You see it everywhere…in trade publications, in business journals, in industry reports, in articles and seminars and webcasts. It’s become a corporate obsession: a focus on the customer. And regardless of what the initiatives surrounding this obsession are called—“customer relationship management,” “customer interaction management,” “customer experience management,” or one of several other labels—there’s one term that is pervasive: “customer.”

Customer-focused initiatives such as these recognize that as businesses have become far larger and more complex, they have lost the customer focus they once had. However, recent experience shows that in order to improve corporate bottom lines and gain a competitive advantage, this focus must be regained.

Thus far, these initiatives, many of which were first introduced more than a decade ago, have not delivered on the promises they have made. Companies have certainly improved their ability to capture and store both transactional and descriptive customer data. But there’s clearly something missing. If recent news articles in BusinessWeek, Fortune, and othersare to be believed, customer satisfaction is still much lower than it was several decades ago.

A small number of particularly savvy organizations have discovered a solution to this dilemma. They’ve identified the missing component in these customer-focused initiatives—customer insight. What’s more, they’ve discovered the key ingredients to maximizing the value of this customer insight: continuity, centralization, and integration. These companies have implemented centralized systems specifically designed for the continuous collection, management, and use of customer feedback within their organizations. These systems are referred to as “enterprise feedback management,” or EFM systems.

Note the word “continuous,” because it’s important. Many organizations perform some form of feedback collection, often in the form of surveys. In fact, most organizations perform multiple surveys. The problem is that these surveys are typically carried out in an isolated fashion within different parts of the organization. Each survey may be conducted with solid research best-practices behind it. But what happens next?

For example, what happens to the data? Does it continue to live only within the department that originally collected it? Or is it joined centrally with the data from other feedback initiatives, as well as the data from other corporate systems, such as operational and transactional data, so that a much more complete view of the customer can be gained?

And do these surveys become one-time attempts to gather customer feedback? Or are they a part of a continuous, integrated program to gather customer input so that, as customer perspectives and opinions change, timely steps can be taken to retain at-risk customers or better identify client segments for more targeted marketing campaigns?

The companies that have found a solution to this challenge now answer these questions very differently than they did in the past. As a result of implementing EFM systems, companies such as Yamaha Motors Europe, Dow Benelux, and others have obtained a means of continually incorporating customer insight into their business operations.

Yamaha Motors Europe, for example, created an Internet portal, the Yamaha Design Café, to learn more about which features were most important to sports bike enthusiasts. In just two weeks, the company’s design team gained valuable insight into how customers would use a sports bike and how much they were willing to pay for one. The company combined this information with other data to identify new directions for product evolution and keep its current models competitive.

EFM solutions can also be used to gather and manage internal feedback. For example, Dow Benelux obtained feedback from employees at its manufacturing facility in the Netherlands by using an EFM solution. Dow was able to address critical employee welfare issues in the plant’s 26 different production units. One result was a significant decrease in disability claims. In addition, employee morale improved, as shown by a drop in absenteeism to 55 percent of the national industry average.

The benefits these organizations have gained are many. By centrally managing the feedback that they collect, regardless of the communication channel through which it was originally collected, they now have a much more accurate, complete understanding of their customers’ preferences, motivations, and intentions. They are then able to use this insight to drive business improvement enterprise-wide, improving their bottom lines and securing a competitive advantage.

To learn more about enterprise feedback management, click here.