Since the service experience defines the real value of the product for the customer, the question arises as to how well the individual employees in the company, from the CEO to the service employee, are informed about the customer experience and customer satisfaction, and what each individual can do in day-to-day business to improve service quality. This is where an Enterprise Feedback Management System offers a simple and targeted approach. Unlike traditional customer, employee, or supplier satisfaction surveys, which are time-consuming to conduct, analyze, and, most importantly, implement, an enterprise feedback management system provides helpful tools for everyday work and involves all employees, processes, partners, and customers in improving service quality.
How has Enterprise Feedback Management worked up until now?
Until now, market research departments, quality management departments or customer service departments in many companies have been regularly or irregularly entrusted with conducting surveys on customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, supplier satisfaction or process analyses. These analyses often present the departments with major challenges in terms of organization: How do we reach all customers, partners, employees? How do we achieve a high response rate? What do we want to ask? How do we evaluate the results?
As a result, a comprehensive and large management report is produced once or twice a year, which is very time consuming and expensive. Since this report only covers the past and there are often weeks between the time the data is collected and the time it is analyzed, the results can only be used as a basis for strategic decisions. In most cases, it is not possible to use them for operational business. To make matters worse, due to their size and the explosive nature of the data, these reports are only available to a few people in the organization.
Consequently, the effort involved in collecting and analyzing data is rarely in proportion to the decisions that can be derived from it and, above all, the effective decisions that can be made to improve your service quality. For customers, employees and partners, the motivation to do something about the problem is even lower, because they do not receive the results, or receive them in a highly summarized form, and feel that despite their valuable and well-considered feedback, nothing will change.
How can an enterprise feedback management system effectively improve service quality?
Today, we are all customers. Each and every one of us has shopped online and knows what good and bad service feels like and what quality of service is expected for each service. There are many different touch points that we as customers have with companies: from the company’s website to its social media presence, correspondence by mail, customer service by phone, to the service representative in the store or on our doorstep. Wherever we go, we have experiences with the company or brand that come together, piece by piece, to form a great customer experience. The customer journey takes us through the various processes of the company, past employees, partners, and so on.
Customer orientation and service quality are above all the key to economic success for service companies.
To improve your service quality, you need to know about individual experiences. But for many companies, this is a black box. The classic complaint box with paper-based feedback forms at the entrance or the well-hidden feedback form on the website no longer help. For one thing, the input and evaluation process takes too long, and for another, they are often silos with different responsibilities. The store manager is responsible for the feedback box in the store, the marketing department for the form on the website-the data does not flow together. Social media channels also fail to provide regular and useful feedback for many companies because it is almost impossible to localize and verify the relevance of the feedback.
Collect and use the right data at the right time
Therefore, feedback needs to be collected as directly as possible, preferably right at the touch points, so that the customer’s experience is fresh and can be acted upon immediately. It should be made as easy as possible for those providing the feedback, e.g. with a tablet on site, directly on the customer’s smartphone, or by phone call shortly after the service experience. The charming side effect: dissatisfied customers are immediately identified and can be won back. This effectively prevents negative reviews on Internet portals and social media channels and helps build a satisfied customer base. It is important to keep feedback forms short and simple, smart and simple – it is about continuous and precise collection of very specific key figures, e.g. recommendation, 5-star rating, yes/no questions, not about comprehensive market research for future prognoses.
The same principle applies to employees, suppliers and partners. A direct feedback channel helps to receive suggestions for improvement, criticism and praise directly and to use them for daily business.
In addition to direct feedback from employees, customers and partners, there are many other sources of data that can be used effectively to improve your service quality, such as movement profiles and tracking data of customers and goods via WiFi, GPS, GSM or RFID systems, business and financial data and information from ERP or CRM systems, such as transaction volumes, shipping volumes, customer information and demographic data. This optional, more advanced data helps to better understand and evaluate the direct feedback.
View reports and analyses in real time
Once the right data has been collected, it is important to draw the right conclusions from it. This is where automated analysis tools come in, preparing the data according to pre-defined metrics. The required metrics are then immediately available for each touch point. Reports for each store, region and the entire organization are calculated live.
By collecting data on a daily basis, meaningful charts are created within a few weeks that provide valuable insights and conclusions about processes and service quality, analogous to existing financial metrics. These include scorecards for the various touch points and the organizational structure, as well as dashboards with charts and trends for viewing the continuous development of certain key figures. The live evaluation makes former white spots in the process map transparent and simplifies the control.
Today’s cloud technologies make it possible to implement such KPI systems within the enterprise feedback management system without major IT effort. Data is collected via decentralized applications on mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, terminals) and is available in real-time on these devices in the pockets of management and employees.
Share your results and engage your entire organization
The best charts, trends and analysis are useless if no one has access to them. Effective enterprise feedback management systems require that data and analytics be made available to everyone in the organization so that their contribution to service quality is visible and measurable. For example, when employees see direct feedback from customers, it motivates them in their daily work. Everyone wants to know on a regular basis how well they are perceived by customers, partners and employees.
With the cloud solutions mentioned earlier, it is now possible to give everyone in the organization access to the data and analytics without a lot of IT effort. It is important to note that not everyone needs to see everything, nor should they. For example, a store manager doesn’t need to see all of the company’s scorecards and metrics, just the ones that affect him or her – such as customer satisfaction and promoter overhang in his or her store, and how it compares to other stores. In this way, employees can see how they and their teams are performing and what customer feedback looks like.
And thanks to mobile technology, reports are available anytime, anywhere. To further increase the effectiveness of the data in day-to-day operations, an enterprise feedback management system includes collaboration tools. These tools help to discuss evaluations directly, discuss results, and derive the right actions.
Derive the right action from the data
Data and analyses are only as good as the support they lend in improving the service quality. The goal of quality management (and the organization’s management) is the adjustment of processes to meet the customers’ needs and the continuous improvement of service and innovations in order to generate new business and customer loyalty. An enterprise feedback management system can provide a critical platform for this, as many management and quality management systems such as ISO 9001:2008, approaches such as Six Sigma or Total Quality Management always start with the customer. The driving force behind an Enterprise Feedback Management System is the voice of the customer. Because the voice of the customer is captured accurately, locally and directly into the organization via an EFM, it provides a large number of interfaces to immediately derive the right activities in the organization.
By triggering tasks and support tickets within the collaboration systems, customer complaints raised via the EFM are immediately responded to by support staff or the call center to win back the customer. At the same time, if necessary, the ticket serves as an order for management or quality management to optimize the process. In this way, weak points can be identified and managed down to the touch point in day-to-day business.
Monitor the effectiveness on a day-to-day basis
The key advantage of an Enterprise Feedback Management system over the traditional approach is the daily management and control through precise data. If the key performance indicators are defined correctly and the survey is set up properly, an EFM acts as a service quality alarm system. If individual metrics exceed or fall below a certain threshold, the system automatically sends an alert to the appropriate people. They can then take immediate action to correct the problem, effectively improving your service quality. The system provides management with regular benchmarks of the organization’s service quality, allowing them to focus on areas of weakness and learn from top performers.
Conclusion
Connect with the author of this article, Niels Delater, on LinkedIn
Case studies, new projects, events and industry news – it’s all on our LinkedIn channel!
