Enterprise Feedback Management Software
Enterprise feedback management software allows businesses and organizations to centrally manage and analyze quantitative and qualitative customer feedback in an effort to acquire meaningful insights.
Enterprise feedback management (EFM) is defined as an enterprise-wide and centrally managed system comprised of multiple processes and feedback surveys designed to facilitate the data collection process, authoring, statistical analysis and reporting. Understanding and keeping track of sentiments throughout the customer journey is obviously a crucial aspect for businesses and organizations of all sizes, especially for product development teams, marketing departments and service providers. However, the challenges and requirements associated with customer feedback management are exponentially bigger for global or multinational enterprises operating in multiple locations and territories. Enter EFM systems.
EFM solutions are specifically tailored to help organizations achieve a specific objective and that is to facilitate seamless and effective communications among different parties; i.e., the business management, its employees, the stakeholders and the customers. Good communications can help make it easier and more efficient to identify issues and areas of concern when it comes to product development and/or customer service, ensuring all relevant information is shared and that the appropriate actions are taken through a collaborative approach. Enterprise feedback management systems are equipped with the tools and capabilities necessary to address the complex requirements of large businesses and organizations at scale.
At its core, enterprise feedback management is a system or a collection of different processes and software that gives businesses and organizations the ability to centrally manage the distribution and analysis of surveys in an effort to capture both quantitative and qualitative customer feedback. An EFM platform allows you to create and publish authoring surveys and then analyze the results for your entire organization so different teams and departments can easily gain access to the data they need to take the necessary actions in improving customer experience.
Enterprise feedback management software solutions are equipped with data capture, reporting and analytics capabilities for every touchpoint of the customer journey. Large businesses and enterprises with a huge customer base are aware of the fact that their customers may already have their opinions and expectations set about the brand and the organization as a whole, the products and/or services being offered, as well as the customer experience. The role of EFM is to help businesses figure out how well or how poor they’re meeting those expectations, which areas they’re exceeding them and where they’re lacking or falling short.
EFM software systems serve as the central platform for you to effectively create surveys, administer them, gather customer responses and analyze the results for the whole organization. Without this kind of software, you won’t have the ability to manage all those processes and you won’t be able to determine how you’re doing and which areas you can make improvements in terms of customer experience. Nowadays, customer experience is very important, as it directly impacts customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. In a competitive business environment, you want to retain as much of your customer base as possible while gaining new ones.
A good enterprise feedback management program is capable of capturing feedback from a wide variety of sources, such as your internal/external employees, your market research initiatives, the vendors within your supply chain, your customer base and social media. EFM systems offer a number of features and capabilities, some of which are basic enough and are often included in many conventional customer feedback tools, while others are more sophisticated and are designed specifically for larger firms and organizations to be used at scale.
For example, with EFM platforms, you have the power to setup a customized survey that will automatically be published or distributed once a trigger action is tripped or taken; i.e., a customer service call, a new purchase, a service renewal or at a specific time interval such as monthly, quarterly or yearly. In addition, you also have the ability to setup a relevant response that will automatically be sent out to customers once their feedback comes in. This will let your customers know, the ones who participated in the survey, that their feedback is heard and acknowledged. This action alone should provide a better customer experience, which also breeds satisfaction and loyalty in the long run.
Customers who provided a positive feedback can then be directed to different ratings or review websites so they can share their positive experience with other prospective buyers and become brand ambassadors and promoters. You can encourage these customers to share their positive reviews by offering incentives like a price discount or a freebie on their next purchase.
On the other hand, for those who responded with negative feedback, the system will give you the ability to contact those customers instantly with a proactive solution to address whatever issues or concerns they have. You may also use that input to learn and improve your product or service so no customer will ever have to deal with the same issue in the future. This is where you begin to deliver better experiences and improve customer loyalty and satisfaction.
All in all, using a good enterprise feedback management software solution should allow you to scale your customer feedback processes more easily and effectively, specifically in the areas of data capture, analysis and response. This approach will ultimately help you build and nurture a stronger customer relationship by providing the best customer experience possible. We all know that improved customer experience will result in higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, which in turn increases overall customer retention.
Enterprise feedback management systems can offer many benefits to your organization, especially when implemented strategically. EFM is a powerful solution that can help drive growth, customer loyalty and retention, as well as profitability for your business.
One of the key benefits of using the right EFM solution is how it helps establish seamless communication and an open dialogue with employees, stakeholders, and customers. Think about it this way: if you want to build a strong and lasting rapport with your existing and new customers, you need to establish good two-way communication. Nurturing customer relationships and keeping your customers satisfied takes more than just sending special offers or information that you think is useful to them in the hopes that they will remain happy and satisfied. Instead, you should empower your customers to voice out their sentiments and share their thoughts either through real-time feedback or surveys.
Enterprise feedback management software also serves as a centralized data collection platform. As you may well know, every element of your business operation has a role to play in the customer journey, from the development stage to marketing, aftermarket sales all the way to customer care and support services. It is crucial to deliver a good customer experience in all of these areas in the customer journey if you want to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty.
However, customer experience data and metrics are typically isolated to the product development, marketing and customer service teams. This means other departments may not have access to the information they require in order to play their part. This is where a well-implemented EFM system can prove its true value to your organization. It is able to combat the emergence of information silos by providing a secure and accessible platform for all captured customer feedback data and delivering useful analytics across all teams and departments within your organization.
EFM systems also have the power to combine meaningful insights from different sources, including from your employees, customers and your market research programs. Businesses that look for enterprise-level feedback software are most likely in need of advanced tools that meet their complex requirements and they may already have several software solutions in their technology stack that are capable of gathering insights. Enterprise feedback management software is capable of combining all the relevant insights to ensure you get the most reliable and up-to-date results with all data points considered.
For instance, a new trend that’s starting to show up among your customers could be related to something that your market research team uncovered and you need to compare both these insights in order to figure out what’s actually happening. An EFM solution enables you to combine and examine the data within a central location, so you are able to manage and analyze every piece of information you receive from all systems across your organization.
Perhaps the end goal for a lot of businesses when it comes using EFM platforms is to improve customer loyalty and retention. Loyalty is vital to customer retention, but customer loyalty is unfortunately a constantly moving target that’s hard to hit. Fortunately, a good enterprise feedback management system can help you identify and stay on top of all the key drivers of customer loyalty so your efforts can remain focused on keeping your customers satisfied and happy.
Being aware of customer sentiment and opinion and how they change is undeniable important. However, having the ability to efficiently capture customer feedback and extracting valuable insights from the information is really where the problem lies. You add to that the large scale and complex requirements of big multinational companies and you have a serious dilemma.
This is why enterprise feedback management software exists. It exists to serve as a centralized platform for enterprise-scale survey creation, distribution, data collection, analysis and reporting. It helps you to better understand your customer base through customer surveys, real-time feedback and detailed analytics and reporting. As a result, you should be able to identify the best strategies to improve customer experience.
