Operational Feedback as Strategic Input

I've been posting recently on the topic of Operationalizing Market Research.  My focus has been on how research approaches and techniques can be applied to generating operationally significant insights (meaning useful for solving day-to-day business challenges).  In this post, I thought I'd take the opposite perspective and talk about how tactical or operational feedback processes can provide strategically valuable insights.

I work regularly with businesses to help them build and benefit from "closed-loop" stakeholder feedback processes.  In my experience, with my own clients as well as with other organizations where I'm familiar with their feedback management processes, I see the primary goal for feedback being operational in nature. i.e. Specific feedback is desired for a specific purpose.  And granted, much of the value that stems from that feedback, whether customer or employee oriented, is tactically useful, identifying a need for some type of short-term response and providing enough data to contextualize the action required.

Yet, I believe that operational feedback, if correctly designed and implemented, can and should be a strategic input too.  Take for instance customer satisfaction surveys.  In C-Sat surveys, lots of operational data is collected, disseminated and acted on, usually by account managers or customer support, with action triggers being based on responses to satisfaction or loyalty questions.  In C-Sat surveys other questions normally are asked about "drivers" loyalty or satisfaction. Product or service "quality", "effectiveness vs. competition", "value" or other characteristics are asked about so as to provide context regarding possible reasons for a satisfaction or loyalty rating.  This additional contextual data provides the required insight about customer issues or opportunities that dictate how a response to feedback should be formulated and implemented at an operational level.  However, in this example, the operational feedback becomes strategically valuable if two things occur:

1. Feedback data on "product/service quality", "effectiveness vs. competition", "value", etc. is connected with customer information like "account category", "industry", "geography", etc. 
2. If feedback data is gathered (and connected) regularly over time.

By doing these two things with operational feedback, strategic insights result.  For instance, "unsatisfied customers" can become "unsatisfied large customers in industry A and geography B who find "quality" to be poor, "competitiveness" neutral and "value" low.  Though there is operational insight in this example (we need to talk to these customers right now!), if this data were to persist over multiple survey cycles and across more industries or geographies, a strategic challenge (or challenges) would be highlighted. i.e. Are we marketing to the right customers? Are we devoting the right mix of resources to the Product or Service we sell?  Etc.

Strategic insights have long been the province of market research organizations.  With the broad deployment of EFM tools for operational feedback, data is now being collected on an operational basis that with a small amount of effort can be transformed into a strategic input to be used by senior management.  All that has to happen is for companies to pay attention to it.  And, use products like QuestBack that facilitate the transformation.