Learning more about Action Management in EFM procesess

Action Management and Tracking in EFM systems

A number of EFM tool vendors and consulting organizations have really been beating the drums lately on the topic of Action Management.  So, I thought I'd post on the topic and ask for feedback from interested parties.   So, I've built a survey on the topic.  If you click the link below you can take the survey.

https://web.questback.com/demo_nash_stewart_qbbostonusa/action_mgt/

What is Feedback Action Management? 

My definition:  "Any process designed to follow up, track, report on, or otherwise manage alerts and associated feedback generated by a feedback management system."

So, what constitutes an "Alert"?

My definition: "An alert is an automatically generated message or event coming from a feedback management system that is based on specific feedback from a survey respondent (or other "inputter of feedback")."

Research from Gartner Group and others has consistently shown that organizations generally are ineffective at taking action on customer feedback.  Typically, the research shows 10% or less of the organizations polled as taking any follow up action on customer feedback.  Yet, industry marketing touts the benefits of taking action on customer feedback.  And, the EFM industry is undoubtedly growing at a fairly rapid pace.  And, has been for several years. 

Clearly, taking action on customer feedback is a desired course of action for businesses.  But, there must be a major challenge with it for so many enterprises to not be doing so.  In my experience, enterprises struggle with managing customer feedback generally, except where that feedback is very focused.  Customer service processes for instance, where most businesses today do some type of post-interaction survey related to completed transactions.  In my opinion, the reason this application of Action Management works is that it is typically driven by the enterprises CRM system and is managed using the CRM system's tools.

In more complex feedback processes where action taking is harder to assign or the action that might be taken is harder to determine, I think enterprises still have major struggles managing feedback.  The reason is lack of system support for the management of Actions. 

It's my belief and experience that EFM tool vendors are working to add useful Action Management capabilities to their tool suites, so that action management can be effectively applied beyond the customer service domain.  I'll be very interested to see what the survey produces for results.

Comments on Gartner's VoC Thinking

  

Gartner recently published a research report (# G00201380 if you're interested) outlining their CRM team's thoughts on the importance of VoC initiatives to the various constituencies that make up the CRM universe (Sales, Marketing and Customer Service). After reading the report I thought I'd share a couple of comments.

Of Gartner's 5 "Key Findings", two stand out as being closely related to "closed-loop" feedback processes:

• "Over 90% of organizations fail to get back to the customer after a customer service survey".
• "Failure to act on the customer's voice defeats the point of listening".

Of Gartner's recommendations one seems particularly relevant to these two key findings: 

• "Create a mechanism for the timely distribution, tracking and action of relevant insights from aggregated VoC data to each stakeholder in the organization, from the frontline customer agent to the CEO".

In my opinion, A "mechaninsm for timely distribution, tracking and action of insights" is a Feedback Management System.  Gartner implies that you have to create your feedback management system.  Or, have one custom built by an integrator / consultant.  However, and fortunately, there are a number of commercially available feedback management platforms that are relatively easy to set up and implement with internal resources and minimal vendor assistance.

Customer Engagement - Reaching Point of Value (PoV) with your customers

The phase of customer relationship development where businesses most often fail, and where customer feedback can be enormously helpful is Customer Engagement - The time between purchase and receipt of value from the purchase by the customer.  Bruce Temkin in an insightful post at his blog: Customer Experience Matters documents the phenomenon and suggests that businesses pay much closer attention to post purchase customer interactions, with a view towards accelerating the time between Point of Purchase and Point of Value.   Click here for the article

Adding our input to Bruce's (Full disclosure - QuestBack and Customer Experience Matters have no relationship business or otherwise), Customer Feedback Management can add enormous value in this phase of the customer lifecycle by helping to:

• Identify customers who are not achieving value from a purchase
• Understand "root causes" for not achieving value
• Propagating information about non-value achieving customers to relevant "actors" in your business (Account Manager, Customer Support, Sales or Product Management, etc.)
• Monitor progress towards value achievement by customers over time (validating the actions your "actor" are taking or not taking)

As vendors of a Feedback Management platform designed to facilitate the propagation of customer feedback to relevant internal actors and the monitoring of actions taken on customer perceptions over time, we see how well designed customer feedback programs can help businesses ensure more of their customers reach Point of Value.  Of course, customers who reach PoV are more likely to be loyal, provide good word-of-mouth reference and stay customers longer than those who do not.  So, ROI from customer feedback in this relationship development activity is very high.

QuestBack has a defined process for supporting this kind of post purchase customer feedback.  If you Click Here you'll be brought to a QuestBack web page documenting the process (Graphic below if you don't want to visit).

As you can see, our perspective is that customer engagement is but one of several customer relationship lifecycle phases that should be monitored with feedback management.  By carefully doing so, a great many insights can be attained about how and why customers are attracted to you, how and why they purchase, engage and possibly leave over time.

Customer Experience Megatrend #1

Propagating customer insight remains a major challenge for most enterprises.

Bruce Temkin, in his latest publication "8 Customer Experience Megatrends" lists "Customer Insight Propagation" as #1. We agree. In surveys we've done over the last year - in which many of our readers have participated - we've found that a high percentage of organizations report challenges with using customer feedback effectively. Some of these challenges were attributed to customer feedback management process, some to architecture / technology and some to organizational issues with customer feedback ownership.

Temkin's report is available here: 8 Customer Experience Megatrends

It makes a lot of sense to us that Customer Insight Propagation would make the top of the list. Businesses have made large investments in CRM and Data Warehouse technologies, as well as in market research, in order to accumulate customer data on purchase history, preferences, buying process and much more. What often lacks is an ability to combine these stores of customer information dynamically with Voice of the Customer data in ways that make resulting customer insights easy to distill and distribute.

