Speakers at the recent Confirmit Community conference (May 21st–23rd) highlighted that feedback from employees, customers, and other stakeholders is a critical influencer of business success today.
The conference audience, a mix of Enterprise and Market Research (MR) professionals from 21 countries, heard a range of talks from Confirmit customers, industry experts, and Confirmit staff. The presentations covered key issues including:
- All organizations, regardless of type, are affected by the same issues of customer, employee, and stakeholder satisfaction and loyalty.
- Feedback from all these parties must be integrated into overall business processes to impact business success.
- How feedback is used is as important as collecting it in the first place – the growth in online channels means nothing without understanding how these channels can work to provide analysis for businesses.
Featured speaker Ed Thompson, VP, Research Director at Gartner, opened the conference by discussing the ‘customer experience’ and outlined how each and every customer experience can impact the overall success of an organization. He described how, as a key measure of the importance that businesses now place on customer experience, there has been a marked increase in professionals with the words ‘Customer Experience’ in their job title – from just three people five years ago, to over 60 today.
Keynote speaker Tony Cowling, President of TNS, opened the second day of the conference by focusing on the MR community and the trends within MR organizations in terms of data collection and data quality. In particular, he discussed industry consolidation, where big players have an increased market share and respective impact on market trends. He also noted that much of the MR industry’s measurements do not take into account organizations that don’t conventionally fit into the ‘MR’ umbrella – such as retail data organizations, online metrics companies, and marketing divisions of non-MR organizations.
Both presentations demonstrated that one of the most difficult challenges that businesses face is gathering accurate feedback data, whether for customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, market research, or other marketing purposes.
Both also highlighted that, while the importance of this data is critical to business success, the challenge to collect accurate data is getting harder. This is primarily because all types of stakeholder are becoming increasingly difficult to reach and elicit responses from, unless the request for feedback is timely and relevant.
In addition, it was noted by Pete Comley, Chairman of Virtual Surveys, that professional panelists can skew the results of feedback surveys, with about one percent of panelists completing 34% of surveys.
Subsequent talks at the Confirmit Community conference focused on the options available to organizations for gathering feedback and integrating it into their businesses, using a range of case studies to highlight success in different areas. These talks included a range of high-level presentations from global Enterprises such as HP, Nokia, and UBS; and global Market Research organizations including GfK NOP, Ipsos MORI, and Virtual Surveys.
About Confirmit
Confirmit is the world’s leading provider of software for Market Research (MR) and Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM). The company has more than 200 employees and offices in Oslo (headquarters), Guildford, London, Moscow, New York, San Francisco, and Yaroslavl. Confirmit’s software is also distributed through partner resellers in Amsterdam, Sydney and Tokyo. Confirmit became a public company in December 2005, and is listed on Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker “CONF”.
Confirmit targets Global 5000 companies and Market Research agencies worldwide with a wide range of software products for feedback / data collection, panel management, data processing, analysis, and reporting. Customers include British Airways, Countrywide Financial, Dow Chemical, Experian, GlaxoSmithKline, Halifax Bank of Scotland, Hewlett Packard, Intrawest, Ipsos, Nielsen, The NPD Group, Safeco Insurance, StatoilHydro, Symantec and Virgin Media.
For more information about Confirmit, visit www.confirmit.com.
