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As an entrepreneur, I wished, I could read into the minds of my potential customers, employees & investors. Such insights would help me to make acceptable value propositions without relying on my gut feelings. I could align my services & products to the taste of my customers or improve the overall job satisfaction of my employees, if only I knew! Functional managers would prescribe a survey, if I presented this challenge to them. Marketing managers would definitely call this a ‘Market survey’ and the HR guys might name it ‘Employee satisfaction survey’. In large enterprises, often a team is dedicated only for the execution of these surveys. Ubiquitous emails have now replaced the traditional paper based survey questionnaires. However, most of the processes are still manual. A lot of cut and paste job is done between the word processors, email clients and spread sheets before you receive a report on the survey.
In the recent years, a few ready-made applications made it possible to automate some of the processes involved in a survey. One could survey a very large population within a short time period. Thanks to the mail servers, broadband and easily obtainable email databases. However, integration of surveys into websites necessitated assistance from web masters. Also, one heard new terms like CAWI (Computer Aided Web Interview), CATI (Computer Aided Telephonic Interview), CAPI (Computer Aided Personal Interview) etc. Most of today’s surveys are focused on identifying macro patterns and often the survey data remain within the departments that initiate the survey. This prevented the top management from using the survey data to draw larger pictures of their enterprises.
As the demand for greater value from every management process grew, enterprises began to develop systems that could integrate the survey initiatives into the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications. These systems were often developed to address the specific needs of the organization at a very high cost of ownership. In 2005 May, Gartner adopted the term ‘Enterprise Feedback Management’ from one of the aspiring vendors of survey software. Although, the demand for enterprise wide feedback management systems grew phenomenally in the last one year, Enterprise Feedback Management or EFM is still in its infancy. An ideal EFM should have the capabilities to meet the functional requirements of various types of surveys viz Market surveys, Employee satisfaction surveys, Customer satisfaction surveys, etc. The current product offerings are dedicated only to address one of these functions.
Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) is an integrated approach to the management of all forms of feedback available to an organization. A true EFM should be like the nerve system of our body. It must be able to gather feedback from various organs of an enterprise and provide ‘actionable insights’ to the management. An EFM system should work in tandem with other management systems like the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM, BIRT (Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools) etc. It must have a central repository of questionnaires and should have a customizable work-flow to suit the processes of an enterprise. This application must be ideally served from an enterprise class server with a powerful database backend. EFM is typically supported by software or software services for collecting and managing feedback from various stakeholders; customers, employees, investors, etc.
Applications of EFM vary widely from HR, IT, Marketing, Sales and continues to expand on its corporate implementation and scope. Departments within an organization can collaborate on feedback initiatives, sharing results and gaining insights that enable the organization to listen, learn, react and anticipate to the needs of their key stakeholders.
Another challenge in the rollout of such a system is to make it user friendly for the functional managers. They should be able to create and manage feedback processes without technical assistance. The emergence of Business Rules Engines and their ‘inference algorithms’ will enable the business managers to customize the system by writing the business rules in plain English. For example, “when customer is unhappy, when customer is flying economy, when customer is frequent-flier, when first class seats are available, then offer first class upgrade at no extra cost”.
VoksPOP (http://vokspop.com) is currently the only EFM that provides customisation of work-flow and its integration with other applications such as ERP, CRM, SCM etc. The work-flow also has an advanced alerts & action plan engine. VoksPOP is the World’s first EFM that runs completely on opensource technologies - Solaris, JBoss, PostgreSQL / MySQL. It is built on J2EE - EJB, Springs, Hibernate & AJAX.
A properly deployed, Enterprise Feedback Management system can significantly enhance the customer and employee satisfaction with minimum efforts and resources. As new standards evolve and EFM systems mature, it will become a strategic tool for enterprise managers. And, we will have another buzz word ‘EFM’.
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