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Confirmit is a product of Future Information Research Management (FIRM) www.confirmit.com [email protected] WhitePaper Enterprise Feedback Management – A Confirmit White Paper

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C o n f i r m i t i s a p r o d u c t o f F u t u r e I n f o r m a t i o n R e s e a r c h M a n a g e m e n t ( F I R M )

w w w . c o n f i r m i t . c o m i n f o @ c o n f i r m i t . c o m

WhitePaper

Enterprise Feedback Management

– A Confirmit White Paper

C o n f i r m i t i s a p r o d u c t o f F u t u r e I n f o r m a t i o n R e s e a r c h M a n a g e m e n t ( F I R M )

w w w . c o n f i r m i t . c o m i n f o @ c o n f i r m i t . c o m

WhitePaper

Britain’s Innocent Drinks famously made the deci-sion to launch its business after a weekend’s market research project. The company’s founders bought £500 worth of fruit, mixed their favorite smoothie recipes, and sold them at a jazz festival in London. The research consisted of a sign and two bins.

The sign asked “should we quit our jobs and dedicate our time to building a fruit smoothie empire?” Re-spondents answered by disposing their empty cups in bins labeled “yes” or “no.” The “yes” bin was filled at the end of the weekend, and the rest is history. Within five years the company was selling annually over £15M worth of smoothies.

While this example may appear a bit frivolous, in fact it illustrates an example of practices that are available today through online technology known as Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) software. EFM is defined as the process by which the collec-tion, analysis and reporting of attitudinal data is integrated into automated business processes and transformed into actionable insight that directly impacts business decisions and performance.

It’s the integration of EFM into business processes, unprecedented breadth and depth of survey based functionality, and the ability to deliver dynamic reports to all levels of the enterprise that distinguish

EFM from other survey-based software. In other words, there’s far more to survey research than just collecting data.

In the case of Innocent Drinks, the launch research was successful because it incorporated several key principles of EFM:

- It provided a good respondent experience. The survey was simple – a single question – and easy to answer and complete.

- The question was asked in context at a key “moment of truth,” not 6 months later as part of a randomly selected customer satisfaction survey or marketing research study on healthy drinks. The result was that data was more accurate and more relevant to the business.

- The survey was integrated into the business process: People needed to dispose of their empty smoothie cups properly.

- Results were delivered in a timely fashion to the business, being available immediately at the end of the weekend.

- Therefore, the data was directly actionable into the business.

Many people consider that while surveys form an integral part of market research that this is their only application. In fact, the collection, analy-sis and reporting of attitudinal data is relevant throughout a company’s business functions. Enter-prise Feedback Management broadly spans three critical business areas:

l Customer Experience Management (CEM)

l Human Resources (ERP)

l Market Research (MR)

Within the first two of these, understanding, antici-pating and responding to customer and employee attitudes form a crucial part of the proper manage-ment of these critical business relationships.

The diagram on the right-hand side shows just a few applications of EFM.

Applications of EFM

Figure 1. The Value Propositions of Enterprise Feedback Management

C o n f i r m i t i s a p r o d u c t o f F u t u r e I n f o r m a t i o n R e s e a r c h M a n a g e m e n t ( F I R M )

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The CRM space is filled with applications and solu-tions, all generally focused on providing companies with a single view of its customers. In reality, this company-centric perspective means that there are silos of information – sales force automation tools, customer transaction software – that focus on the needs of the business rather than on the needs of the customer.

In fact the data contained in CRM applications tends to be transactional or historical in nature. CRM technology was created to give companies an understanding of their customers’ behavior, in the expectation that behavior is repeated by individuals and that aggregation and segmentation of individual behavior leads to the ability to predict behavior.

This is fine to the extent that the models work; how-ever it is analogous to driving a car by looking in the rear-view mirror. Just because the road behind was straight doesn’t mean that the road ahead doesn’t bend.

