By Adam Edmunds, CEO, Allegiance

Established in 2005 and headquartered at South Jordan, Utah, Allegiance offers feedback management software to help organizations grow customer and employee loyalty and engagement. The company has raised total funding of $18 million from El Dorado Ventures, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Allegis Capital.

As our industry grows and VOC/EX practitioners gain more budget, responsibility and power within the organization, it's critical to step back and ask 'what business are we really in?' Your collective value will rise and fall based upon how effective you are within the organization.

In the past, your job duties consisted of gathering data – and you were good at it because today there are mountains of data piling up at your firms. You spent hours combing through the data to glean a few useful insights to share. Exhausted, you would quickly regroup to do another deep dive in the data to find a few more insights. This repeating cycle was the way you operated – every day!

But there's something fundamentally wrong with this. Your main value to an organization is expressed when you reveal actionable insights to the right people at the right time. This was the thing you wanted the most, but it was the least-delivered portion of your jobs.
You may have been in the data gathering business in the past, but the future lies with data insights. You cannot gather more data only to deliver tepid insights. Your value and your place at the highest levels of the company are weakened by this result.

Your job is really about delivering insights. To do this, you need automated programs. Sometimes, less robust programs work better. Sometimes asking fewer questions in surveys, and even sending less invitations can help to streamline what you do and how you do it. Less can equal more.