Why Benchmark Customer Feedback?

As reported by Gartner*, "Feedback management technologies will be the top investment made in 2009 to improve customer experience.”

Businesses invest in Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) to manage customer experience on two levels:

• Act on individual customer experience, e.g. reach out to customers that have indicated a high level of dissatisfaction.
• Act on aggregated customer experience, e.g. improve various customer programs and functions.

In both instances, the potential return on a business' EFM initiatives is linked to feedback trends: Are our customers more satisfied now than previously?

Typically, businesses measure and act on customer feedback, and use trend data to validate customer experience improvements.

But as businesses rely only on their own in-house trend data, have they really unleashed the true potential of their efforts to improve? How can they know that their own isolated performance is a good one?

In our view, it is essential that companies not only rely on trend data to gauge improvements, but also compare their own data with industry feedback benchmark data. Analyzing its own isolated trend data, a company may improve its customer experience, but still be way behind its competitors.

* Gartner, Inc. "Predicts 2009: CRM Customer Service and Support" by Jim Davies, November 10, 2008.

Measure. Benchmark. Act.

This is what it is all about. This is what we are all about.

We founded FeedbackMetrics on the vision that feedback measured needs to be benchmarked with industry data to enable businesses to act more successfully.

Welcome to our first blog post :-)

It all started in 2008. With more than 20 years of experience from the survey software and market research industries, we were surprised with the lack of affordable survey metrics and industry benchmark within the field of Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM).

Businesses investing in EFM seem to typically follow one of two strategies:

• Strategy 1: Do it yourself
  The company licenses a survey software technology, and develops/implements its own customized survey methodologies (e.g. a website effectiveness survey) and/or licenses a third party methodology with benchmark (e.g. ACSI).
  
• Strategy 2: Let a consultancy do it
  The company outsources its EFM initiatives to a CRM/Customer Experience, HR, or Web Usability consultancy. The consultancy uses its own methodology and technology.

Both of these strategies come with pros and cons. And some companies combine strategy 1 and 2 to outweigh the cons.

In our view, a third-party survey methodology with benchmark (regardless of strategy 1 or 2) has traditionally been very expensive.

FeedbackMetrics will in 2009 introduce several new affordable survey metrics and industry benchmark products (hosted on-demand / Software as a Service (SaaS)) in the areas of website, customer, and employee feedback.

Stay tuned :-)