CRM - January 2009 - (Page 28)

THE FEEDBACK FUNNEL act on or fix whatever problem they had.” To do so, Vectra turned to Allegiance, a South Jordan, Utah–based enterprise feedback management (EFM) provider. Since implementing Allegiance’s Engage platform, the company has doubled the amount of feedback received since 2003, response times have dropped from two weeks to 24 hours, and resolution times have plummeted from 31 days to five. And yet despite scattered results of that caliber, it seems as if EFM’s true potential has only just begun to reveal itself, in part because the maturity of the solutions— and of the vendors offering those solutions—remains somewhat unresolved. (For more on the vendors operating in this field, see “Feedback Is the Future,” Scouting Report, December 2008.) The reality of the situation isn’t lost on the players in the field. “EFM has grown up and become a real force to be reckoned with, and that’s only happened in the last 18 months,” says Chris Cottle, vice president of corporate marketing at Allegiance. “The market had to mature.” Recent research backs up Alban’s observation. According to the “2008 Contact Center Survey/Feedback and Analytics Market Report” from West Orange, N.J.– based industry research firm DMG Consulting, the EFM space grew by 21.3 percent between 2007 and 2008, the highest rate of growth in its history. As the market continues to grow, the manner in which companies are trying to cull and act on the treasure trove of information is also evolving. “Last year we examined survey solutions [in this study]; this year we also included feedback, but next year we’re just going to call it ‘EFM,’” declares Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting and author of the report. “We’re not interested in vendors that [just] have one piece. [Any qualified offering] has to support multiple SHIFTING TO EFM Vectra is not alone in its pursuit of a fullfledged feedback solution. In fact, EFM is top-of-mind right now for most companies, says Oscar Alban, principal market consultant for contact center solution provider Verint Systems. “Up until now, it’s been very interesting to me that many organizations have guessed what was important to customers,” he says. “To me, this whole feedback piece has been the absolute missing link to CRM.” The Problem(s) with Surveying ne of the primary ways companies have sought the thoughts of their customers is through surveys—either the old-fashioned paper-based variety Vectra Bank Colorado used to employ or the increasingly common ones that rely on the phone, interactive voice response (IVR), or the Web. One problem: The technology to create surveys and push them out to consumers has become so commonplace that it has seriously impacted the validity they deliver to organizations, says Dr. Jodie Monger, president of Sterling, Va.–based consulting and research firm Customer Relationship Metrics. “One of the things that is particularly frightening to me as a research person is many believe it doesn’t take much more than staying in a Holiday Inn Express last night to think you can write a survey or conduct survey research,” she says. “In fact, that cannot be further from the truth. People understand there has to be some way to gather customer feedback, but it’s the deviation from the research principles that is causing so much bad research to be done.” Monger says that many fail to realize the different survey biases that can occur by using different scales within one survey and simply asking the wrong questions. Companies not adhering to proper research guidelines will have perpetually flawed data, she says. “Garbage in, garbage out,” Monger says. “This isn’t something to take lightly because people are making business decisions based on these statistics. You think you’re making an informed [choice] based on research that’s done, but it’s leading you down a particu- O lar path that can’t necessarily be supported quantitatively.” Monger and her colleague, Jim Rembach, senior vice president at Customer Relationship Metrics, both believe that the problem with surveying has to do, in part, with the proliferation of technology making it possible. “Everyone is interested in the capability,” Monger says. “Now what hardware and software providers have done is enable rampant survey malpractice to occur by making it easy to collect data. No one ever said it is difficult to collect it, but the challenge is in getting the right information, understanding how to do the analysis correctly, and applying it to a business.” Issues in surveying also crop up from contact center agents, says Oscar Alban, principal market consultant for Verint Systems. He argues that companies are doing themselves a disservice by customizing technology to automatically ask callers in the IVR system before a call begins whether they would like to participate in a survey, as opposed to having a customer service representative (CSR) manually invite a caller to do so. “[Executives] are afraid agents are going to be cherry-picking, but in reality CSRs can figure out if a customer decided to do a survey [pre-call], and if the interaction went badly they can put themselves in idle because they have to hang up first in order for the customer to get to the survey,” he says. “It’s like a Mexican standoff.” This isn’t to say that surveys are not a viable way of collecting customer feedback. Just not in all cases. “The problem is that surveys aren’t the answer to every single research need,” Monger says. 28 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2009 www.destinationCRM.com http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/crmmedia/crm1208/index.php?startid=48 http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/crmmedia/crm1208/index.php?startid=48 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2009

CRM - January 2009 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Shots Heard ’Round the World 30,000-Foot Views Of the Cloud Stuffing the Ballot Box— With Complaints The Marketing Line for ’09 CRM on Twitter Technology Helps Insurance Weather the Storm Required Reading The Google-ization of CRM The Feedback Funnel Email: What’s Inside? Shake Your Moneymakers Lead Sweet Lead Incentives at the Speed of Lightpath Sales Contentment for Content Management A Worthwhile Excursion Into Call Recording Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - January 2009

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