CRM Connectors
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.