Learn More About Enterprise Feedback Management Software
What is Enterprise Feedback Management Software?
Enterprise feedback management (EFM) software centralizes all customer feedback into a single hub where all data and information are easily accessible and packaged by analysis. It performs data collection on customer feedback to provide businesses with actionable customer or employee insights. EFM accomplishes this by creating and distributing optimized customer surveys to request feedback on their experience with the product.
EFM software or enterprise feedback management systems benefit businesses by compiling feedback across multiple channels into a single coherent picture of the customer experience. Structuring this feedback helps a company’s marketing, sales, and product development teams better visualize where to find customer pain points and opportunities. Furthermore, the insights gleaned can aid business strategy and decision making by notifying leaders of negative feedback in real time. EFM is an excellent tool to promote customer loyalty by acting as a company’s listening instrument. It should be noted that EFM software focuses more on external customer feedback rather than internal employee feedback.
EFM software can perform all the capabilities required for products in the Survey category. Similarly, tools in the Experience Management (EM) category can perform all of the features described in the EFM category. The Survey, Enterprise Feedback Management, and Experience Management are mutually exclusive categories. Depending on business needs, the company may need more or less than what EFM software offers.
What Types of Enterprise Feedback Management Software Exist?
Although most EFM software allows for creating custom surveys with unlimited questions, some EFM platforms provide more granularity regarding certain survey formats. Below is a list of a few buyers might see in various EFM software.
Net promoter score (NPS) surveys
The NPS survey is one of the best EFM tools to measure customer loyalty. An NPS survey gauges customer satisfaction by asking customers a single question. Often, this question is like, "How likely are you to recommend products to a friend or colleague?" Customers then respond to the question on a scale of 1–10. Companies translate those scores to identify how many customers were detractors (1–5), neutral (6–8), or promoters (9–10).
The NPS gives a company a better sense of its performance. Over time, a company can compare its performance on the NPS survey to see if it is losing or gaining customer loyalty. Narrowing down the brand performance to one question increases users' chances of participating in the company’s survey.
Customer effort score (CES) surveys
A CES survey asks customers a single question about how easy it is for them to get the support they need. This is a great way to isolate customer satisfaction needs based on customer support and understand if customer service is an aspect of the business that is lacking.
Customer satisfaction surveys
A customer satisfaction survey allows customers to answer various questions based on a particular experience at a company. This can be a reaction to a company-sponsored event or a particular product. The end goal is to measure short-term customer satisfaction. This can be a helpful marketing tool to promote a particular product or experience and develop a long-term plan based on what products are working well.
What are the Common Features of Enterprise Feedback Management Software?
EFM products contain these core features as part of their package:
Survey builder: The main feature of EFM software is its survey creation capabilities. Users create custom surveys to distribute to customers and record their responses to an internal team using a centralized EFM database. Team members can then collaborate on the survey within the EFM software and add supplementary questions or edit other aspects. The survey interface also allows for customized survey layouts and company-branded images, giving the survey a more professional look.
Omnichannel feedback: EFM software can make it easy for customers to share their feedback by answering surveys through a customer's preferred communication channel. This allows companies to give customers multiple options, translating to a higher participation rate.
Triggered workflows: When a customer completes a survey, EFM software will automatically notify the user and automate the next step in the feedback process. This helps with workflow management and customer follow-up. Depending on the customer sentiment, different workflow tasks may be triggered. PR teams may be in charge of responding to customers who responded negatively to the survey, while marketers may be the ones to promote the positive responses. The triggered workflow function lets the company decide how relevant content is routed to the appropriate teams.
Data reports: EFM software provides users with data-driven analytics. Instead of manually counting the number of customer responses and identifying important keywords, EFM software will do all the calculations, providing numerical data based on customer feedback.
Text analytics: Text analytics allows users to gather data from open-ended questions that are asked within customer surveys. While businesses can easily and simply gather insight from questions that can be answered in a straightforward "yes" or "no," open-ended questions are more challenging to sift through. Open-ended questions are important to add to any survey because they allow the customer to elaborate on common problems that they are experiencing with a product or brand. Text analytics can sort customer sentiment based on keywords, efficiently organizing the data.
