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Survey Research & Enterprise Feedback Management
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Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Apr 03, 2009
 In your online surveys, you should use demographic and firmographic questions to profile respondents and their organizations. This will enable you to cross-tabulate and compare subgroups to see how opinions vary between these groups.
When possible, place these sections near the end of the questionnaire as they are tedious and intrusive. Sometimes, though, one or two demographic questions must be moved to the screener in order to route respondents appropriately.
Pre-populate from CRM systems where possible, so that information can be updated rather than re-entered. When integrating with CRM data, make sure to ask the question in your survey the same way it is reported by your CRM system.
When trying to compare your survey results to other data, such as U.S. Census estimates, make sure to use similar categories and questions as your sources.
Here are sample demographic questions, many adapted from the 2000 U.S. Census:
Q. Gender
What is your sex?
o Male
o Female
Q. Age
In what year were you born? ____
Q. Marital Status
What is your marital status?
o Now married
o Widowed
o Divorced
o Separated
o Never married
Q. Education
What is the highest degree or level of school you have completed? If currently enrolled, mark the previous grade or highest degree received.
o No schooling completed
o Nursery school to 8th grade
o 9th, 10th or 11th grade
o 12th grade, no diploma
o High school graduate - high school diploma or the equivalent (for example: GED)
o Some college credit, but less than 1 year
o 1 or more years of college, no degree
o Associate degree (for example: AA, AS)
o Bachelor's degree (for example: BA, AB, BS)
o Master's degree (for example: MA, MS, MEng, MEd, MSW, MBA)
o Professional degree (for example: MD, DDS, DVM, LLB, JD)
o Doctorate degree (for example: PhD, EdD)
Q. Employment Status
Are you currently...?
o Employed for wages
o Self-employed
o Out of work and looking for work
o Out of work but not currently looking for work
o A homemaker
o A student
o Retired
o Unable to work
Q. Employer Type
Please describe your work.
o Employee of a for-profit company or business or of an individual, for wages, salary, or commissions
o Employee of a not-for-profit, tax-exempt, or charitable organization
o Local government employee (city, county, etc.)
o State government employee
o Federal government employee
o Self-employed in own not-incorporated business, professional practice, or farm
o Self-employed in own incorporated business, professional practice, or farm
o Working without pay in family business or farm
Q. Housing
Is this house, apartment, or mobile home -
o Owned by you or someone in this household with a mortgage or loan?
o Owned by you or someone in this household free and clear (without a mortgage or loan)?
o Rented for cash rent?
o Occupied without payment of cash rent?
Q. Household Income
What is your total household income?
o Less than $10,000
o $10,000 to $19,999
o $20,000 to $29,999
o $30,000 to $39,999
o $40,000 to $49,999
o $50,000 to $59,999
o $60,000 to $69,999
o $70,000 to $79,999
o $80,000 to $89,999
o $90,000 to $99,999
o $100,000 to $149,999
o $150,000 or more
Q. Ethnicity
Please specify your ethnicity.
o Hispanic or Latino
o Not Hispanic or Latino
Q. Race
Please specify your race.
o American Indian or Alaska Native
o Asian
o Black or African American
o Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
o White
For related posts, see:
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Nov 03, 2008
 Brad Bortner has a new Forrester independent report out last month, "Best Practices-The Next Wave In Customer Satisfaction Studies Is CRM Integration: How Firms Move From Measuring To Fixing Customer Problems". Abstract:
A rising tide of customer satisfaction research is also lifting the tide of another type of software enabled solution to harness these insights. They are enterprise feedback management (EFM) systems that combine elements of survey tools with tight customer relationship management (CRM) integration to create centralized repositories of customer insight and allow almost real-time attempts to resolve customer satisfaction problems. These solutions can be either good for market research groups or just another internal headache - depending on how they are embraced. Forrester believes that they represent a rising tide in research, and we advise savvy researchers to embrace them and use them to guide their deployment.
Jessica Tsai provides good coverage of this research for CRM Magazine, with a detailed interview of Brad in "Survey Tools Step Up: Even if customer surveys don't interest you, real-time alert capabilities might".
