.  The theory behind event driven feedback is that any business process lifecycle can be broken down into a series of events that define its life history.  Each event is a key point at which feedback is highly relevant and value producing.  In an event driven world collecting the right amount of feedback is a simple matter of defining your events then collecting feedback after each of those events during the normal operation of the process you are in.

Interestingly, most businesses (and particularly large businesses with I/T architects in their  I/S departments) already understand their key business events.  Large businesses have mostly mapped their business events as part of their enterprise architecture models.  They've had to, in order to develop databases and data warehouses that support their key business processes and store the information relevant to each event occurring within those processes.   

I think applying the same methodology for breaking down a business' data and processes can be used to break down a businesses feedback collection and analysis needs. 

An interesting thought indeed that your corporate Information Architect may be the key to an effective resolution of your company's feedback managment challenges.

Customer Engagement and Net Promoter

I recently worked on a feedback management project for a large local club soccer organization trying to help them assess their relations with members.  In the survey we asked the "Likely to recommend" question and came up with over 50% promoters and an NPS of 23.  Without going into detail about the survey, what struck me was how engaged this club's promoters were in its success.  We asked promoters how often they had recommended the club in the last year.  Over 95% indicated one or more recommendations.  Over half recommended more than five (5) times.  And, about a quarter recommended more than ten (10) times.  Many promoters indicated, via open answers that they were continuing to work on behalf of the club by actively referring people.  Clearly, a very engaged group. 
This particular club is premium priced (2x the cost of many other club programs), operating in a very competitive market and is a relatively new entrant.  So, it seems to me that the engaged-ness of their promoters has largely been the driver of their successful growth. 
  
In thinking about engagement by this group of promoters it occurs to me that the "likely-to-recommend" question is a natural "trigger" question for identifying engaged customers.  But, based on open answer responses from "neutrals" and even "detractors" at the high end of the detractor scale, I think engagement questions should be posed to more than just "promoters".  In this survey, as well as others I've done, I've seen enough similarity in open answer responses from neutrals and "high end" detractors to believe that substantial levels of leverageable engagement exist amongst those customer subsets to at least be asking them how often they are recommending, as well as one or more other questions that indicate how engaged they are. 

The next challenge of course, would be to leverage engagement amongst these "lower tier" engaged customers (i.e. neutrals and high end detractors with similar characteristics to promoters).  Doing that requires Acting on their feedback quickly and effectively to deal with the issue(s) that put them into the neutral or detractor bucket in the first place.  It would, I think, also require that something else be done that encourages "promoter" behaviors they are already partially exhibiting.