During talks with Allegiance, of South Jordan, about the customer feedback-management software it offers, a CEO wondered how many comments his company was receiving.

"They ended up checking and they had a contact desk and an e-mail desk on their Web site," said Adam Edmunds of Allegiance. "They had 140,000 e-mails there that no one had ever looked at."

Rolling out a new software package this week, offering expertise on customer and employee loyalty and backed with $5.7 million of new financing, Allegiance is positioning itself to offer solutions to companies, such as the unnamed one above, that want to effectively manage a sometimes huge volume of customer comments.

With current customers that include T-Mobile and the Department of Homeland Security, Allegiance has just signed up Zions Bancorp. The Utah banking giant not only wants to track and respond quickly to customer comments but also to continually gauge the morale and loyalty of its 11,700 employees.

And it's in that intersection - of ways to measure, expand and keep customer and employee loyalty - that Allegiance sees ways to make its clients, and itself, more profitable.

"Eighty-four percent of customers that leave a relationship with a business do so because of poor service, which is the umbrella of everything we're talking about out here," said Chris Cottle, vice president for corporate marketing. "The traditional battle businesses think they're fighting is quality and price but service is this huge thing."

Edmunds, at 29, is the Allegiance CEO. He formed a company called SilentWhistle in 2005 after graduating with a master's in accounting from Brigham Young University.

But Edmunds said SilentWhistle's single product - to take reports of corporate wrongdoing - limited the company's growth potential. So in 2005, SilentWhistle acquired Allegiance Technologies, a company founded in 2000 by BYU marketing professor Gary Rhoads to track and manage customer and employee feedback.

With the launch this week of its suite of products, Allegiance and its 60 employees offer software that allows a company to receive and solicit feedback from customers from a Web page, telephone calls and surveys. That information goes into an Allegiance-hosted database and from there, the company offers a set of tools to route that information to the right person to ensure a quick response.

For a company such as Zions, Allegiance can help conduct monthly surveys of customers and employees at all branches and levels, and generate reports that can flow to many levels of the organization.

"If your employees are unhappy, it's going to reflect on your customers with poor service," said Claire Howells, employee engagement and communications adviser for Zions Bancorp, the holding company for eight banks in 10 states. "And conversely if your employees are motivated and happy, that leans toward better customer experiences, as well."

Zions Bancorp entities Zions Bank of Utah, Vectra Bank Colorado and Nevada State Bank already had been using Allegiance before Zions Bancorp decided to take it to the entire organization after considering other providers.

Allegiance also offers experts such as Rhoads, a member of the company's advisory team, to design customer and employee surveys, and interpret the resulting data that constantly flows into its databases. The system can even provide real-time reports.

"There's no reason to deal with turnover after it's happened," said Rhoads. "We can deal with it before it happens."

Allegis Capital of San Francisco led the $5.7 million investment in Allegiance this year.

"I thought the business proposition they came up with is compelling," said Spencer Tall, managing director of Allegis, which helped bring in some new members of the management team along with its $3 million share of the capital infusion.

tharvey@sltrib.com