We at Vovici have been ahead of this curve, integrating EFM with CRM systems since at least 2005. It started out as custom development, then moved to custom development with SOAP APIs, before evolving into configuration using prebuilt libraries as CRM connectors. We also recently announced a partnership with Oracle for integration with Oracle CRM on Demand.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Sep 19, 2008
 So when I was looking over presentations to attend at the Gartner CRM show, one of the presentations I chose was Social CRM Meets the Enterprise. I assumed it was a Gartner presentation, and once there was pleasantly surprised to find out it was an Oracle presentation, as we were in the middle of extending our partnership with Oracle.
Yesterday we announced that Oracle has chosen us as a CRM On Demand Inner Circle Partner. Here's Julie Adams, Oracle Vice President:
Our product management team has thoroughly reviewed the partner ecosystem for the most synergistic solutions from our partners. We believe Vovici, as part of the Oracle CRM On Demand Inner Circle Partner Initiative, will provide our customers and prospects complementary value-added functionality in the enterprise feedback management arena.
We've been integrating our EFM systems with CRM systems since 2004, back when most of our clients were running proprietary CRM applications. In 2004, we had a small suite of perhaps a dozen SOAP web service calls that could be used for integration. By 2006, that had grown to an extensive layer with over 100 web-service calls. Now, with the announcement of the Vovici CRM 2.0 Connector for Oracle CRM On Demand, we have taken a few weeks of custom development effort and reduced it to a few days of mainly data configuration.
Why integrate your enterprise feedback management system? To treat your clients as if you actually know who they are when you survey them, to minimize the amount of information they must provide, and to avoid bad survey situations like the one Jim Davies of Gartner related.
Why integrate your EFM system with Oracle CRM On Demand? Because now, not only is it the right thing to do, it's the easy thing to do.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Sep 15, 2008
 Summary of my coverage of the convention:
Next up, some excerpts from the Internet Marketing Conference.
Update (10/9): Feedback survey on the conference champions "green" web surveys.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sun, Sep 14, 2008
 At the Gartner CRM Summit 2008, Anthony Lye of Oracle presented Social CRM Meets the Enterprise. Some quick points on his presentation follow.
Anthony began by differentiating CRM 1.0 and 2.0 by focus and strength:
- CRM 1.0 - Transactions - understanding hierarchy
- CRM 2.0 - Conversations - understanding social networks
He characterized the rise of social media as the biggest disruption that has occurred to CRM. (Gartner itself avoids the term CRM 2.0, which means different things to different people; see CRM 2.0 = CRM + EFM.)
Traditional CRM doesn't understand conversations, but social networks don't understand business. More than 40% of business incomes happen outside of any one enterprise.
How important are conversations? If you perform Google searches on the top 20 global brands, 30% of the links returned on the first page for each brand are links to social-media sites. This was probably the most important statistic I learned at the Gartner summit, as I've already found myself repeating this stat a few times this week. Clearly, the crowd is shouting down the voice of the brand.
Anthony also cited Edelman's Customer Index Report 2008: 76% of respondents would rate a person like themselves as the most credible spokesperson for a brand, significantly greater than the amount that would choose the CEO. While the Internet may account for only 10% of total U.S. sales, online social networks are estimated to be impacting 40% of U.S. sales.
The terms "online community" and "social network" are often used interchangeably, but Oracle recognizes three types of social network:
- Consumer Social Networks
- Productivity Social Networks
- Customer Social Networks
Customer Social Networks are vendor-centric, enabling members to discuss business processes with fellow customers.
History, according to Oracle, can be divided into three epochs:
- 1980s - On Premise solutions - IT innovates
- 1990s - On Demand solutions - the Line of Business innovates
- 2000s - Social solutions - the "edge" innovates
I'd quibble with the timing (on-demand solutions have really come into their own only in the last five years) but I agree with the broad strokes.
Oracle argues that selling is fundamentally social, but that SFA is about reporting more, and selling less, as a result of an operational effort of pleasing management rather than customers. The Alexander Group surveyed 1,000 North American businesses and found that only 22% of an account executive's time is spent selling; most is spent in administration and reporting; only 3% of time is devoted to selling new products. Truly social CRM allows account executives to report less, and sell more, becoming a sales productivity application.
