Allegiance Inc., a leader in the new and emerging field of Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM), has introduced Professional Services to help guide businesses through the process of implementing an effective EFM program.
Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) is a new business discipline which entails using electronic surveys and other feedback systems to gather opinions from customers and employees, and then using the responses to drive key business decisions. In some ways it is like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – however, while CRM is uses mostly quantitative data to reveal the “who,” “what,” “where” and “when” about your customers, based on their past interactions, EFM is used to discover the “why” based on your customers’ emotional responses to survey questions, which are typically delivered post-transaction on the Web or on the phone.
EFM can be viewed as an extension, or enhancement to CRM, in that it is a way of taking “soft” data, such as your customer’s perceptions of your company, and tying it to the hard data in order to make better informed business decisions. Many will tell you that EFM is a discipline unto itself, simply by way of the fact that it achieves things that CRM alone cannot. By understanding the emotional reasons why your customers want to stay with you (or leave you), and the emotional reasons why your employees want to stay in their jobs (or leave their jobs), you can improve customer loyalty and achieve better retention rates, which in turn leads to higher profits.
Utah-based Allegiance Inc. offers hosted EFM solutions that drive growth and increased profitability through improved customer loyalty, employee retention and “engagement.” The company recently announced the launch of its Engage Platform, which it claims is the first system to link employee and customer loyalty and “engagement” to profits. The SaaS solution helps companies gather, analyze, and respond in real-time to customer and employee complaints, comments and suggestions.
Now, through Allegiance’s Professional Services, companies have a team of loyalty and engagement experts who can provide comprehensive implementation guidance, customer support, education training, and best practices consulting for the Allegiance Engage platform. This team of experts will help ensure that companies get the maximum results from their efforts to engage with employees and customers and achieve their business goals.
“Doing surveys is one aspect of gathering feedback, but going beyond analytics to actually using the data to affect business outcomes is very powerful,” said Esteban Kolsky, research director at Gartner, Inc., in a press release. “Professional services and consulting is critical to help customers not only collect the right data, but actually understand it and put it into practice in their organization.”
Allegiance Professional Services offers Fast-Start Implementation Consulting, which helps companies set up a system for gathering the right data and quickly start engaging with customers and employees; Dedicated Account Management and Customer Support, in which experts in loyalty and engagement practices work with customers on a dedicated basis to support their specific requirements; Comprehensive Education and Training: which includes a range of courses covering the basics of EFM to more advanced implantations (this includes both instructor-led and software-based training); and Best Practices Consulting: through which customers will come to understand and use the data from the Engage platform to affect business outcomes such as employee turnover or sales revenue.
“Allegiance Professional Services are a companion -- and crucial part of the complete Allegiance Engage platform,” said Greg Heaps, Allegiance COO. “Gathering the right data and understanding how it impacts your company provides a comprehensive approach to achieving long-term success. We don’t believe in selling an application and saying goodbye. Our growth and success is built on a tradition of offering complete solutions – which includes technology, support and consulting.”
The Allegiance Engage platform is available as a complete package called TotalEngage, or as individual components for specific areas of EFM, including CustomerEngage, EmployeeEngage, ActiveSurvey and SilentWhistle Ethics Reporting. Professional Services is available to support any of these elements.
For more information, visit
www.allegiance.com.
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Patrick Barnard is Associate Editor for Customer Interaction Solutions magazine and Assignment Editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.