I’m conservative by nature and normally would not make any predictions about anything. But when I’m absolutely convinced of something, I fearlessly take the plunge. Just ask my wife. After our first date I knew she was the one for me and on our 3rd date I told her so. While she thought I was nuts, I knew I was right and 12 wonderful years of marriage (and counting), have shown me to trust my inner voice.

So now you are probably thinking why you’d listen to a guy who hears inner voices and proposes on a 3rd date. I hear you too.…so I’m going to share my very reliable and trustworthy sources upon which I make my prediction.

Enterprise Feedback Management is Gonna Be BIG in 2012

As I was thinking back on all the articles and reports that I’d read in 2011, I saw a clear pattern emerge, one that has me absolutely certain that enterprises around the world will be focusing heavily on Enterprise Feedback Management, also known as EFM. So without further ado, I present the evidence.

Customer Experience Has Become a Major Focus for Enterprises

Wildly successful companies like Apple, Zappos, Amazon, and Rackspace all make the customer experience a huge priority within their organizations. Here is a sampling of articles written in 2011 that show this to be true as well as strongly indicate that this trend will intensify with more corporations following in the footsteps of Apple and friends:

• A Forbes article by noted business author, Steve Denning highlights how Apple is a premier exponent of listening to customers and making sure that they are absolutely delighted with Apple’s products, stores and services.
• Zappos customer support is already legendary, and this recent Forbes article stating that “customer service is the new marketing” of course, quotes Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO of Zappos as the paradigm for this approach.
• A Fortune Magazine article quotes Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace Hosting, about how they plan on taking over the cloud computing space with “fanatical support”. Rackspace Hosting plans to beat out larger players like Amazon Hosting and Verizon by providing extremely good customer support (which of course translates into excellent customer experience).
• Lastly, this TechCrunch article shows how online retailers are all vying for the top spot in customer satisfaction with Amazon leading the way.

Incidentally (or not), Apple, Amazon, Rackspace and Zappos all use the Net Promoter Score as their metric of choice for measuring customer satisfaction.

EFM and Customer-Centricity on the Radar of Leading Analysts and Consultants

Let’s start with McKinsey & Company. In a recent article two of their principals, John Copeland and John Forsyth write that for many companies, customers are just a “blur”. However, to succeed, companies require consumer insights (CI) that are not only insightful, but can be shared and acted upon throughout the organization for enhanced performance. Pretty clear here that McKinsey is pushing their enterprise clients to adopt some form of EFM.

Moving along, Bruce Temkin and Forrester analyst, Andrew McInnes, underscore the extreme importance of Enterprise Feedback Management by debating the need for new terminology in the space. While Temkin believes his new term,CIA or Customer Insight and Action is more precise and hence more useful, McInnes opines that EFM is still a relevant description. Both of them, however, totally agree that enterprises absolutely need to gain insight into the customer experience in an organized, effective and actionable fashion.

Interestingly, both McInnes and Temkin discuss in other blog posts, how to transform the Net Promoter Score (a customer satisfaction metric) into a more action-oriented KPI, something which we here at Kampyle are very involved in.

Enterprises are Sitting on Mountains of Idle Cash

If you are still reading this, you might be thinking that this is all fine and good, but who says that enterprises will plunk down the cash to pay for EFM solutions?

The answer is provided by well-known investor and entrepreneur James Altucher in his recent, hilarious TechCrunch article, as well as by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry in his Business Insider article. Both of them predict that enterprises are going to be spending some serious money in 2012. Gobry writes “the stars are all aligned for enterprise startups. Companies are sitting on tons of cash, not knowing what to do with it.” Altucher notes that “non-banks in the S&P 500 have two trillion cash in the bank, the highest levels ever. This cash is sitting around doing nothing.” He then asks “Do you know what happens when cash is sitting around doing nothing?”
I think I know.

In summary, enterprises are going to be spending a lot this year, and with a super-focus on customer satisfaction, finding out what it is that delights customers will take center-stage. And that is why I confidently predict 2012 as the year of Enterprise Feedback Management.

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments section below.

About the author

Zev Schonberg is a Marketing Communications Manager at Kampyle. He loves learning about how technology impacts business, mountain biking and writing an occasional blog post.

You can connect with Zev via Google+, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Feel free to get in touch with him about Kampyle, mountain biking, or tips on being a parent for 5 great kids!

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