SynGro CEO Keith Schorah challenges the industry– does the ‘E’ in EFM really mean Enterprise-wide?

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

SynGro launches Intelligent EFM technology to help businesses derive greater value from customer engagement

SynGro Ltd, a leading provider of intelligent customer feedback management solutions, today unveiled its latest Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) software suite. The new Intelligent EFM (iEFM™) portfolio of products and services will benefit organisations by helping them reap a greater return on investment from their engagement with customers.

Underlying the SynGro concept is the ability to drive the right actions leading to the best outcomes in growing the lifetime value of an organisation’s customer base. Unlike any other EFM solution currently on the market, the iEFM™ software suite includes new knowledge management, action orientation and collaboration features aimed at encouraging focused engagement throughout the whole organisation to enhance customer experience.

The following four applications make up the SynGro iEFM™ software suite, each of which can be tailored to meet specific business requirements:[1]

1. iEFM™ Engage, to collect and consolidate customer feedback - including real time reports and dashboards with drill-down capability to quickly identify the root cause of customer dissatisfaction
2. iEFM™ Manage, to distribute reports, analyse and act on the findings - including a closed loop feedback management capability that allows low scores/complaints data to be sent to the person or people within the organisation who are accountable for fixing the problem, ensuring the loop is closed on all queries
3. iEFM^™ Learn, to generate best operating practice and share knowledge – including support hubs where staff can access solution documents which can be updated and amended
4. iEFM^™ Improve, to create an environment for continual business improvement - including pattern analysis and KPI management functions to identify, manage and rectify large scale issues on a cross-functional project basis, giving visibility of customer issues and their status throughout the organisation, helping to provide a speedy response and improve service

[1] See ‘Notes to editor’ for more detailed list of features of the iEFM^TM software suite

EFM is a system of processes and software that allows organisations to centrally manage customer feedback, whilst enabling the deployment of information across the enterprise. This provides decision makers with important analytical data to increase customer satisfaction and retention and ultimately boost profits. However, Keith Schorah, CEO of SynGro, believes that most EFM vendors currently stop short of providing customers with the full package, and is questioning whether EFM is really delivering what, by definition, it really should be.

He comments: “The analysis of customer feedback and making sure the right processes are put in place to ensure organisations can effectively manage data must be paramount to any EFM solution. It should act as a driver for the technology rather than implementing technology to generate mountains of research, and then thinking about the analysis afterwards. In my experience, most organisations utilise EFM solutions that collect data in a central database and it is then up to the customer to work out who it should go to for analysis within the organisation. Our approach is unique in being entirely ‘intelligence driven’. We engage the whole organisation and our iEFM™ solution maps the data directly to the right people, in real-time, as it is collected. We simplify the process and make it as bespoke as possible.

“Driving action from feedback across the whole organisation is the only way to ensure significant return on investment from customer engagement programmes. As it becomes more important for businesses to react to customer feedback I believe we must, as an industry, ensure that every part of the organisations we advise are singing from the same song sheet and are joined-up in their approach to customer feedback management. There is no point in information remaining in silos when real customer empowerment may only be gained from that information being available and accessible to operatives in various parts of an organisation.”

NOTES TO EDITORS

Features of SynGro’s iEFM^TM software suite

Reports and dashboards with drill-down capability to identify the root cause of customer disaffection quickly

• Clear, concise and visually appealing
• Real time
• Overlay with CRM and financial data for contextual analysis and strategic decision making
• Can be automatically downloaded in MS PowerPoint
• All data can be downloaded into Excel
• Can change the colour palette, axes and zoom in and out of detail areas
• Different individuals (or groups) within an organisation can be set up to access different reports types or groups of reports e.g. agents get different reports to managers
• Data in the reports is specific to the person reading them e.g. different agent teams could access different data, managers can get a higher level view

Closed loop feedback management that send low scores/complaints to a person or people that are accountable for fixing the problem

• These can be escalated if nothing has been done (no limit to the number of escalations)
• Sensitivity can be placed on what score or event triggers an alert per customer
• Escalation times can be varied per customer
• The customer can be called again to ensure that the issue has been fixed and to test the effectiveness of the resolution – this ensures that the loop is properly closed
• Supports the requirements for ISO standard quality management

Best Operating Practice (BOP) to either store documents or provide links to internal resources (Sharepoint, for example) that contain information relevant to issues that customers have raised, and therefore provide a speedy resolution

• Agents are directed to actual documents that are pertinent to the customer, the customer’s attributes and the issue raised
• Comments can be added ensuring knowledge share and development of BOP

KPI management

• KPIs can be set based on any loyalty metric (or customer satisfaction index) and its drivers to ensure that all employees are focused on driving customer lifetime value

Case management tool to identify, manage and rectify large scale issues

• Set any number of triggers and alerts based on different criteria e.g. Customer loyalty metric drops by 10% in a certain region, the same type of issue is raised more than 100 times etc.
• Create a project, assign resources, activities problems and solutions and manage them to completion.
• Automatically keep track of all of the customers that the issues may be affecting so that they can be communicated with upon resolution
• Give visibility throughout the organisation e.g. agents will know that a) there is a problem and that b) there is a project ongoing to resolve it and this can be communicated to customers that may have the same issue

About SynGro
Founded in 2004, SynGro is a leading provider of customer feedback technology and customer retention programmes for large enterprise.

Working with complex organisations with large customer bases across the world, SynGro provides solutions to gather real-time customer feedback, and implement programmes to show organisations how best to act on data to help shape strategy, achieve continual business improvement and positively affect their bottom line.

Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) is an emerging market and since its introduction more and more companies are striving to integrate customers closely into their business operations.For further information visit www.syngro.com.

Follow SynGro on Twitter @SynGro

For further information or photography:

Denise Fraser
Firefly Communications

0131 301 5308 / 07739 007468

Syngroteam@fireflycomms.com