Benefits of EFM compared to web survey tools

Why you shouldn't "monkey" around with your customer's survey feedback.

I've encountered many companies who use inexpensive web-survey tools in their customer feedback initiatives.  These people are always interested in the added capabilities offered by EFM versus their web-survey solutions.  But, on balance they are skeptical about spending money to achieve the added benefits an EFM based approach and tool offers.  So, I thought it would add some value to the discussion to revisit EFM's value proposition versus web-survey tools.

Admittedly, some web-based EFM products cost a lot of money.  Some cost many thousands of dollars per year.  However, others (like QuestBack) are priced so that smaller businesses can afford them.  Point is: there's a wide range of EFM price points.  But, almost always, if used for customer feedback it's highly likely that their all-in cost of ownership is lower than the cheap web survey tool.  Needless to say, there are dependencies when calculating EFM's benefits versus survey tools.  Customer lifetime value, customer churn rates, customer acquisition cost, win-back cost, etc., have to be considered.  Of course, they should be part of the calculation because if you are doing customer feedback it's probably because you want preserve or improve customer relationships, reduce churn, lower customer acquisition cost, etc.

A couple of EFM benefit calculation scenarios (there are many others):

What is the value of a lost customer?  If your customers have high "lifetime" value, the cost of losing just one customer is high (by definition) and thus painful.  Losing one because your cheap web survey tool couldn't automatically notify an account manager of an issue after receiving feedback raises the cost of that cheap web survey tool by the value of the account you lost.  Losing multiple accounts because of a "follow-up gap" compounds the cost.  My belief is that companies with customer lifetime values above five thousand dollars should be using some kind of EFM approach and tool.  If your company meets this test and does customer feedback using one of the cheap web-survey tools out there, I'd suggest you are almost certainly and unnecessarily losing customers that you might not have to lose.

What is the cost of pursuing the wrong opportunity?  Suffice to say, companies with long, complex sales cycles have to test their opportunities periodically for alignment to customer needs, budgets, technology environments, etc..  Often this is done through account reviews or occasionally it is outsourced to an agency as a form of market research.  But, if your company supports opportunity analysis using a web-survey process you are likely missing opportunities to react quickly to changes in customer needs during the sales cycle and spending money (and FTE time) where you shouldn't.

EFM's Value Add
EFM guarantees that a person (or persons) in your company will be automatically tasked with reacting to feedback from a customer person who provided that feedback.  Web survey tools don't enable this.  The value add of EFM comes from the action taking this enables. 

Other EFM Benefits:

In addition to action-ability, EFM tools offer other capabilities to find and use insights that surface from customer feedback.  EFM tools have built-in analytical, reporting and dashboard tools that allow group level customer insights to be quickly identified and distributed to the managers or teams in your company that need them.  This is often done in real-time (Something QuestBack makes possible).  In contrast web survey tools tend to simply push data out to other systems (MS EXCEL anyone?).  Where a person has to then build the analyses and reports.  An inefficient, expensive and unnecessary use of FTE time.  And, often an overlooked cost of web-survey tools.

At the end of the day...
You shouldn't monkey around with your customer's feedback. It could be dangerous to your company's health.  Web-survey tools have much higher costs than their license fees.  And, they don't actually resolve your needs for timely and action-able customer feedback.

If you would like to learn more about me or QuestBack my LinkedIn profile is:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
Click Here to Try QuestBack

Etuma Text Analysis - Cloud based, fast and effective. All at ~$3K / month

A couple of months ago I posted on text analysis vendor Etuma - www.etuma.com   (Click here to read).

At the time, it seemed to me that an affordable, cloud based text analysis solution like Etuma would offer businesses an easy alternative to the expensive, harder to use solutions currently on the market.  And, could potentially broaden the market for text analysis in general, by allowing companies with lower budget thresholds to apply powerful text analysis technology to smaller scale business problems.

As I've become more familiar with Etuma's capabilities and seen it in action, I've been increasingly impressed. For example, I recently loaded an Excel file representing the results of a survey I conducted for a local soccer club.   With no "tuning" of the lexicon and no setup from Etuma, it was able to give me very useful topic and sentiment insights on a data set it had zero experience with. 

