Overview
This article provides an introductory perspective on the ResponseTek product and its history.
Introduction
About ResponseTek
It is common sense that every company exists to offer a set of products and services, and needs to be profitable in order to keep working throughout the years. Companies can only survive if they pay attention to the people willing to pay for those products and services: their customers. Dissatisfied customers will not only buy from a competitor but will also detract the company's image, advising potential customers to avoid it because of a bad experience.
Although all of this is well known, information about how customers perceive the company, its products, and services usually does not flow within the company as it should. As a result, companies lose the opportunities to regain customer confidence after a bad interaction and to get insights on which interactions to improve.
Customers interact with a company in many ways. In most cases, customers use the company's web site, talk to a salesperson, purchase a product or service, use technical support, and so on. All these interactions have the potential to improve or damage the company's reputation.
ResponseTek was then created with the purpose of letting customers express their feelings about the interactions with the company, giving visibility about how satisfied or dissatisfied customers are, and taking actions to improve the overall perception. Also, employees are a valuable source of information, since most customer-facing people are aware of customer complaints and how internal procedures may affect how customers are treated. Therefore, upper management can highly benefit from all this data at the time of taking decisions.
Description
ResponseTek History
ResponseTek was founded in 1999 by Syed Hasan, a management consultant. The idea came after two interesting events on the same day. First, Syed met some senior executives from a global financing company. They felt disconnected from their customers and worried because timely customer insights were not flowing through the business. Although these issues were pretty common among companies this size, they could not envision a solution.
Later on the same day, Syed was in the airport to take a flight back home when he discovered that the flight had been canceled. To his surprise, the gate agent was extremely helpful and booked him on a different airline. He wanted to express his gratitude for the work done by the agent but became frustrated as there was no formal way for him to provide his feedback.
He then realized that he faced two sides of the same problem: executives disconnected from customers and customers eager to provide feedback without a channel to share their experience. He envisioned a solution that would connect customers with company executives and employees in an easy and intuitive way. He sketched out the basic concepts of what he called "customer experience management" software that later became ResponseTek.
By early 2000, a beta version of the software had been built. The project succeeded and attracted investors. In May 2018, ESW acquired ResponseTek. Today, ResponseTek customers are telecommunication enterprises, banks, leasing companies, among others. They are divided into two business units: Telecom customers are under Skyvera and all others are under Ignite.
ResponseTek Features
The diagram below gives a vision of the main functionality:
ResponseTek offers a solution to send surveys to end customers (companies or individuals interacting with ResponseTek customers). First, surveys are prepared by defining the questions and assigning weights to each of them (1). Different languages can be used in the same survey if needed. After some interaction (2), invitations are imported with information about which end customers should answer a survey. These invitations are then sent to email addresses or phone numbers (SMS) (3).
Once a survey is completed by an end customer (4), it is computed for different reports. Reporting is a key feature in ResponseTek. Reports allow filtering by different criteria, such as customer satisfaction and time period. Advanced text analytics and sentiment analysis can help to build a complete view of the customer experience across the organization.
Based on the feedback received, it is possible to make decisions and take action to improve services and products (5). Feedbacks can even trigger automatic alerts so that agents can take action in specific scenarios.
ResponseTek is offered both as a SaaS and an On-Premises product.