Thoughts on Enterprise Feedback Management
The Gartner Group was paid a bundle to come up with a fancy name for survey software - Enterprise Feedback Management (aka EFM). They also gave a huge indication that the industry is heading this way - fast. They even gave strong probability numbers that companies will be ditching their survey software tools for tools that cost in the millions - because they believe feedback is so vital to their success. There are a lot of companies that claim they invented EFM.
But seriously… who cares about EFM?
What you need to do (if you are in the market for survey software) is to get referrals, evaluate your options carefully, and create a list of what is most important to you… as if you were buying a car. There is a huge difference between Survey Monkey and tools from companies like Perseus and Confirmit that can costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, but there are also a lot of companies in between, such as Prezza Technologies with high-end features and aggressive pricing meant to challenge this market…
From what we have seen, this is what the survey software market looks like:
1. Cheap but Limited Survey Tools (LOW END)
Limited Features: doesn’t support advanced features Limited Support: no live technical support when you are in a bind Limited Scalability: limits growth by placing penalties on submissions Limited Life: data is away each time, not easy to re-use and perform trend analysis
2. Powerful but Expensive MR Tools (HIGH END)
Expensive: Usually starts at $10K(base) for 1 year of hosted surveys! Penalties: Limits on responses, submissions, users, bandwidth Difficult: Need a PhD to understand advanced stats packages Overkill: Bloated with features from very specific customers
3. Business Research Tools
Emerging… right now. It’s the high end tools without the extra market research (MR) add-ons.
