Surveying for Feedback/Response Action Management

Periodically I see discussions in articles and LinkedIn forums about the "Death of Surveys".  But, in my view, the on-line survey business is simply transforming from a focus on surveying for data collection to one of surveying for feedback and response action management (F/RAM).  This is particularly true, I think, in the case of relationship surveys (customer, partner, employee, alumni, union member, donor or "membership" types of surveys).  In short, where "relationships" exist between an entity and a population of people, something more than data collection is now necessary. 

In my view, surveying for relationship management purposes is occurring more today because of the growth of social media, on-line chat and mobile device technologies, all of which help businesses collect huge amounts of customer data. So much so, that businesses are almost overwhelmed by it. It's not a coincidence that data analysis, "big" data and data storage vendors are doing well.  All that data needs to be analyzed, correlated, cross referenced and stored.  Yet none of it really triggers businesses to build better relationships with the people they interact with.  Somewhere and some how, somebody has to ask customers how they feel in order to assess relationship quality.  If a business has lots of customers, a feedback/response action management survey is the best way to do that, because the feedback automatically propagates dialogue in a F/RAM process.

Feedback/response action management is a process that many businesses are unfamiliar with.  Its a fair bit more complex than traditional market research.  It relies on customer data to guide how response action management should be implemented and it necessitates the use of a methodological approach (NPS, CSAT, CxM or something similar).  In addition, F/RAM requires that feedback scenarios be modeled or at least thought through, so that appropriate responses can be formulated (i.e. who responds and how when a customer - from country x, with product y and issue z triggers a response action based on their survey feedback). 

A number of on-line survey platforms today can implement an F/RAM process.  Some of the platforms though are expensive to acquire.  My admittedly incomplete list of F/RAM capable tool sets includes: QuestBack (all platforms), Vovici, Medallia, Allegiance and ConFirmIT.  ClickTools and KeySurveys to my understanding only implement F/Ram processes through CRM integration (and ClickTools only for SalesForce). In my experience, almost all the other tools  "out there" are primarily focused on just data collection and analysis.

In my experience there are two critical capabilities that a tool needs to have in order to implement an F/RAM process.  First a tool needs to be able to trigger a real-time follow up action based on a survey response, customer data or a combination of both.  Second, a tool has to be able to link, in real-time, customer data to the survey at a respondent level.  Without these two capabilities F/RAM processes require lots of I/T intervention in order to get survey responses to trigger actions at a respondent level.