The glue between historical behavior and future behavior is forward-looking attitudinal information. Although people don’t always do what they say they’re going to do, capturing attitudinal data and correlating it to historical behavior provides a much better indication of future behavior.

For example, consider the connection between past purchase behavior and loyalty, or propensity to repurchase. One can augment transaction records with demographic or lifestyle information to better predict future behavior. Further, many companies do conduct studies of customer satisfaction to learn how satisfaction allows one to predict loyalty.

Unfortunately satisfaction does not correlate well to loyalty. There are many reasons that satisfied cus-tomers defect to other product or service providers.Dissatisfaction, on the other hand, correlates very well to disloyalty. By allowing companies to commu-nicate directly with their customers and consumers, an EFM software platform provides a customer-cen-tric view that will drive direct value into business processes. By escalating complaints through an automated alert system, it enables a rapid response to dissatisfaction.

For example, consider the complaints process. Most businesses have disparate mechanisms to handle complaints – help desk, email addresses or other contacts found on the web site. This results in a mechanism that is not centralized, with the end re-

sult being that customers feel that their complaints are not adequately addressed. Therefore, most customers do not complain.

Research shows that as many as 98% of customers never complain to anyone within the company from which they bought a product or obtained a service. This is not because they don’t want to, but because they feel their complaint will not be handled prop-erly.The result is often that they fail to do repeating business with that specific company and instead defect to its competitors. This leads to a loss of lifetime value of customer revenue and profit.

Properly designed EFM software allows custom-ers to automate the complaints process across the moments of truth in the customer lifecycle and to integrate this into their business processes so that complaints are handled in a centralized way. Their customers are actively encouraged to complain, leading to better customer relationships, improve-ment of products, and increased profitability.

Global 5000 companies today recognise the advan-tage of eliminating silos of attitudinal data and man-aging customer feedback as an end-to-end process. In a recent report, Gartner estimates that “through 2008, 40 percent of total feedback tool deployments will be done through EFM systems.” (1)

Customer Experience Management

Website exit- purchase?Abandons

withoutpurchase?

Marketingeffectiveness

Profiling

Account Management

Event Satisfaction(new account)

Mapping of Cross-selling Opportunities

Closed Contact Center

Case

Attrition /Retention

Figure 2. Moments of truth in the customer lifecycle

C o n f i r m i t i s a p r o d u c t o f F u t u r e I n f o r m a t i o n R e s e a r c h M a n a g e m e n t ( F I R M )

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Countrywide Financial, America’s larg-est mortgage lender, began to improve customer satisfaction by working to understand the Countrywide customer experience. By identifying key moments of truth for both customers and business partners, key activities to monitor and measure were developed. These touch points spanned the customer’s preliminary research about Countrywide, from comple-tion of a mortgage application and through to speaking with Countrywide call center staff.

Countrywide decided to make use of the efficiencies of an online survey channel because “We wanted to integrate the survey into our business processes so that we could reach our customers as soon as possible after they spoke to one of our representatives,” said Lyle Kan, EVP Customer Experience Marketing Group.

“This ensured that we would catch them when the interaction with us was fresh in their mind.”

One application that has delivered an improvement in survey efficiency regards Countrywide’s wholesale business chan-nel, in which loans are funded through independent brokers. Integrating with Web Services APIs a survey is automati-cally delivered to brokers within a day of speaking to the Client Support Center, thus providing timely responses regard-ing satisfaction with interactions between brokers and Countrywide analysts.

Countrywide also sends a weekly survey to brokers regarding their most recently funded loan. In the event a broker chooses a low overall satisfaction score, an email alert generated by the platform is sent to the regional operations manager

containing detailed loan information and the broker’s contact information for follow-up. To further enhance the alert program, a link has been added to the alert so the regional operations managers can record their follow-up and have it appended to the survey response in the database. The survey results and any follow up are com-municated in reports to senior manage-ment to complete the recovery process.

