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03.12.09 Use EFM To Complete Your CRM  By Jim Berkowitz Here are several excerpts from an interesting article about Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) by Brendan B. Read, EFM to Complete CRM If Done Right: Enterprise feedback management (EFM), according to Wikipedia, "is a system of processes and software that enables organizations to centrally manage deployment of surveys while dispersing authoring and analysis throughout an organization." EFM organizes and channels both customers' reactions and proactive market research that go into refining and developing products and services, improving service, and into learning more about customers. EFM is natural fit with and arguably completes customer relationship management (CRM) strategies for those reasons. EFM tools are also used to determine employees' attitudes to help organization deliver better internal services, such as help desk and HR. Jim Davies, a research director with Gartner points out that EFM is enabling real-time and event driven responses, thereby permitting much more accurate and actionable data. EFM solutions are improving through supporting more channels, better analytics, and robust technology stacks. The surveys are more personalized and customized. Yet EFM has not become as popular as it could be given what it can do very several reasons... These range according to Davies, from the cost of adoption to the architectural maturity of available solutions. It also includes a general lack of understanding of the benefits of embracing a holistic view to enterprise feedback where the software is an embedded part of organizations' business applications.
"There are dozens of online tools that create surveys so you can send them to thousands of customers but you don't always get a huge amount of value from that but that's what people tend to think surveying and EFM is about," explains Davies. "Yet it can't be further from the truth." "If you do proper EFM, which in contrast integrates with your operational systems, is personalized, supports multiple delivery channels, is event driven, and has good analytics the costs becomes much higher but you get far more value in return. You obtain better information that leads to better business decisions, and to much higher response rates." Unfortunately, EFM solutions have often been underutilized by enterprises, with the investment idle and resources wasted. What typically happens in these cases is that different departments buy EFM tools to relieve what Davies called "pains" i.e. why customers or employees are unhappy. Yet these applications end up in silos, with multiple data sources, and no intelligence to filter them. If you'd like to dip your toes into the EFM waters in a low cost yet highly effective manner, you should check out the following two offerings from CRM Mastery, The Customer Lifecycle Management Assessment and the Customer Insight Analysis. Comments About the Author: Jim Berkowitz is a seasoned executive with more than 30 years of professional services and project management experience related to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Financial Management (Accounting & ERP) software solutions for small, mid-sized and Fortune 500 companies. As a Sales Force Automation and CRM Consultant, Jim has assisted more then 100 companies with the design and implementation of custom CRM solutions. Mr. Berkowitz is the founder and President of CRM Mastery, Inc.; a company dedicated to serving small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) by offering affordable tools and guidance to help them plan for and succeed with their CRM initiatives. |
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