Does a "C.I.A." equal an "E.F.M." ?

 Some comments on Temkin's Six "D's" of Closed Loop VOC systems

"20 best practices across these 6 Ds that will increasingly push companies to invest in Customer Insight and Action (CIA) platforms" - Bruce Temkin.

I'm a big fan of Bruce Temkin and his Customer Experience Matters blog.  So, when he released his recent report titled: "Voice Of The Customer Programs Grow Up" and blogged that businesses will be forced to invest in CIA platforms - what I call Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) systems,  I took notice. 

As someone who personally uses, sells and supports a robust EFM system (called QuestBack) it is nice to hear an eminent customer experience persona like Bruce talk about the need for businesses to acquire EFM systems to help them manage their feedback. 

As it happens, QuestBack (http://www.questback.com/) offers out-of-the-box support for (but maybe not a complete solution to) five of Temkin's six "D's" (Detect, Disseminate, Diagnose, Design and Deploy).  And, I'm not sure any system supports the sixth "D" (Discuss).  More important though, I think, is Bruce's assertion that market research organizations need to change or risk becoming obsolete. 

My own view is that market research organizations need to change their perspectives about feedback, from a "research" perspective, to a "feedback" perspective.  This isn't to say that market research tools should be abandoned, just that market and customer data needs to be viewed as feedback contributing to a greater (wholistic?) knowledge of "the customer".  Where today research is often developed in isolation from the wholistic customer viewpoint, often being "siloed" to products or departments.

It also seems to me that with so much new data available to organizations via social media, organizations would be well served to monitor those data streams, extract key findings regularly and seek to validate (or invalidate) those findings via structured ad-hoc feedback (surveys) to their existing stakeholders.  By doing so, they would create a process that takes maximum advantage of the available technologies for listening and diagnosing market and customer trends, as well as the rapid action management tools available to them through EFM systems.

At any rate here's a "shout out" to Bruce for another very interesting report.  The report costs money ($195.00).  But you can read his executive summary and a couple of his posts about it on his site.  Link is::  http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/6-ds-for-voice-of-the-customer-programs/

The Survey is Dead - "Long Live the Survey"

This has become a hot topic in the LinkedIn forums I follow as well as in some of the voice-of-the-customer focused media. The headline would lead you to believe that social media based feedback will over time replace customer surveys both for Market Research and Customer Management purposes.

In my opinion, social media may actually increase both the frequency as well as the value received from customer surveys.  Here's my logic.  When an issue is surfaced via a social media channel, organizations need to answer at least four questions when determining response:

• What is the issues' potential effect on the business
• What is it's relative importance
• Who owns it
• Who's going to respond 

For some issues this will be easy and determinable through the social media dialogue mechanism.  For more substantial issues though, it will require answers to those four questions. Much of the answer determining data I believe will have to come from surveys. So as issues surface, surveys will have to be sent out to put some structure and context behind the social media generated data.

Secondly, surveys and especially web-based customer surveys, simply provide organizations with too much valuable, actionable feedback (at a very low cost) to stop being the core feedback management tool for most companies. As EFM technology improves and cost-of-ownership declines this technology will be deployed by more organizations, more often than it is now.

Having said all that, social media is a wonderful new tool for listening to customer (and other constituency) feedback. It allows for the almost immediate gathering of qualitative feedback.  Which alone, and when used with survey based feedback, can provide very rich insights.  In the absence of structured feedback though, this unstructured form of feedback might just as easily be not valuable, or worse resource consuming while not adding value.

Lastly, it seems to me that social media, because of its interactive nature, could be expensive to rely on as a feedback mechanism.  People, after all, have to monitor and act on it (as well as decide how to act), determine if it should be acted on to begin with and potentially do it all quickly at all hours of the day or night. 

In the end I think Social media will be additive to the toolset used for listening to customers and creating dialogues with them.  What its best uses will eventually be, I think is still an open question.

Convergence of CFM and VOC - Some additional thoughts...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on this topic with the idea in mind that technology convergence - mainly feedback management and text analytics - would eventually change the way organizations manage their feedback by providing a single application where feedback of different types could reside.  After doing some more reading (and thinking) on the subject, it seems to me that this convergence will take a long time to have any real organizational impacts.  Mainly, because entrenched business functions within organizations don't easily change the way they do things.

A couple of my thoughts on how converged Enterprise Feedback Management and Text Analytics solutions will actually operate in the real world.

I suspect that for organizations that employ EFM today, text analytics will be an add-on capability with two main uses:  To provide some automation for analyzing verbatims from surveys, and possibly, to provide a mechanism to merge at least some of their unstructured feedback with the structured feedback they get now. More importantly though, for EFM vendors facing increased competition from lower cost feedback management tools, text analytics will provide some "glue" to bind customer's more closely to them.

For organizations that mainly rely on unstructured feedback mechanisms today, convergence may mean easier access to, or possibly, more intelligent approaches to structured data gathering. Text analytics can help to create a structure for unstructured data.  But, because its hard to control for respondent profile (ensuring the response isn't all from the "wrong" sets of people) in unstructured data streams, whatever structure and results come out of the unstructured data analysis will have to be validated by surveys, which provide more controlled sets of results.

In the end little real change is likely to occur in organizations from this technology convergence. But lots of expensive software should get sold along the way.