Customer interaction: Some EFM solutions allow users to contact customers directly through the software’s dashboard. This enables users to respond to negative customer sentiment as soon as possible and engage in conversation regarding the customer’s negative experience with the brand or product.
Other enterprise feedback management software features include Brand Design Consistency, Device Responsiveness, and Security.
What are the Benefits of Enterprise Feedback Management Software?
Outreach: EFM software has the ability to reach out for customer feedback across communication channels, like SMS, email, live chat, and social media. This expands the company’s ability to recognize a large portion of its customer population, providing the most accurate and granular datasets to best inform its marketing, sales, and customer service teams on how to respond to each opportunity.
Customer insight: With highly customizable survey building instruments, the ability to ask for customer feedback is only limited by the user’s ability to communicate their question. The feedback from tailored survey instruments designed by an SME gives a company the most impactful insights into customer needs to guide its business strategies moving forward.
Customer loyalty: Creating an avenue for customer feedback makes them feel heard and promotes quick resolutions to their pain points. Building a relationship where the customer feels heard creates trust and comfort that is difficult to put a price tag on. For customer success managers, these efforts are critically important for customer retention. Overall, loyalty is heavily impacted by customer experience.
Notification: Using EFM software to keep an ear on the ground can prepare the business against unforeseen challenges that can negatively impact its business-customer relationship. A robust EFM infrastructure allows the company to react decisively whenever customers voice a complaint or a negative experience.
Who Uses Enterprise Feedback Management Software?
Almost any business team can take advantage of the features provided by EFM software. So long as they wish to solicit structured quantitative feedback from a customer base, EFM can help their team accomplish this goal.
Customer service teams: Customer service teams are responsible for supporting customers by answering questions and troubleshooting technical difficulties. EFM can support these teams by holding them accountable for service quality by automatically delivering survey prompts after each service session. Using EFM products, customer experience can be quantified and recorded into metrics.
Sales teams: Sales teams are professionals focused on promoting the company’s product to the customer base. They engage potential customers to make the product seem more enticing than competitors or to ensure currently subscribed customers continue to find value in the products. EFM supports sales teams by allowing them to keep tabs on customer expectations of their product, their service quality, and how customer success teams can engage their clientele.
Market research teams: Market research teams are responsible for keeping tabs on the company’s market status and tracking sales trends within each particular demographic for targeting or otherwise. Market researchers can use EFM capabilities to perform market assessments by reaching out to their customer base to gauge how their products compare with their competitors, their market presence currently, and their attitude towards the brand.
Product development teams: Product development teams are the heart and engine of any company focused on profits derived from customer sales. These teams build the products to be sold and continue to iteratively improve the product through customer feedback and engagement. EFM can step in to build that communication channel between a company’s consumers and product teams. Doing so removes empathy, foresight, and understanding barriers that usually separate product teams from their audience (consumers). In some cases, during pilot testing, EFM can also be used to acquire structured feedback on a product’s prototype.
Human resources teams: Human resources, employee success, people operations, etc., are all labels to describe the business function of a department responsible for recruitment, development, employee relations, benefits, investigations, and culture. EFMs products are usually directed outward to gauge the satisfaction levels of customers and clientele. However, from the HR perspective, they could view their employee population as their customer base because they also provide support services to other departments. In that sense, HR teams can also take advantage of the products listed in this category for their business function.
Software Related to Enterprise Feedback Management Software
Related solutions that can be used together with enterprise feedback management software include:
CRM: CRM software is a great tool to integrate with EFM software. Once users pull all the customer data in surveys and reports, they can integrate it into their CRM database to centralize all customer data into one location and add context to customer profiles. This makes it easier for users to pull actionable insights from customer data.
Customer data platform: Customer data platforms (CDPs) are used to consolidate and integrate customer data into one single database. This can include customer contact information, address, etc. Since EFM software is a collection of customer survey data, it can be useful to consolidate it into a customer data platform so businesses can have a more comprehensive view of customer information.
Feedback analytics: Feedback analytics focuses primarily on qualitative data by using artificial intelligence like natural language processing (NLP) to analyze text data for insights about customer feedback interactions. The software compiles all inbound and outbound communication channels into a coherent voice of the customer to reflect the customer experience. With this analytics instrument utilized with EFM, businesses can navigate customer feedback with greater finesse when wielding their qualitative and quantitative feedback instruments.
