Excellence in EFM

A truly world-class feedback program goes beyond just capturing feedback to sharing data across the organization, recovering unhappy customers quickly, discovering insights in the data, and improving the customer experience enterprise-wide. These five key steps aren't always linear or orderly (just like the real world): they can occur chronologically, simultaneously, or asynchronously. But with the right program in place, they form a virtuous feedback-improvement loop.

Most feedback solutions today focus mainly on only two steps of a world-class program: data capture and data analysis (part of the “Discover” step). A recent Gartner Research study reports that though 95 percent of companies capture customer feedback through formal or informal means—step one—less than 10 percent of companies reach the final step, improvement efforts.

This disparity between what makes sense and what actually occurs reflects what’s available in the market: most feedback vendors provide products and services related only to data capture and data analysis.

Survey vendors, such as online self-serve survey companies, mail houses, and call centers, focus almost exclusively on data capture—step one.
Market research firms add to data capture efforts by providing extensive analyses and rudimentary data dissemination—steps one, four, and a little of two.
Enterprise Feedback Management vendors offer better data reporting than market research firms, covering steps one, two, and four.
Corporate Excellence Platform vendors, like Medallia, leverage collaboration and cutting-edge technology to get you to the end goal of winning in the marketplace through steps one, two, three, four, and five. They enable you to use your data to drive firm performance.

STEP 1: Capture

Goal: Capture the right data

A world-class feedback system captures customer feedback in all its forms: solicited and unsolicited, quantitative and qualitative.

Access the right feeds

Including the right:

Types of data: quantitative and open-ended survey data, unstructured data, and other relevant data feeds; sources include operational, transactional, CRM, loyalty program, accounting and financial systems.
Collection methodologies: email, web, telephone, IVR, mail, comment card, and more.
Levels of data: at the lowest levels available, such as at the individual and department levels, with the option to aggregate up to the highest levels, such as store/property, brand, region, and corporate levels.

Listen to the right mix of customers

Overall sample: should be representative of your customer base and large enough to produce reliable quantitative data.
Customer segments: sample should include representatives of each segment and identify respondents by segment.

Design the right survey

User experience: should be pleasant, easy, and respectful of the customers' time.
Target audience: should be the main operational user.
Survey questionnaire: should observe key concepts of measurement and statistical theory—for example, using 7 or more scale points to enhance precision and sensitivity (Medallia favors a 10 point scale), and employing scale anchors to ensure that all respondents have the same response emotions in mind when answering questions.

STEP 2: Share Results

Goal: Create situational awareness, grow share of mind

A world-class feedback system tells you whether you’re winning or losing (situational awareness) and keeps your customers close (share of mind).

Blast the data out

Everywhere: on the web; push reports to BlackBerrys, iPhones, and email accounts; and automated integration to external systems, such as intranets and balanced scorecards, to enable easy use of information outside the feedback solution.
To everyone from the frontlines to the C-suite. Organizations that share customer feedback data not only provide specific informational value company-wide, but also, according to academic research, send an important cultural signal about their customer focus and enjoy superior firm performance.
In real time, with feedback that's live almost as soon as customers give it.

Overcome obstacles to use

You haven't truly shared data unless your organization actually uses it. To drive use of data:

Make it easy with intuitive user interfaces that invite, rather than intimidate, users.
Make it relevant with personalized web dashboards that tailor reporting to the needs, interests, and abilities of each user.
Make it accessible with, for example, push reports that reach the users who won’t log in.
Make it trusted with explanations of the validity, reliability, and precision of the data. Research shows that employees who perceive data to be accurate, relevant, and actionable are more likely to use it.

STEP 3: Recover

Goal: Repair damaged customer relationships and learn how to prevent recurrence

A world-class feedback system helps companies determine why customers became unhappy, repair customer relationships, and learn from your mistakes.

Make recovery easy

Assign every case an owner with clear lines of responsibility.
Track case progress. Moving too slowly? Our system can automatically escalate cases and notify you, all based on your aging criteria and escalation path.
Communicate easily and efficiently with your customers using our built-in "rapid response" capabilities.
Customize "at risk" alerts to your specific requirements: our system adapts to your customer recovery path, not vice versa.

Improve customer dialogue

Ensure consistently high-quality communications by using e-mail templates as the starting point.
Confirm that at-risk customers are being handled the right way with our compliance monitoring.

Facilitate organizational learning

Use our automatic logging of customer communications and outcomes to help your team learn what’s working and what’s not and to share the knowledge organization-wide.

STEP 4: Discover

Goal: Uncover root causes and determine how to improve

A world-class feedback system explains variations in data and outcomes, such as “Why did my sales drop last quarter?”

Generate and test hypotheses

Analyze numbers with slice-and-dice analytics and interactive correlation and regression analytics.
See what's really going on with advanced visualization capabilities.
Make sense of comments with text analytics.
Iterate on analysis to explore, ask "why," see exceptions, and draw conclusions.

Identify best practices

Rank everything: touchpoints, segments, and more, to see which are doing well, which are doing poorly.
Reach out to best practices leaders in your organization.

STEP 5: Improve

Goal: Improve firm performance

A world-class feedback system becomes an information portal through which your company drives improved performance.

Set goals

Determine realistic goals based on past data.
Prioritize goals based on their estimated effect on loyalty.
Adjust goals based on local conditions.

Test and Measure

Conduct parallel tests in a structured environment: create customized test and control groups and compare their performance side by side.

Iterate

Leverage real-time feedback to make adjustments on the fly until you hit the bull’s-eye.
Use internal and external benchmarking to identify best practices.

Share best practices

with key operational managers
through document blogs
using video blogs
organization-wide

5 Steps from Feedback to Excellence