Departmental Use of Feedback Management

Most organizations get to the point where they are subjecting customers to too many surveys through the bottom-up adoption of survey tools. This frequently happens in an organization where no market-research function exists or where MR concentrates primarily on strategic or outsourced projects.

With MR uninvolved, surveying starts as an individual activity, where each individual may have selected a different survey software application to use. Over time, these individuals begin working together, and survey research within the department turns into a collaborative effort. The requirements become increasingly complex as users' knowledge of surveying increases.
Each department or division often evolves through four stages in its use of survey systems:

1. Survey activity using simple survey tools is widely distributed.
2. De facto survey-domain experts emerge through experience with these tools and through peer recognition. Only rarely do these experts have any formal training in market research.
3. Survey development, deployment and analysis changes from a solitary effort to a collaborative approach within the department and occasionally across departments.
4. The need quickly arises for more sophisticated survey systems, greater collaborative capability and wider information sharing. 

Missing from this evolution, unfortunately, is a market-research department mentoring the users of these survey tools.
While enterprise feedback management systems are intended to provide cross-departmental standardization, they are adapted as frequently for standardization within a department. Departments often have all the same problems as the enterprise does when it comes to survey research, only smaller in scale.