At the highest level, analytics is aimed at helping companies make strategic business decisions pertaining to product design, market assessment, new product introduction, competitive intelligence and customer-value mapping. The questions answered here, include: How do we enrich our current market position? What are the threats our business faces from the competitors? Which market segments are most lucrative for our business? Analytics falls into the two broad categories of descriptive and predictive. Descriptive analytics seeks to identify relationships between customers or products through a process of extract, transform and load, for instance, extracting data from inside and outside sources, transforming it to fit business needs, and ultimately loading it into a data warehouse. Descriptive analytics is the province of business-intelligence systems.

Predictive analytics processes historical and transactional data to identify the risk or opportunity associated with a specific customer or transaction. These analyses weigh the relationship between hundreds of data elements to isolate each customer’s risk or potential, which guides the action on that customer.

Enterprise-feedback Management

An emerging niche in the analytics field is Enterprise-feedback Management (EFM), which welds advanced survey design to CRM integration and advanced reporting to statistical analysis. It includes centralized panel management and a workflow process for consistent survey quality. Enterprises are adopting EFM to collect and analyze data, and to use the information in conjunction with existing data and needs.

When selecting a provider to assist with managing enterprise feedback, companies should focus on a 24–36 month window. “Feedback systems require a culture to support successful implementations, which takes time to place and grow effectively” says Esteban Kolsky, Analyst, Gartner.

When implementing a feedback solution, most companies tend to focus on surveys as the only potential source of feedback. However, some are starting to focus on other sources of feedback such as social networks, unstructured feedback, blogs and forums and community spaces. Such unrequested feedback reflects what customers truly feel about a company’s products and services, without the structure of a survey or corporate event. The ultimate goal is for an organization to capture, retain, leverage and use all available feedback from all sources as a single form of input into an EFM system.

Sources of data include transactions, both real-time and Web-based, as well as text information, gathered through surveys or other means. The mode of data gathering should be tailored to the individuals being queried. In a survey, the types of questions posed to existing customers would vary from those posed to noncustomers. “For existing customers, you might want to assess their attitudes about product or service, while for new customers you’d want to know more about their buying habits,” says Tony Agresta, VP, Worldwide Product Marketing, SPSS.

ICM Direct, a U.K.-based market-research firm, has supplemented its use of SPSS software with an SPSS managed-services platform in order to conduct online surveys. The platform, which consists of a data center in Miami, allows ICM to run a third-party software product that’s geared toward online surveys — that kind of flexibility would have been impossible in a traditional application service provider setup. “It gives us the power to meet our clients’ requirements, whether it’s housing data or moving into [survey] panel management,” says Patrick Diamond, MD, ICM Direct.

Gartner cites the case of Barclays Bank, whose customer complaints program had three main objectives: Improve customer-service recovery, reduce avoidable complaints and increase “customer warmth.” The complaints-management process was riddled with problems, including a lack of ownership of complaints, the use of 33 separate departmental systems, and a failure to act on customer feedback. In order to standardize complaint management across the bank, Barclays replaced the 33 systems with provider-supplied complaints- management software, with access for 32,000 employees. It’s the most widely adopted customer-facing system ever introduced across Barclays.

The important lessons are to recognize new sources of feedback such as socializing events or forums for customers, and determine better methods to use these as input for analysis. There may be few tools to do that, but the value of the feedback will surely exceed most investments to mine it.