“Going on-line has been extremely ben-eficial,” says Kan. “We have reduced the turnaround time for report delivery from 3 months to two weeks, while reducing costs by 85%. Most importantly, using the data collected in the broker surveys, the division launched a process improvement program that has increased top 2 boxes satisfaction scores significantly. This has been instrumental in our ability to improve our business partner relationships.”

How is EFM technology applied to Customer Satisfaction and driving business improvement?

Similar to the value placed on acquiring and retain-ing customers to drive a business’ revenue and profit is the significant value increasingly placed by enterprises on acquiring and retaining a work-force that contributes to the company’s ability to execute its business objectives.

EFM software is the ideal mechanism for senior HR staff that need to track attitude throughout the employee lifecycle. This includes regularly sched-uled employee satisfaction surveys that provide a view into trends and which can offer comparisons to industry-wide employment benchmarks, as well as integration with the business process so as to al-low incremental views of the employee throughout the stages of each employee’s individual develop-ment within the company.

This process may begin even before employees accept employment offers. Given that there’s a significant cost in identifying and hiring the best re-cruits, HR executives seek to maximize the return on that investment, ensuring that those to whom the company makes an offer will accept.

Human Resources and ERP

RecruitmentWin/LossSurvey

InductionPulse Check

Three-monthPulse Check

Training

Relocation

Benefits

CareerManagement

Promotion

ExitInterview

Figure 3. Moments of truth in the employee lifecycle

C o n f i r m i t i s a p r o d u c t o f F u t u r e I n f o r m a t i o n R e s e a r c h M a n a g e m e n t ( F I R M )

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An astute company will incorporate a survey into the recruitment process for those candidates who turn down an offer, providing insight on how to improve the process of new employee hiring.

Retention is driven through surveys incorporated into the exit process. This allows the company to understand trends among those who leave the company for another employer and adjust policies in order to retain well-trained, productive staff.

Consider that today many global companies con-duct exit interviews locally. These are often done on paper, and reviewed by the local HR representa-tive with the line manager. The findings often find themselves locked away in a cabinet.

Deployment of an EFM system allows the busi-ness to standardize on the content of the survey and aggregate the results into an ongoing trend-ing dashboard report. Senior HR staff can review trends that are regional, functional or even global and take appropriate action.

Other HR related applications include:

- Providing a 360 degree view of the employee during a performance appraisal process.

- Ad hoc employee surveys.

Such a platform is also useful for monitoring of compliance with legal requirements, in particular

the US Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 with regard to tracking and auditing compliance.

With respect to Human Resource studies the key is not only in providing a broad, regular look at employment, but also in providing event-generated insight so that data can be gathered in context.

Figure 4. Interactive HR Dashboard

Powered by Confirmit Reportal

Statoil, Norway’s state energy company and one of the world’s largest suppliers of crude oil, focuses on building strong employee relationships in order to drive the business forward.

The company had conducted an annual paper-based “Workplace and Environment” survey for more than 15 years, taking regular temperature checks and adapting their busi-ness strategy accordingly. Covering a range of topics from leadership, the environment and employee perceptions of the organiza-tion, the annual survey is an essential tool for driving the business forward.

The organization decided that with the work-force having grown to more than 16,000 em-

ployees, spanning 25 countries and speaking 9 core languages, it was time to change the way they conducted employee research.Grethe Stødle, Statoil’s Change Manage-ment Support Manager says, “In our first year using EFM software, the immediate benefit was the rapid development time for imple-mentation of our project. “Further, we have seen considerable improvements in response speeds. We have seen around 85 percent of employees respond within the first few weeks. Previously, responses had filtered in over a 3 month period. And we now have access to real time reporting, which is a real benefit.”

Having created a state-of-the-art custom-re-porting portal, Statoil employs 70 members of staff working full time to deliver a range

of business critical data for the company’s seven business units. Stødle explains, “Statoil sees EFM as an invaluable business tool - and evaluates every aspect of employee responses. It helps us to derive considerable competitive advantage and ensures that we meet the expectations of our employees.” Project Manager Øystein Aase says that “since the delivery of the first employee survey, the company has expanded the use of our EFM software, undertaking more than 100 internal and external surveys using the platform and the corporate reporting portal.”Stødle sums up the success of the project as “fantastic”. She concludes, “This has enabled us to achieve critical business objectives - something which could not have been pre-dicted just twelve months ago.”