Challenges with Enterprise Feedback Management Software
Enterprise feedback management solutions can come with their own set of challenges.
Incorrect sentiment analysis: As with any software automation, users are wary of potential inconsistencies and errors that may crop up once a piece of technology is implemented. Since EFM software provides text analysis tools that are designed to evaluate customer sentiment based on keywords, a possible issue that could arise is incorrect filtering. To combat this issue, users must carefully read through customer surveys to ensure the authenticity of each customer response.
Validity and reliability: Survey instruments are infamous for being sensitive to questionnaire wording. If the question and instruction are not designed with enough precision or care, there is the risk of misinterpretation by the customer. Surveys rely heavily on accurate interpretation for accurate data, and disrupting this process can impact the effectiveness of EFMs in finding the trends to help the business.
How to Buy Enterprise Feedback Management Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Enterprise Feedback Management Software
Selecting the best EFM software for a company requires the foreknowledge of what sort of business need it would fulfill. This is particularly important for the Enterprise Feedback Management category because it is mutually exclusive to the G2 Survey and Experience Management categories. That is why the selection team must understand the specific capabilities needed for their business.
Compare Enterprise Feedback Management Software Products
Create a long list
To start, find products that best fit the company’s industry needs. The EFM category is large and expansive, with certain products having the capacity for specialization in the buyer company’s niche. Some can serve enterprise-level businesses, while others are better suited for medium and small-business functions. Self-awareness of the company’s capability is critical for determining the best fit.
The buyer must consider the size of their organization, the type of demographics they wish to contact, the communication channels, and any legal constraints on data privacy or storage of sensitive information. There are very strict legal requirements to be met when collecting data on certain demographics. The following are some questions buyers can keep in mind during this process.
- Which are the countries, states, and demographics the company wishes to gather feedback from? For example, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) protects USA children's data if they are under 13 years old. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) also requires quality control of data storage and collection methods.
- What communication channels like SMS, social media, email, live chat, etc., can the company take advantage of?
- Will security measures be needed for sensitive personal data like medical conditions? HIPAA limitations require strict security measures on how secure the communication is, how the data is stored, and how long they’re allowed to be stored.
- There are international standards of data protection, collection, and storage. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards must be adhered to if there is the possibility that a European citizen may be caught in the company’s questionnaire net.
Create a short list
After creating a long list, more immediate issues like budgeting, platform preference, and scalability will require the company’s attention. For example, some EFM products are software products that require computer installation, while others are subscription and browser based for universal access so long as the user has internet and the correct authentication credentials. System compatibility for software integration is also important to avoid hiccups and performance bugs when implemented. Be sure to select packages specific to the business needs, as there will always be an option to upgrade and expand services to match the company’s growth, needs, and capabilities later.
Conduct demos
Demonstrating software capabilities is critically important for any large software purchase, as it is a major commitment to the business and the employee user experience.
Selection of Enterprise Feedback Management Software
Choose a selection team
When performing demos, include the software users, their respective managers, IT professionals, legal department, data engineering or science or analysis teams, and product managers. They offer a unique perspective into how the software will interact with the company’s current data infrastructure, impact user experience, and have the creative implementation of the software not yet considered.
Negotiation
After selecting the company’s list of prospective software service providers and demonstrating the capabilities of each product of interest, negotiations are in order. Having two-three options helps determine which product gives the best bang for the buck.
Final decision
The final decision should be made with the input of all involved teams, SMEs, and users. It is best to select the product that fits the business needs, as no perfect option is available. It is also possible to consider employing a pilot program for the software product’s adoption. If necessary, the company can perform the adoption in stages so teams can easily transition to using the software.
Enterprise Feedback Management Software Trends
Social media feedback
Businesses are realizing that the quickest way to gather customer feedback is by engaging with customers on social media channels. Companies can do this by posting customer feedback surveys on their social media pages. Since customers spend a great deal of time on various social networks, businesses would do well to leverage those networks.
Automation
EM contains all of the features described and required to be in EFM. Over time, for EFM products to remain competitive, they will begin to adopt similar features and ultimately transition to the EM category. This automation includes artificial intelligence and closed-loop capabilities for products similar to EFM by automatically responding to customer inquiries.
