EFM: The Who, When, Why, Where & What of Surveying
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Sep 10, 2008
Yesterday I covered one slide of Jim Davies' presentation, EFM: The Who, When, Why, Where & What of Surveying. Today I wanted to look at some of the highlights of his presentation.
The What? Jim described EFM systems as the feedback "hubs" of their organizations, the central repository for survey data.
Why? Without EFM systems, organizations trip all over themselves, oversurveying customers and missurveying them, because of a lack of attention on process and results. Check out yesterday's post, "When Surveys Go Bad", for four negative case studies Jim presented of what happens when organization don't adopt EFM systems.
Who? Gartner mentioned four firms as leaders in enterprise feedback management: ConfirmIt, Vovici, SPSS and Ransys. He also mentioned other companies, categorizing them as low-end tool vendors or as process vendors, focusing on one narrow part of feedback. Two "companies to watch" for Gartner are Cvent and Fizzback, with its novel SMS solution.
When? Begin planning for EFM implementations now! Gartner estimates that EFM implementations will grow 15-20% in 2009 over 2008. When planning to implement an EFM system, Jim noted that "EFM functionality is more diverse and complex than many organizations perceive." Regarding on premise vs. on demand, Jim said, "Don't be afraid of SaaS, don't avoid it out of fear, but do look at the complexity of integration."
Where? By department and across the organization. In online communities. Jim pointed out that EFM can be used for "extracting insight from the chaos known as social computing". To accomplish this, set up an online community with member profiles containing information such as the member's product portfolio, demographics and geographic location. Use forums for ad-hoc feedback, with text mining supporting the qualitative analysis. For the quantitative side, field surveys to not only community members but to customers who aren't community members as well; let customers select their preferred modality. And my favorite quote from the conference: Jim Davies said, "Only one vendor does all this - Vovici." Otherwise, he pointed out, you should expect to find an EFM application and integrate it with a separate community platform. Of feedback management systems and social community platforms, Jim expects that "these realms will merge."
You can purchase a recording of EFM: The Who, When, Why, Where & What of Surveying, and all the other Gartner presentations from the Gartner Customer Relationship Management Summit 2008, at the Gartner event site.