How is EFM technology applied to Employee Engagement?

C o n f i r m i t i s a p r o d u c t o f F u t u r e I n f o r m a t i o n R e s e a r c h M a n a g e m e n t ( F I R M )

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Just as customers and employees move through a well-defined lifecycle that defines their relation-ship to the business, also products have a well-defined lifecycle that spans the time from their inception through launch and eventually their end of life.

Much has been written about the high failure rate of product introductions. As a result, businesses invest tremendous effort researching the market to understand the desires of their target segments. While it would be foolhardy to rely solely on them as the only source, customers are often the source of innovative ideas that contribute to successful product introductions. Relationship management programs must therefore include the voice of the

customer in new product development.The platform must be designed to meet the re-quirements of these business users by delivering the capability to create and manage consumer pan-els and engage this group over multiple modes of data collection, including face to face, telephone and online communication.

The platform must also support studies that take place over extended periods of time. It must fur-ther allow for import data from different sources for reporting purposes, as large multi-brand busi-nesses will use many different agencies to conduct specialized research. It is useful to combine these into a single view of the customer, brand or prod-uct as appropriate.

Market Research

Last year, Egg, the world’s largest pure online bank, sought to reinvigorate its brand with a product that would reinforce Egg’s brand values and create a truly innovative customer proposition. Its CEO gave his team a mandate to launch the product within a 5-week period.

Ordinarily this process would have taken 6 to 12 months, with the proposition team doing a detailed evaluation of 10-12 ideas. The process would cover several rounds of research, including qualitative to develop ideas, further research to refine them, and finally to generate the communications and advertising campaign.

Instead of research deadlines of 2 weeks, the Customer Experience team set dead-lines at 2 days. “The executive team was very clear as to his expectation of our team, challenging us to achieve what he termed unrealistic objectives,” says Mark Pearson, Head of Consumer Insight.

“Egg has been using EFM technology for 3 years, managing customer experience across a range of products and touchpoints. Our usage has grown to the point that we now interview nearly 20,000 customers per month, driving valuable insight into our busi-ness. The team’s experience and familiarity with the product combined with the trust re-

lationship we have with our customers gave us an expectation that we would achieve our goal.”

The initial task was to find the right product idea and the key hooks. Egg’s multi-dis-ciplinary research team, with experts in consumer insight, CSAT, the call center, pro-gramming and reporting, met to discuss the project at 11am. Reviewing the interactive online report from their ongoing Customer Satisfaction Tracking study, they began to consider what they’d learned about consum-er attitudes towards money.

The team agreed a set of survey ques-tions by 3pm, programmed it by 5pm and launched at 7pm to 20,000 customers – an 8 hour turnaround.

By first thing the following morning, they had received sufficient results to feed to the Executive team, Sales, Marketing, PR and their agencies. All told over 2000 customers participated in 2 days, by which time they had enough data to close the survey. This delivered the 3-4 nuggets that formed the basis of the value proposition that became Egg Money.

Given the revolutionary nature of the product, it was critical in the period leading to launch that Egg learn how best to com-

municate the nature of the product and its benefits to its customers.

Again, Egg turned to EFM software for rapid insight.

This time the deadline was a meeting with the creative agency the following morning to drive the launch campaign.

The team launched a study at 7:30pm, invit-ing 30,000 customers for input. They were asked about their understanding of the prod-uct and whether the key hooks made sense. They were further asked whether it was a product they would buy and their opinions on product naming. By 11:30 the following morning Egg had sufficient response to de-liver the insights to the agency for launch.

