Is the Social World the End of Enterprise Feedback Management?
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Jul 27, 2010
Today’s guest post is by Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky). Back in 2002, Esteban conceived of the next-generation of survey software: Esteban called the market Customer Feedback Systems and began championing it at Gartner. As a visionary, he was the first to see where the feedback-management market was heading. At Gartner, he was a tireless evangelist of the need for top-down corporate adoption of feedback systems. Now with his own firm, ThinkJar, Esteban is a customer strategist devoted to helping organizations understand the opportunities created by social media. - Jeffrey
Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) is the best solution for an organization to merge structured feedback (surveys) and unstructured feedback (basically any other content that could be considered feedback) with organizational data to generate insights into their customers. Until a few years ago the unstructured feedback, which amounts to around 95% of feedback available, came mostly from notes collected in the field, interviews with key customers or stakeholders, or responses to surveys that had essay-style answers.
Then the world turned social.
The advent of the Social Customer unlocked the possibility to tap into a vast source of feedback previously unreachable. Twenty times more feedback than before, and more honest unstructured feedback at that, began to appear. Social Customers like to share their opinions, their likes and dislikes, and even their needs and desires in multiple platforms: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs and communities--to name a few.
Social “gurus” predicted that Social Feedback meant the end of EFM.
The rise of this unstructured feedback sent EFM and analytics engines into a spin – it was too much information to be processed efficiently. All this data, and resulting insights, adds an incredible amount of value to the organization in three areas: Customer Profiles (used by CRM to assist Sales and Marketing functions), Research and Development (where customers can contribute their ideas directly into the process), and Customer Service (where customers can identify and help solve problems earlier than ever).
These functions are at the core of what Social CRM does, making EFM a critical component of a Social CRM implementation. Feedback Management became the fourth pillar of CRM (together with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service – see Figure 1 above); Social CRM must use feedback to deliver value.
Social CRM is about an exchange in value between the company and the customer: the company gets precious and valuable data about likes, needs, and desires, and the customer receives a more personalized and effective interaction in return. Detailed analysis of the data collected, combined with the feedback obtained, yields actionable insights that the company uses to improve interactions, products, and services. The standard model of feedback (see Figure 2, to the left) of isolated events that are tied to specific interactions is giving way to an Experience Continuum (see Figure 3 below) where feedback becomes the key element of the interaction.
In this new continuum, the constant gathering of feedback, from both structured and unstructured sources, becomes the critical element for the Social Business as it becomes the source for actionable insights, telling the company what to do better next time. Experiences, products, services, interactions – all get modeled and remodeled by the constant feedback stream generated by customers by both types of feedback.
The need for structured feedback does not go away, as it is imperative to know precisely the customer reaction to a specific event, but rather gets augmented by the addition of analyzed, unstructured feedback to complement the direct and purposeful collection via surveys.
As you can see, Feedback (and EFM) not only does not die in a social world – it becomes ever more critical: the already existing integration points, feedback events at critical junctures in interactions, analytical tools, and process workflows that EFM already has are all necessary and useful going forward – they simply end up working overtime with 20x more data.
Don’t you think?