Tuesday, January 23, 2018 Stamford, CT USA — Large U.S. companies have spent tens of millions of dollars on enterprise feedback management (EFM) systems and have been largely disappointed with the results. Although EFM platforms designed to save money and “digitally transform” their customer experience (CX) programs have failed to live up to the promise, companies should not give up or lose hope. There is a way to cure the EFM hangover. 

To be effective, a CX program must include two elements: 1) Data reflecting the voice of the customer, and 2) A strategy that uses those data to achieve positive change in workflows and organizational culture. In most cases neither the EFM provider nor the company itself has the expertise to build the processes required to translate data into actions that have a meaningful and repeatable positive impact on the customer experience and overall business performance. As a result, the EFM initiative fails to deliver expected benefits or achieve target ROI.

“What these companies are discovering is that EFM ‘solutions’ are not really solutions at all—they are software tools, and provide just a first step in building a CX program capable of having a measurable impact on business performance,” says Jacqueline Vose, Senior Vice President of Greenwich Associates Customer Experience Group, and author of a new report, Customer Experience Management: The EFM Hangover.

Curing the EFM Hangover
To realize expected ROI on EFM initiatives, organizations must implement them as part of broader CX strategies that identify and capture the right customer feedback, integrate data with advanced analytics and normative benchmarks, and use the resulting insights to create a “closed-loop” system in which specific individuals are tasked with specific actions, and results are monitored and assessed for effectiveness.

Because few organizations have the internal expertise needed to create and implement such a far-reaching strategy, specialized customer experience consultants are emerging as a key resource in achieving expected returns on EFM investments and CX initiatives. The end results are compelling. Companies that partner with these expert consultants achieve increased ROI on their investments in the form of increased customer retention, increased product cross-sell, decreased cost due to a reduction in customer issues, optimized service and enhanced operating performance, and a measurable and sustainable change in organizational culture.

“Companies that acquire the expertise needed to integrate EFM systems into a comprehensive CX strategy that changes workflows and organizational culture are able to optimize the performance of the EFM and deliver robust ROI on the CX program as a whole,” says Jacqueline Vose.