EFM's Value Proposition Revisited

What is the real value of Enterprise Feedback Management?

Bruce Temkin's recent article titled: "EFM is Dead" (www.customerexperiencematters.com) stimulated a fair amount of discussion in various blogs and forums devoted to Voice of the Customer issues.  His essential point is that Customer oriented feedback and analysis EFM platforms need to evolve so as to assimilate more streams of feedback data than they currently handle (i.e. mainly survey based feedback).  My thought on the matter:  It's a fair point.  And, is likely to prove out as being true for some businesses and application today, as well as going forward for most. 

My issue with Bruce's line of reasoning is its focus on customer oriented applications of EFM. Where admittedly, vendors are working (struggling?) to incorporate new streams of social media based feedback into their feedback management models.  Yet, EFM's value proposition has always been based on more than just customer feedback.  In many businesses, EFM's primary value proposition has more to do with workforce / talent management than it does with customer experience.  So, to say that EFM should become "Customer Insight and Action" (CIA) when EFM is about customer, partner, employee, investor, training and other applications of feedback (as well as the intersection of insights from those different data sources) seems somewhat premature and maybe just a tad parochial, at least to me.

Given the debate about acronyms, I thought it might add something to the dialogue by revisiting the value proposition offered by EFM platforms.

First.  EFM's value proposition to a business is directly proportional to the number of processes where it is employed.  If you employ feedback management only in your VOC process your payback only comes from improvements based on VOC (which of course can be many).  If you employ EFM in lots of processes, the value proposition can come from lots of insights from many parts of your business.  I've included a graphic below (courtesy QuestBack) showing application areas where EFM is applied in business processes (click the image for an enlarged version).

As you can see, EFM can be applied to Sales, Marketing, Admistration, I/T, Training and HR processes.  And, in multiple ways within each. 

Second.  EFM's value proposition is directly proportional to the value of key business relationships.  Obviously customer relationships are important, even critical, for many businsesses.  Yet, for many businesses, partner relationships, regulator relationships, employee relationships, etc. may have equal or even greater value.  The point: What does it cost you as a business when a key business relationship goes sour and especially if you don't know it is souring?  The larger a business gets, the more key relationships it has. Those relationships should be paid attention to regularly.  EFM, and especially closed-loop EFM (C-EFM?) helps you do this.

Third.  EFM's value proposition is enhanced by its ability to take feedback streams from multiple, divergent data sources and put key types of data into concise metric based form.  An example being Customer Satisfaction juxtaposed with Employee Satisfaction and / or Partner Satisfaction.  Most serious EFM platforms have mechanisms that let businesses "see" the effects of changes in one set of metric data on other sets of metric data.

In short EFM may be a dying acronym.  But EFM's benefit set goes way beyond CIA for most businesses.