In our opinion, the majority of the value to be had from Customer Feedback comes only after it is filtered or distilled into actionable insights.  Actionable insights that are dynamically distilled from customer feedback are especially value adding, because they are actionable immediately and the benefits of immediate action are often very large. 

A quick note on the value of metrics when combined with dynamic feedback distillation and delivery.

When you have the infrastructure to distill and deliver customer insights dynamically to key internal actors, metrics can be very powerful.  This is the value premise behind Net Promoter and other customer loyalty / advocacy metrics.  They simplify the process of insight distillation by the design of the metric question and answer scales.  By combining a given net promoter answer with other data like customer value, region, products, etc., distillation of feedback gets relatively easy and doesn't require sophisticated statistical analysis to create actionable insight.  Adding "internal actor" information provides someone to deliver insights to for action. 

QuestBack is especially valuable if you don't have infrastructure to distill and deliver customer insights to internal actors.

QuestBack offers an out-of-the-box solution to this challenge. By feeding QuestBack data from your CRM or Data Warehouse prior to launching customer surveys, you can easily contextualize Voice of the Customer information based on any characteristic your data stores contain about your customers. We then provide built in mechanisms to dynamically propagate the insights produced to people in your business that are most able to use the insight.

Note: Temkin Group is not affiliated with QuestBack Boston. We just find a lot of what he says to be really insightful.

To learn more, visit our website at: www.questback.com

Doing Closed Loop Customer Feedback Management Right

Thoughts on doing "Closed Loop" Feedback Right

Lots of "good news" is associated with "closed loop" customer feedback processes.   Loyalty, retention and better insights into customer behavior are high amongst them.  Yet closed loop processes turn out to be stubbornly difficult to implement. In the past I've talked about the 5 challenges enterprises face in trying to implement closed-loop feedback processes. 

1. Corporate hierarchies and information flows.
2. "Ownership" of the customer.
3. Out of context data.
4. Customer survey processes and platforms not designed for "loop closing". 
5. Managing the feedback itself.

All five challenges have to do with managing customer feedback.  Collection of feedback is, today, a given for most enterprises.  So, organizing the business to utilize feedback, designing processes that "close-the-loop" and selecting the tools and technologies to use for feedback management has become the real challenge. 

The new question:  What is the appropriate level of process for your enterprise to ensure the maximum advantage from customer feedback?

The answer:  It depends.  And, some of the dependencies are:

- Size of your customer base
- Value of a customer relationship (revenue, profit, reference ability, etc.)
- Dispersion of customers (Geographic, market vertical, etc.)
- Size of your enterprise
- Diversity of your enterprise (#business units, products, markets served, etc.)
- Dispersion of your enterprise (geographic, market vertical, etc.)

Generally speaking, the less complexity inherent in your customer base and enterprise, the less customer feedback management process you'll need.  As a consequence less resource will be needed for managing customer feedback, as well as for acquiring tools and technology.  The opposite is also true.  More complexity equates to more CFM investment.

How to organize for CFM?

• Define your KPIs, potential actions based on those KPIs, ownership of the actions and tracking of the effect on KPIs based on actions taken. 
• Segment customers based on revenue, geography, profitability, reference ability, and other descriptors you have in your databases
• Segment the people in your enterprise based on role and responsibility so you will know who potential "loop-closers" are.
• Determine who gets what customer feedback
• Design loop-closing actions (i.e. tasks based on specific feedback)
• Monitor your KPIs over time for change

For big, multi-business, multi-product, multi-location enterprises this process is very involved and often facilitated by management consulting firms like Bain, Accenture, IBM consulting and others.  It’s also a very big ticket item. 

For mid-size firms it can be much simpler, though still complex and consulting assistance may or may not be needed.

For smaller firms this process can be an in-house or a vendor assisted effort.

Some additional thoughts

Keep in mind that feedback collection processes may already exist and could be providing much of the data you need.  It may also be that existing data collection processes will need to be revisited.  Many data collection tools (survey monkey, zoomerang, key, and others) stop at data collection and don't really support implementation of loop-closing processes or management of feedback.  If you are using such products now and want more feedback management capability you may want to considering upgrading to more sophisticated CFM platforms.

CRM systems can play a valuable role in managing customer feedback.  But, they also present a set of challenges when combined with CFM tools.  Specifically integration.  And, often the CRM system itself will need redesign (new fields for feedback data, new processes for tasking).  The CRM system will likely need to be adapted to accept specific data streams from your feedback process and then kick off tasks for the people assigned to close the loop.  You should expect to use a fair amount of I/T support if you plan to use CFM in conjunction with CRM.

QuestBack and some other vendors - offer CFM systems that perform data collection, analysis, and action assignment / management capabilities.  These vendors offer a less complex and typically more cost effective approach to upgrading data collection processes to CFM processes.  They are especially valid for smaller firms with less complex customer profiles and organizations, less I/T capability, and smaller budgets.

A final thought

To be successful with CFM, like with any other business process, it's important to understand what you want to achieve within the context of who you are and your existing capabilities.  Selecting relevant KPIs is also important.  Much has already been written about CFM KPIs (see anything on Net Promoter), so I won't go into that here.  But, if you think through your customer feedback needs, your ability to manage using feedback and the capabilities of your CFM tools, you can overcome the challenges and begin closing the loop with your customers more often and to good effect on business growth.