Vision Critical makes Forrester's list

The economy and stock market may be topsy turvey, but large corporates still need to know what is going on within their customer base. Thus the need for Enterprise Feedback Management firms, such as our fantabulous Fund III portfolio company Vision Critical.

Forrester Research is out with a report on the EFM space, and Vancouver-based Vision Critical made the list, along with Confirmit and IBM SPSS, among others. Here’s a snapshot on the report by CMS Wire:

Currently, the EFM marketplace isn’t as comprehensive as others because technologies are still evolving and mostly smaller vendors populate it. In their evaluation, Forrester found more than 26 vendors offering software and services to support clients’ Voice of Customer (VOC) programs. Of them, all but two generated US$ 30 million or less in revenue from EFM technologies and services in 2010, and none demonstrated clear market leadership.

For market insights professionals, these vendors also serve to provide customer satisfaction and loyalty research, but only in a much broader sense as compared to their customer experience professionals, who are employing solutions focused on driving continuous operational improvements.

Based on a 76-point criteria, which were grouped into three high-level buckets — current offering, strategy, and market presence — Forrester evaluated five EFM market insights platform providers: Confirmit; Globalpark, a QuestBack company; IBM SPSS; Vision Critical and Vovici, a Verint Systems company.

In this instance, IBM SPSS, Globalpark, and Confirmit lead the pack, noted especially for the different ways in which they collect feedback, integrate data and survey programming. For the remaining vendors, Vovici and Vision Critical were noted for their evaluation processes, but lacked in key areas like data integration and analytics.

Even when you’ve built a company from scratch to 400+ employees, with tens of millions of annual revenue, there’s still work to do. That’s partly what drives Dr. Angus Reid, Vision Critical’s CEO, and one of Canada’s most successful entrepreneurs of the past 20 years.

MRM