Oracle is applying social media to a host of Oracle Social CRM applications, including Oracle Sales Prospector, Sales Campaigns, Sales Library, Spaces and Sales MIX.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sat, Sep 13, 2008
 At the Gartner CRM Summit 2008, Gartner analyst John Radcliff presented The Revolution in CRM Architectures and Technology. His "Aha!" slide indicated the following top-ten priorities for organizations to consider this year (based on a survey of Gartner analysts):
- Web 2.0
- Cost/Growth/Innovation
- SaaS
- Modernization of applications
- SOA/SOBA/SODA/EDA/BPP
- CE/CRM
- Application governance/PPM
- Business process discipline
- Application architectures
- MDM/EIM
For Web 2.0, John discussed communities and social networks, saying "the digital native has arrived". Web 2.0 will have an increasing impact on CRM, as digital natives ("Generation V", those who have grown up with the Web) become customers and employees. Online communities now provide consumers with a way to make their voice heard by leading brands.
For the move to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), John discussed the significant growth in on-demand CRM suites. (For us at Vovici, our software sales have declined even faster than we budgeted for, due to the significant shift and increase in our SaaS sales.) While there are contrarians out there, SaaS is winning over more and more organizations.
Enterprise feedback management, while not explicitly included in the Top 10 (next year!), was included, and mentioned, within CE (Customer Experience) technologies.
For mobile devices, John pointed out that handsets are driving the Mobile Web: there are 200 million notebook computers with excellent browsing experiences, but 1.5 billion handsets, with 35% providing good web browsing experiences and 50% providing reasonable browsing experiences.
John discussed the evolution from UIs to UXs, from user interfaces to user experiences, granting users ever greater control of their applications, with wider accessibility to the applications from multiple platforms.
He concluded with evaluations of each of the major CRM vendors, and how well they achieved SOA, either as a wrapper around existing applications or as a fundamental redesign of an SOA platform.
John had a lot of good content, but if you were playing "buzzword bingo", you would have your had best chance of winning during his presentation!
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Sep 11, 2008
 On Monday, at the Gartner CRM Summit, Jim Davies gave the presentation The Role of Technology in Improving the Customer Experience. He began with a compelling point: billions have been invested in CRM systems, yet customer satisfaction has not improved. How to explain this discrepancy? Most CRM systems have been implemented from an operational point of view, not from the view of customer experience. In fact, many technologies have made the customer experience worse! Annoying IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems, hard-to-use web sites, poor call routing, call centers with powerless customer service agents all save their companies money, but at a cost to the customer.
Clearly, technology needs to be used to improve the customer experience, not just to achieve operational efficiency. How to reconcile these two competing goals? Jim proposed a compelling analytical framework for prioritizing which technologies to adopt. He presented a series of charts graphing investments on the dimensions of Productivity (how much does this technology improve customer service productivity?) and Impact (how big of an impact does this have on a customer's experience?).
Each technology is then plotted with a colored circle indicating ease of achieving ROI: green for easier, yellow for moderate, red for challenging.
The composition of the actual charts will vary for your industry and organization.
Key to improving the customer experience is the need to better collect feedback and better analyze opinions. Jim outlined the following technologies to help:
Collect Feedback
EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management)
Survey tools
Event analytics
BPM (Business Process Management)
QA monitoring
Analyze Opinions
Customer value analytics
Data mining
Segmentations
Sales/CSS/Marketing
Jim made another key point: balance customer surveys with detailed analysis to determine what customers really want, in order to invest in the appropriate improvements. Jim gave the example of BT Retail, which was trying to determine the lack of correlation between satisfaction scores and intermittent failure to meet SLA (Service Level Agreement) response times. For certain periods, BT field-service representatives were not showing up at customer locations within the committed time window. Yet for those transactions, satisfaction was no lower than for transactions that were within the time window. Meanwhile, BT was expending significant resources to try to improve the responsiveness. From further research, BT determined that the SLA lapses were occurring during periods of difficult local weather; customers were happy that a BT representative showed up at all, given the conditions, and therefore did not penalize the company for the delay. As a result, BT shifted its efforts to better communications and settings of expectations, by calling affected customers in advance to let them know that the weather would result in a delay.
Jim's final recommendations for improving customer experience:
- Create technology matrices to prioritize which technologies your organization should invest in to improve the customer experience
- Look for appropriate opportunities to embrace existing technologies
- Focus on improving important attributes
- And finally: "Build an EFM system and explore more innovative feedback mechanisms."
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