Why Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) software?

Successfully giving customers what they want is a very effective way to increase brand loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and ultimately help your company grow.

Chances are, you have a lot of data that tells you what customers are doing—whether they buy your products, visit your website, and how they engage with you. But knowing the “why” behind the numbers ultimately comes from listening to your your customers—not looking at a dashboard.

While listening to one person is a fairly straightforward task, things get much more complicated when you need to listen to hundreds or thousands of customers. Gathering feedback in a scalable and actionable way is the key to improving your company’s products and services, which is where enterprise feedback management (EFM) comes in.

Your customers already know what they want from your company, so the real challenge is consistently meet their expectations. Enterprise feedback management involves collecting both quantitative and qualitative information in order to assess customer needs and make sure they’re being bet at every touchpoint.

Trigger surveys at major milestones (purchase, renewal), or after specific events (a customer service call), and automatically respond to the feedback you receive with a relevant response. If you get great feedback, refer the customer to ratings and review sites. If a customer is unhappy, reach out to them proactively with a solution. An enterprise feedback management system should make getting feedback and reacting to it a scalable and profitable endeavor.

But why should your company engage in an EFM program? In addition to using insights from enterprise feedback management to improve products and services, other benefits of utilizing an EFM program include:

Getting existing customers to make another purchase costs a lot less than acquiring new customers. Not only are existing customers a prime source for revenue, but they can also assist with marketing by recommending your company to others.

In order to fully reap those benefits, use enterprise feedback management systems to better understand what your customers expect—and to take steps to improve your customer relationships when you’re coming up short.

Just because a customer isn’t completely happy doesn’t mean they want to hurt your company’s reputation. It turns out a large percentage of negative reviews that are published online are the result of consumers not having any other outlets to express their concerns, dissatisfaction, or frustration.

In many cases, people just want the knowledge that their complaints will be heard. By implementing an EFM program, you give customers a strong signal that you care while identifying customer issues before negative reviews or ratings start popping up.

While your company may have gone through the process of defining customer profiles, consumer expectations change and evolve as your products and services improve.

With enterprise feedback management, you can continue to sharpen ideal customer profiles. Not only will you get a clearer and more accurate picture of the customer you want to reach the most, but EFM can also help you stay on top of any changing trends within your customer base.

Gathering information by interviewing customers or searching online reviews can help you scratch the surface of what your customers want, but may not uncover everything you need to know. Enterprise feedback management can give you the whole picture. Here are a few quick ways to get started:

Since customers are already spending time on your website, it’s a great place to give them an opportunity to give feedback. Pop up surveys provide a simple but very effective way to collect feedback on your website. This feedback will not only increase website engagement, but studies have show that the mere act of asking for feedback also increases customer loyalty.

You can also ask customers for feedback through their inbox. Adding a link to a relevant feedback form in any email can help you understand exactly how customers feel during that stage of their relationship with your company.

Because face-to-face communication can yield its own set of insights distinct from survey data, any customer listening program should include actual conversations. Direct customer interaction may not scale as well as an EFM program, but the information that can emerge from a fluid conversation can be critical to make sure you’re asking the right questions in the first place.

Read more about how to make the most of focus groups and surveys.

One of the reasons that enterprise feedback management is so effective is because it provides a framework for getting feedback from customers on a consistent basis. A simple way to get started is to conduct customer surveys regularly. This practice will yield more useful metrics, such as progress over time. Taking a consistent approach will also make it easier to compare your results against industry benchmarks.

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score, and this metric offers a way for marketers to measure customers’ satisfaction and loyalty. We have a simple NPS template that covers everything you need to ask in order to wield this robust data source. In fact, by integrating NPS into an enterprise feedback management program, companies are much more likely to grow by at least 10% (or more!) in just twelve months!

Developing your own enterprise feedback management program is a great way of staying on top of customer expectations. Since successful programs rely on having many feedback channels, use some of our survey templates to make your enterprise feedback management program more effective:

Customer satisfaction template

Website feedback template

Customer service feedback template

NPS®, Net Promoter® & Net Promoter® Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.