Because I loaded the survey results from an Excel file that included all the other (non verbatim) responses, Etuma also immediately allowed me to segment verbatims using the responses to non-verbatim questions as background variables. For instance, I could aggregate verbatims from Promoters, Passives and Detractors and see what topics they were talking about and see how they felt about those topics.  I could then drill down to the actual verbatims in each response "bucket" (Promoter, passive, etc) for further analysis.

Granted, I have some expertise in customer surveying. So, I'm not a total neophyte when it comes to text analysis.  But, by no means do I know anything about programming a text analysis solution and I didn't have to with Etuma.   So, to me, this test showed that people with reasonable experience levels in customer surveying could take Etuma and quickly use it as part of their VOC, Customer Experience or Customer Feedback strategy with very little assistance from Etuma.

Having some understanding of how text analysis solutions are priced today, it is quite remarkable to me that for around $3,000 a month Etuma can process 5, 6 or 7 thousand text items per month, while providing powerful and user friendly tools for data analysis, report design and dashboarding the analyses for business end users. 

For businesses with ongoing customer survey processes (either transactional or relationship) and generating 10-50,000 responses a year (assuming 2-5 verbatims each) text analysis is currently pretty much out of reach due to the cost of the solutions available.  Etuma puts text analysis back into these companies "wheel houses".

If anyone is interested in an Etuma Trial just click here

Anyone who'd like to speak with me about Etuma360 can reach me at: stew.nash2010@mail.com

Stewart Nash
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
 

Referrals from Customer Feedback - More impactful than ever

I was talking with a potential new customer recently who articulated a business challenge with their referrals process and was thinking about using a customer feedback based process to help with it going forward.  I had posted on this topic back in 2009 in a post titled: "Revving Up Your Referrals Engine with Customer Feedback"  (Click Here to Read).  After reading through my post, I realized it needed updating based on the changes in technology and culture we've undergone since that time. 

Essentially, changes in technology and culture have made customer referrals an even more potent and high impact source of new business opportunities than they ever were before.  Referrals or Testimonials used to be used by marketers to validate sales claims of capability, reliability or ROI.  In today's business culture "sales" often doesn't get a chance to make any claims until potential buyers have determined capability, reliability and ROI.  Buyers do this by researching on the internet and checking out referrals or testimonials they find before engaging with vendors.  As a result businesses need as many referrals as they can get and need them to be fresh, cogent and widely available to potential buyers doing research via the internet.

My old post discussed five different ways to leverage customer feedback towards building a self refreshing referrals "engine".  

• Identify referral candidates.  They are "promoters", "apostles" or "raving fans".
• Understand a candidate's willingness (and intensity) to engage in your marketing.
• To create actual engagement with referral candidates (via Closed Loop follow up)
• To feed CRM processes with referral information.
• To continuously provide new or refreshed referrals.

Since 2009 technology changes, mobile and social media in particular, have enabled feedback derived referrals to have rapid and powerful business impacts.  Today, it's possible to launch a web survey and immediately start receiving responses from automatically identified potential referral candidates.  Then, using an alert or notification process, to quickly inspect comments for usable remarks.  After selecting referral candidates, permission forms can be automatically  provided to them and, after grant (anonymously or by attribution), their comments "flowed" through to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or a web page.

This process can take a few minutes to a few hours or can almost even be continuous if feedback is implemented via event driven processes such as customer support or through social media itself.  The "time-to-impact" from survey to referral to business value can be very short.

EFM systems (like QuestBack) enable these types of dynamic feedback driven referral processes.  What's remarkable though, is how cost effective this type of referral engine is for businesses.  When I was a "pup" in the marketing world, a referral came about via an interview with a customer followed by a draft write up, an approval by the customer and only then could the it be used in a product brief or as part of a story in a publication.  Each referral cost thousands of dollars to generate and use.  Today, using EFM, a referral can be identified, accessed and deployed to market for a few dollars or maybe tens of dollars.

Why more businesses aren't using EFM in this way surprises me.

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.