Enterprise Feedback Management

Enterprise feedback management (EFM) is a system of processes and software that enables organizations to centrally manage deployment of surveys while dispersing authoring and analysis throughout an organization. EFM systems typically provide different roles and permission levels for different types of users, such as novice survey authors, professional survey authors, survey reporters and translators. EFM can help an organization establish a dialogue with employees, partners, and customers regarding key issues and concerns and potentially make customer specific real time interventions. EFM consists of data collection, analysis and reporting.

Modern EFM systems can track feedback from a variety of sources including customers, market research, social media, employees, data collection, vendors, partners and audits.

Prior to EFM, survey software was typically deployed in departments and lacked user roles, permissions and workflow. EFM enables deployment across the enterprise, providing decision makers with important data for increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty and lifetime value. EFM enables companies to look at customers "holistically" and to better respond to customer needs.

Gartner projected that 40 percent of total feedback system deployments would be EFM solutions in 2008. Its worth noting that the motivation to pilot/deploy EFM is often to reduce the reliance on (or reduce the costs of) traditional satisfaction research.

Esteban Kolsky, when a research director at Gartner, described the market structure as follows: "The market for these tools is a highly fragmented one, with no single provider. It's going to jumpstart a bunch of acquisitions as larger vendors look to work EFM and surveying into their growth strategy."

The EFM market grew 60% to 70% in 2005 and 2006.