Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, once stated that there are only two sources of competitive advantage: 1) The ability to learn more about customers faster than the competition, and 2) The ability to turn that learning into action faster than the competition. At the heart of any successful business, in other words, is a dedication to customer feedback. Without systems for organizing that customer feedback, however, companies can’t effectively translate it into action.
In the early days of market research, many companies’ surveying efforts were disorganized, often due to poor coordination between departments. For instance, the marketing department, sales section, and accounting team could each send out separate surveys measuring customer satisfaction. Without some form of organization, all of these survey results stay stranded in each department. Customer feedback isn’t fully utilized under this informal surveying approach.
As an example, let’s say that a certain company's marketing department conducts a phone survey measuring customer satisfaction regarding company communication. They want to learn which sales communication methods are the most effective. Although no questions mention billing preferences, several survey respondents mention that would prefer to be billed online, rather than via snail mail. The accounting department would love to gain such insight into customer preferences, but they never receive it because the marketing department doesn’t see the value of such feedback.
In addition to under-utilizing customer feedback, a problem with this sort of scattered approach to customer feedback is that management has no way to see the bigger picture, in order to act on customer requests and steer the company toward long-term success. Another weakness has to do with maintaining a healthy pool of customers to survey. No one likes to answer the same questions repeatedly, and customers become irritated when asked for feedback too frequently. Finally, long-term trends are difficult to track without a method of organizing customer feedback. It’s impossible to assess customer engagement, customer loyalty, or any other feedback metric without a consistent approach.
Enterprise Feedback Management, or EFM, provides a solution to the problem of scattered customer feedback. EFM refers to any software system that centralizes and organizes customer feedback. Market research companies have developed EFM software to gathers, analyze, and distribute feedback data. Using an EFM solution, businesses can measure Customer Engagement, analyze how to improve engagement scores, and send survey results to the appropriate people within the organization.
PeopleMetric’s Enterprise Feedback Management system is unique for several reasons. First, our core set of Customer Engagement Management questions are proven to effectively measure customer engagement, which we have shown drives long-term business outcomes such as ROI. Second, our EFM solution for B2C clients includes a tool that allows managers to see which areas of focus will have the greatest impact on customer engagement. Finally, PeopleMetric’s EFM software sends Action Alerts notifying management of opportunities for growth, customer recovery, performance improvement, and marketing possibilities. (The client dictates which employees should receive these real-time alerts.) By using PeopleMetric’s EFM solution, companies can ensure that customer feedback is centralized, distributed to the correct employees, and fully optimized.
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