Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) Is Dead
Posted by Steve Elliott on Wed, Jun 08, 2011
I recently read a post from Bruce Temkin titled Enterprise Feedback Management is Dead. He and I both used the tag line to get your attention but I used it because I don’t think the statement is accurate. What is really going on is an EFM evolution.
Now that listening technologies have evolved, it stands to reason that companies would want to bring all of their feedback listening posts together, run predictive analytics and then target their actions and investments for maximum impact. There is real power in mashing up feedback from historical data from a bunch of channels and then slicing up the feedback by demographics, geographies and industries. These evolving platforms can bring together direct and indirect feedback which provides a much richer story. Listening with surveys, panels, social media, call centers and online communities with speech and text analytics under the hood is a power proposition. Add the wealth of information stored up on customers and employees in CRM and BI systems and it gets even more interesting.
Bruce posted the following:
- Enterprise. The focus of these efforts needs to be on the customer, not the enterprise.
- Feedback. The analysis needs to examine insight across a variety of inputs, not just feedback.
- Management. The value of these efforts comes from taking action, not from managing surveys.
I would say True, True and True. I would argue that no one bought EFM because he or she wanted to manage surveys, get one insight from one input stream or simply to focus on the enterprise. As the warden in Cool Hand Luke said, “what we got here is failure to communicate”. You can call it EFM, Customer Insight and Action Platforms or some other VoX Platform (Voice of the Customer / Employee). At the end of the day all of these ideas are overlapping and each centers on trying to perfect your understanding of what your customers really want in each phase of their experience with you.
Gathering reliable, relevant and meaningful feedback is hard work and the only reason to invest in the effort is if the company plans to take action based on the results. When all is said and done, it’s all about improving the bottom line, making customers your advocate and making sure your employees are happy and motivated. That has always been the goal.
No matter what you call it, EFM platforms are evolving into what customers were looking for all along: a single platform that provides a holistic view of the customer / employee with multiple ways to listen, with insight that can be operationalized and with the ability to leverage the data from CRM, BI, etc. Interesting times.