EFM Community is a strategic and centralized enterprise solution that enables organizations to create and manage online communities and panels—providing voice to customers, employees, or other constituents. Organizations are able to maintain a secure knowledge base of their survey communities and online panels, share them within groups, and integrate the data into information from other business systems. With a comprehensive view of an online community organizations are able to protect the relationship with their members, gather regular, consistent feedback, and avoid survey fatigue.
EFM Community gives voice to the online community empowering organizations to easily and systematically collect, manage, and use feedback throughout the enterprise—building customer loyalty, facilitating collaboration and innovation, and influencing critical business decisions.
EFM Community is offered in two levels to align with needs and project scope. EFM Community Team is designed for the multi-user requirements of teams and departments. EFM Community Enterprise is designed to meet the broad requirements for managing feedback across the entire organization.
EFM Community provides users the ability to quickly and easily create questionnaires, post surveys, solicit responses from community members or outside groups, collect responses, analyze results, and distribute findings.
- Easily create surveys with a word processor interface that is the most powerful and easiest to use on the market.
- Add advanced survey design elements such as branching, skip logic, and piping.
- Build advanced reports to drill down into data and create meaningful reports in real-time.
- Manage and control survey frequency by maintaining a comprehensive view of survey communities. Know who has been surveyed when—maintaining a positive relationship and avoiding survey fatigue.
- Maintain multiple profiles for each community member featuring unique demographics to target specific respondent groups.
- Import community members from established contact lists, or link community information to your existing customer or employee databases.
- Combine a wide range of reporting elements such as frequency analysis, correlation analysis, gap analysis, and summary of means to create insightful reports in minutes.
- SAS70 approved survey hosting environment with 128 bit SSL encryption and redundant firewalls; 24/7 monitoring and protection, and sophisticated data backup procedures.
EFM Community is a solution designed for organizations looking to build and manage online communities and panels, more effectively leverage existing communities, or need more advanced panel management. Providing a long-term, sustainable solution, it stays current with new trends and methodologies, while maintaining stability and reliability. Easy integration with other enterprise systems makes it an added value to initial investments.
With EFM Community, organizations gain actionable insight through community panels and community management to streamline business processes and align business goals. Incorporate regular customer insight into business operations, target company resources to increase productivity and enhance business agility, understand employee needs to improve hiring, training and management; and identify trends that drive profitability.
A comprehensive, enterprise-scale feedback solution, EFM Community can be used across the whole organization allowing each department to manage their own projects at their own pace. User-based roles and permissions allow for easy collaboration to get relevant feedback to the right people at the right time.
Hughes Network Systems
Company Background
Hughes Network Systems is the world’s leading provider of broadband satellite network services for businesses, consumers, and governments. Hughes has shipped more than 1.5 million systems in over 100 countries and reported nearly $1 billion in annual revenue for in 2007. Headquartered outside Washington, DC in Germantown, Maryland, Hughes maintains sales and support offices worldwide and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hughes Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:HUGH).
Challenge
Hughes is continuing to grow and succeed in this highly competitive market because the company is committed to delivering the highest level of customer service to all its customers—whether they are Fortune 500 companies, a small business owner or your average American family. In order to continually provide outstanding products and services, it is critical for the company to have accurate and up-to-date customer satisfaction information. More importantly, any new customer data collected needs to seamlessly integrate with other business systems and databases that store existing customer information. In this way, the various departments in the company are all able to access a holistic view of a customer’s history.
Since the late 1990’s, Hughes has tried a variety of survey tools, each having its own advantages and disadvantages. None provided a complete solution that met the full spectrum of Hughes’ needs—including a home-grown custom application developed in-house in 1999. The problem was none of these solutions were scalable or flexible enough to handle the wide range and heavy volume of survey needs. Hughes even outsourced the survey projects to third-party research firms, which proved to be too costly to maintain over the long-term.
Solution
Hughes initially became a Vovici customer in 2000, and the first implementation immediately reduced the time it took to design and launch surveys. However, dramatic benefits emerged when Hughes upgraded to Vovici’s EFM Community solution in 2005, which provided real-time feedback from surveys; integration with existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and financial applications; security and confidentiality; and an open platform that enabled custom coding to accommodate Hughes’ unique requirements. Centralizing survey efforts also helped ensure all surveys adhered to consistent quality and customers were not being contacted by multiple areas of the company.
"We are expanding our use of Vovici everyday at Hughes. We literally have hundreds of surveys going out daily,” said Anida Carpenter, Customer Research and Business Intelligence manager at Hughes Network Systems. “We’re leveraging the centralized and automated feedback controls that Vovici provides to support multiple, departmental initiatives as an integrated strategic component of our success. It allows us to react faster to our customers because we have near real-time problem identification, which results in timely product and service response."
Among its many uses of EFM Community, Hughes collects information from customers at nearly every touch point. One of the key areas of measurement is the installation and fulfillment chain. Third-party auditors are employed to check on the quality of the installation at the client site to ensure all equipment associated with the satellite internet is properly installed and functioning. Capturing this information and tying it to the customer’s file allows Hughes to have a 360-degree view of the customer’s experience.
Also, new products are put to the test by customers who provide feedback through surveys. Because Hughes’ products are highly technical, and certain components of the product can only be tested after it has been installed at the client’s site, these “beta testers” provide a final opportunity for the engineering team to perfect new products before releasing them to the general public.
Results
Hughes gained a tremendous business advantage by centralizing its survey efforts in-house with Vovici’s EFM Community solution. The company improved customer satisfaction by 35-40% since 1999, and since 2001 has saved $218,000 annually by bringing survey projects in-house. Among other operational benefits, call centers around the world automatically receive daily downloads of various customer survey results, which means customer service agents, no matter where they happen to be—India, East Coast, West Coast, etc.—always have the latest, most up-to-date information available.
Hughes is able to maintain its leadership position and continue to build loyalty among their client base because they are able to communicate so effectively through the use of interactive feedback surveys.