Use of the EFM platform across the busi-ness for customer-facing studies as well as marketing research meant that Egg could tap into its customer base to provide the sample required for these surveys. The close rela-tionship Egg has with its customers ensured the high response rate needed to deliver the results to the aggressive deadlines.

Pearson concluded, “This was a significant project for us, and the quick turnaround en-abled by Confirmit accounted for a significant reduction in time to market.”

How does one apply online EFM technology to New Product Development?

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Enterprise Feedback Management covers a broad range of solutions under three specific areas: Cus-tomer, Employee and Market Research. As differen-tiated from survey tools that focus on data collec-tion, properly designed EFM software is architected in order to turn the data collected into insight, driving business decisions that impact the bottom

line. Further, integrated with other customer data sources, it allows seamless and liberal use of data one already has about customers to increase the relevance, and therefore value, of that insight.Specifically, there are several key components that are required to deliver the requirements placed above. These are:

A Software Platform for the Enterprise

l A reporting tool that delivers the results at a high level so that management can view trends while allowing for drilling into data as deeply as necessary. This means that the EFM system can be used as an exception or even relationship management tool that handles issues that need to be escalated.

Results are delivered online for maximum flexibility in slicing and dicing the data for analysis and interpretation. While one should be able to export reports for offline presentation, note that these are merely snapshots. The ideal is to deliver high-level dashboard reports for senior management to monitor attitude as needed.

To achieve this goal, reports must enable incorporation of data from more than one survey project. This allows the dashboards to provide insight into attitude across different moments of truth within employee, customer and product lifecycles.

l A survey authoring tool that delivers complex surveys as easily as simple surveys, with a focus on a good respondent experience. People today receive more and more invitations to take surveys. Those which are most engaging, easy to use and even fun are going to get the highest response and completion rate. And getting that quickly and accurately provides the most value into business.

It requires a breadth and depth of functionality that, when required, goes far beyond what’s available in simple survey tools. This includes complex survey logic so that people only see questions that are appropriate for them. It includes the ability to extend where necessary the respondent interface beyond what was envisioned by the product’s designers. It allows for multi-mode capture of data, so that the platform is truly respondent-centric rather than merely survey-centric.

l An open architecture that allows for two-way integration into back-end systems. This allows, for example, solicitation of feedback in context, at the “moment of truth.” Gartner reports that “The most-important aspect of feedback is timing. Gartner has determined that feedback collected mmediately after an event is 40 percent more accurate than feedback collected 24 hours after the event.” (2)

It further allows for pre-population of surveys with data that you already hold about your respondents, so you don’t have to ask them for information you already hold about them. It allows for real-time alerts into the business, depending on the response received, so that you can quickly close the loop on feedback received. It also allows delivery of report data via web services into other applications so that the enterprise gains a holistic view of customer, employee or market information as needed.

The value of allowing this is that one can deploy surveys that are timely, relevant, and specific to the respondent. It means that businesses can interact with people completely in context with the business process and the relationship that exists.

l A system that is robust, scalable and secure to meet the needs of the global enterprise. Customer data is a key component of corporate intellectual property. Enterprises today interview millions of customers, prospective customers and employees. The underlying technology must be designed to scale well in terms of administration overhead for authoring, data collection and reporting. It must be reliable and available, whether installed on premise or on demand. And it must be secure, ensuring confidentiality of response both for the respondents – employees and customers – and for the business.

The diagram demonstrates a software architecture that supplies components sufficient to perform EFM across a global enterprise.Figure 5 – Enterprise Feedback Management Software Architecture

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1. Technology – this is the software platform as described above. As noted above, the platform must be open so as to accommodate third-party technological add-ons. These may include dialer systems for telephone interviewing, connectors to multi-channel devices, and so on.

The underlying survey engine must be robust enough to meet the demands of the global enterprise. This includes the ability to scale to accommodate the millions of completed surveys that are likely to be collected annually. It must be available – there’s nothing worse than sending out a survey invitation in context to find the server unavailable. It must be secure, whether stored on premise or run on de-mand, so that sensitive data is never compromised. 2. Respondent Access – in most cases, busi-nesses already have relationships with survey respondents. For Customer and Employee related studies, it’s pretty straightforward to know whom to invite to respond, although understanding how to contact individuals must be considered.

