Some characteristics of "Great" feedback management programs

Many organizations today have programs, initiatives and technology (EFM) for gathering and managing customer, employee or other constituency feedback.  As with many new technologies, lots of them haven't received the benefits they expected.  In my opinion this is because they are still doing "research" and not "feedback management".  I think these organizations have simply swapped EFM in for something else they were doing (outsourced market research mostly).  But, haven't changed their feedback approach to "engagement" with customers, employees or other constituents.  As a result, they don't realize their feedback management programs could be giving them a lot more than they get today. 

So how to tell if a feedback management program works well?  My anecdotal thoughts on how to tell if a feedback management program is working:

• Business users clamor for the data coming from the EFM platform and use it, unprompted, to interact with the customers, prospects, partners, employees, etc.  This is especially the case if no "top down" management edicts are required.  If "line" managers, directors and vps want the data, use it and act on it, its probably a good program.
• Processes simply wouldn't function nearly as effectively without the feedback.  Whether it's customer support, lead generation, learning management or anything else, if the objective of the process can't be accomplished without feedback its a sign of "good" feedback management.
• Customers (or other constituencies) get anxious about not being asked for feedback and say so to sales or support people.  This indicates the feedback management program is perceived as valuable by customers.
• Incentives.  If you don't need them to achieve reasonable response rates (25%+), your feedback program is probably delivering value to your constituents and is "good".

In my opinion good feedback management programs have some defining and yet easy-to-evaluate attributes:

• Win-Win.  Good feedback initiatives provide "wins" for everybody involved.  Those providing feedback benefit by doing so as much, or more, than those receiving it. 
• Closed Loops.  Good feedback programs continually "close the loop".  Moreover, it's done on a one-to-one basis. 
• Time investment.  Organizations with good feedback management programs invest substantial amounts of staff time to respond individually to each person giving them feedback. 
• Expectations met. All feedback gathering activity (as opposed to research) creates some  expectation of action or dialogue.  Good feedback initiatives take this into consideration and ensure any expectations are met. 

If you aren't sure about the benefits your feedback management initiative is generating, it's easy to ask some pertinent questions: Does your customer "win" by giving you feedback?  Are you always closing loops? Does your staff invest time regularly to respond to feedback?  Are you meeting the expectations your respondents have for follow up (are you closing the loop in the right way)?

The benefits of doing feedback management "right" are compelling, with increased profitability typically accruing to organizations that do it well.  It seems to me that more organizations could be doing it well using these simple guideposts.

More on Operationalized Research

In my last post I talked about concept, and reality, of operationalized research and how it's changing the EFM marketplace.  But I was a bit disjointed in my presentation.  So, I thought a little  clarification was in order.

The key concept: The more rapidly an insight can be discovered and acted upon, the more valuable the discovery/actioneering mechanism is.  My contention is that EFM tools that automate insight discovery and action processes are more "valuable" to a business than those that require manual intervention in insight discovery or insight action-eering.

I closed the post with the statement: "By applying operationalized research capabilities to social media based feedback, businesses will be able to accelerate their understanding of prospects, customers and markets".  My thought was that speed of insight discovery and action-eering is even more important when the feedback source is a social media channel.

As many of my customers can attest, I've been very exited about QuestBack's new ability to implement it's Ask & Act process on Facebook based feedback (More info on QuestBack Social Insight).  Businesses that use QuestBack to implement "Act" processes on Facebook  feedback can designate staff to receive "rules" based insights using QuestBack surveys running inside Facebook via a Facebook application.  Those people can then immediately act on those insights with actions taken being delivered via Facebook messaging or e-mail. 

The words "research" and "operational" are not typically used in conjunction.  They in fact connote different processes.  But, QuestBack, and to be fair, a few other EFM vendors have succeeded in developing solutions that allow research to be "operationalized" using social media.  Businesses or membership organizations with Facebook strategies could benefit from deploying this kind of solution, as it will help them utilize staff more effectively, respond more rapidly to issues and opportunities in their markets and promote their responsiveness to customers.

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.

Operationalizing Research - EFM's Changing Landscape

The EFM marketplace has recently undergone lots of change.  Companies are merging, the technology itself is evolving to new platforms like mobile and social media, the model is migrating increasingly to "do-it-yourself" vs. outsourced, new technologies like text analytics are being incorporated into EFM and integration with other "cloud" technologies is accelerating.
  
All this has me thinking about the nature of feedback, how it's being used by businesses and how that is changing.  In my experience businesses work with two types of feedback, operational feedback, and for lack of a better term, "research" feedback.  I think that the changes I've outlined have blurred distinctions between the two.  And, that this will have a substantial impact on how businesses work with feedback data of all kinds in the future.

To me, operational feedback differs from research in two key ways: 
- The business need to take follow up actions on it. 
- And, its usefulness in building KPIs.   
Otherwise, operational and research feedback don't differ much.  Of course, it's arguable (and maybe true) that operational feedback is not accurate enough for scientific conclusion.  But, it seems to me that it can be made much more accurate by adding more "background" variables prior to solicitation (to establish population differentiation).  And, by managing respondent populations with filters afterwards (on the assumption that enough respondents participate to provide enough data). 
At the end of the day both types of feedback are simply data.  What typically differentiates research from operational feedback is not the feedback, it's the depth of analysis applied to the data. 
Looking at the many recent marketplace changes, EFM vendors focused on operationalizing research appear to be having success.  I think the business need to quickly understand and act on insights derived from complex combinations of feedback and "background data" is driving that success.
 
I believe social media is extending this market trend.  By applying operationalized research capabilities to social media based feedback, businesses will be able to accelerate their understanding of prospects, customers and markets.  And, to therefore "compete" more effectively.  If I had to guess, I would say that businesses will migrate to EFM vendors who can help them operationalize social media derived feedback.

Facebook based - Closed Loop Feedback

A couple of weeks ago I posted a note about QuestBack's new add-on module for collecting feedback from an organization's facebook friends.  As I have been learning more about the new QuestBack Social Insight product for facebook, I've become more impressed with its capabilities.  In particular, QuestBack's ability to "layer" a closed loop process on top of facebook derived feedback. 

Think about it, today you need to have people paying attention to your facebook page simply to respond to feedback.  With the new QuestBack product you can ask people to give you feedback, then rely on QuestBack to automatically route that feedback to the correct people in your company.  And, to provide the mechanism for actually "closing the loop" with facebook based feedback providers.  In my mind a pretty cool new capability. 

So how might this new facebook feedback mechanism be deployed?  A couple of ideas immediately come to mind:  Customer Support, Lead Generation and New Product Development.  With QuestBack running on a facebook page, customer support requests can be taken and processed via a quick web survey. The loop can be quickly and easily closed when a support rep gets the QuestBack notification and replies by e-mail from within QuestBack.  Same thing with leads.  Your sales guys will love it.  New product or service ideas can be collected and presented quickly and easily to product management people, who can then "close the loop" by entering into a QuestBack based dialogue with the facebook "friend" who provided the feedback.

Up until now, closing the loop on facebook based feedback was time consuming and expensive.  QuestBack makes it just another part of your closed loop feedback process.