For Market Research studies companies are commu-nicating with a universe larger than their customer base, so respondents aren’t always known. In this case it’s often necessary to purchase (or lease) “sample” from companies who maintain panels

representative of consumers within various markets. These panels are often useful for B2B applications as well as B2C applications.

3. Expertise – many applications of Enterprise Feedback Management don’t require any specialist expertise. For example, surveys that are integrated into your customers’ or employees’ lifecycle tend to be very straightforward, and content for these can often be generated internally. The same is true for Contact Center Alert applications, in which the requirements are merely to measure agent perfor-mance, create benchmarks for the business, follow trends, and escalate urgent issues.

The situation is more complicated when one is plan-ning brand measurement activities, for example, or employee climate surveys. In this case it is often necessary to outsource the creation of content for such studies if the domain expertise does not exist or cannot be accessed in-house.

4. Implementation Resource – either you have it in-house or you don’t. For some EFM applications you’ll need someone who can program complex sur-veys and create report templates so that your busi-ness owners can deploy and analyze survey results.

In addition to the essential components described on the previous page, the core platform includes a component that provides for engagement and management of the respondent community. In the market research space this is referred to as a panel (most commonly a consumer panel), while one may refer to is as a customer or employee community when discussing CEM and HR applications. In all of these cases the community management must offer a means to create incremental profiles of members, a powerful segmentation engine and a mechanism to ensure loyalty and engagement.

The platform must be constructed in such a way as to encourage creation of applications that can be delivered through the platform itself. Given that the Reporting module allows for inclusion of data from any projects run on the platform, this structure gives senior management a way to look at attitude

across the Enterprise in a single dashboard report. From here management can interactively drill-down into the report to study particular areas of interest.

One of the key points of EFM is that attitudes are not formed and stored in silos, so it doesn’t make sense for the business to hold them that way. Indi-viduals’ attitudes span the business and complement the behavioral and transactional data already held.The platform must be structured in such a way that respondents can interact on the channel of their choice, not that of the survey author. This im-poses a respondent-centric structure rather than a survey-centric structure. It is critical in allowing the creation of requests that are delivered in context, and therefore more likely to encourage a response, allowing the Enterprise to build an incremental picture of its customers, employees and the market-place.

Components Required for EFM ImplementationIn order to properly implement Enterprise Feedback Management projects, four components are required:

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For other applications and for simpler surveys, assum-ing that the software platform you adopt is sufficiently flexible to provide for survey creation without requir-ing programming knowledge, this won’t be an issue.

Some organizations, like British Council, UBS and Countrywide Financial, have created internal

“Centers of Excellence” whose role within the orga-nization is to provide the knowledge and resource to apply company best practices in all surveys.

Here you’ll need to gauge availability of resource internally relative to your business’s ability to secure outsourced implementation resource.

Many businesses today look for that edge that will help them to understand consumer, employee and market behavior, perhaps even to drive that be-havior. The banking industry understands well that previous behavior isn’t always a good indicator of future behavior, otherwise stated “past performance doesn’t guarantee future performance.”

By collecting and analyzing attitudinal data, by de-ploying a properly architected Enterprise Feedback Management software platform, global enterprises

can drive that data into business processes so that it becomes actionable.

Standardizing on a single platform results in reduced costs across the business and better control of communications practices. The result is an increase in the agility of the business as it can respond to changes in customer, employee and market attitude as a part of its process. Ultimately that drives an increase in top line results and efficiency in the busi-ness, generating a significant return on investment.

Summary

1 Esteban Kolsky, “Make the Transition From Surveys to Enterprise Feedback Management,” Gartner, May 20052 Esteban Kolsky, “Implement Customer Satisfaction Management Processes to Improve Revenue,” Gartner, March 2006