Vovici Appoints Greg Stock Chairman and CEO

DULLES, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vovici, the leading provider of enterprise feedback management (EFM) solutions and survey software, today announced that its board of directors has appointed Greg Stock as the company’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), effective July 1. A proven technology leader, Stock brings more than 20 years of technology industry and marketing experience to Vovici.

"As a CEO, I know how important it is to understand the collective voice of customers," said Stock. "Vovici's solutions enable organizations to take customer feedback and turn it into customer loyalty. Vovici has already delivered high-impact feedback solutions to more than half the Fortune 500. I am excited to join the team and build on this foundation of success."

An accomplished executive, Stock joins Vovici having most recently served as president and CEO of Mirage Networks, a provider of network security solutions based in Austin, Texas. During his tenure, Stock led the company from start-up to market leader with more than 600 customers across 40 countries. Mirage was successfully acquired by Trustwave in February, 2009.

Prior to Mirage Networks, Stock was a key player in successful DC-area technology companies. As Vice President, Marketing, Stock drove Vastera, a provider of global trade management solutions, to the market leading position and was instrumental in the company’s successful initial public offering in September, 2000. Previous to this, Stock helped Manugistics, the supply chain management leader, grow to more than $200M in revenues and initiated the company’s expansion into China and Australia.

Vovici’s investors include Austin Ventures and Mayfield Fund. “Greg is an outstanding choice to lead Vovici,” said Chris Pacitti, General Partner at Austin Ventures and Vovici board member. “A tenacious leader with an inspiring approach that energizes people to achieve, Greg has a demonstrated track record for establishing market leadership and global expansion initiatives. Much of Greg’s past experience is in leading sales and marketing organizations, positioning him well to lead a company such as Vovici that is focused on helping its clients create customer loyalty solutions.”

Stock is succeeding Dean Wiltse who has served as Vovici’s Chairman and CEO since 2005. Wiltse oversaw the merger of Perseus and Websurveyor in 2006, re-branded the company as Vovici, and converted the business into a software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise. “The Board would like to thank Dean for his achievements to date and know he is looking forward to spending more time with his family in Arizona,” said David Lack, Partner at Austin Ventures.

“We are delighted to welcome Greg to Vovici,” said Dean Wiltse. ”Vovici has established itself as the SaaS leader in enterprise feedback management. I look forward to working with Greg as the company enters its next phase of growth, delivering EFM solutions to clients so that they can better capture and analyze their customer feedback.”

First Commercial Software for TRS-80 in a Decade: Vovici FEEDBACK/80

ROCKLAND, MA-April 1, 2009- Vovici today announced the immediate availability of a new version of EFM Feedback written specifically for the Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. "When we realized that no new software had been developed for the TRS-80 Model I in eleven years, we felt compelled to re-open the market window," said Jeffrey Henning, chief strategy officer of Vovici. "The TRS-80 is an exciting platform for us, given its installed base. While some software companies were started in the garage, we're the first to develop software for computers that are often left in the garage." 

Vovici FEEDBACK/80 is available directly from Vovici as a bundle with any edition of a Vovici application. For a limited time only, the new product comes with Vovici v4, the leading enterprise-feedback-management platform and the only survey software that uses a word-processor interface. Available as an annual subscription, Vovici v4 allows you to design, administer, collect and analyze web surveys.

Unlike the TRS-80 edition, the web edition offers full charting and presentations, report writing and questionnaire libraries. Add-on options include Feedback Intelligence, which brings business intelligence capabilities to survey analysis, and Mobile Survey, which provides for offline survey administration.

Vovici FEEDBACK/80 supports a nostalgic command-line interface and can be used to enter and tabulate survey results, with the number of questionnaires you can process limited only by RAM. You can enter 30 questionnaires for a system with 4K RAM and several hundred questionnaires for 16K RAM. FEEDBACK/80 can support up to 50 questions per survey, where every question is a multiple-choice, single-response style question. To conserve RAM, you do not enter the text of the questionnaire into the system. 

"We're taking backward compatibility to a new level," commented Jody Bailey, vice president of development and network operations for Vovici. "Supporting the TRS-80 emphasizes the Vovici commitment to integrating state-of-the-art feedback management with legacy systems."

About Vovici

Vovici is the pioneer of Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM), providing comprehensive survey software, panel management and online community solutions. Our survey tools enable organizations to centralize feedback data collection, build and manage proprietary panels, leverage corporate social networking, and utilize robust survey analytics and reporting. Our solutions increase customer loyalty, facilitate collaboration and innovation, influence critical business decisions and provide voice to online communities. Organizations worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune 500, rely on Vovici to gather feedback on customer satisfaction, perform market research and gauge employee satisfaction. Visit http://www.vovici.com/ for more information.

CONTACT: 

Vovici
Jeffrey Henning, 781-848-8100 x 550 
mailto:jhenning@vovici.com?subject=TRS-80&body=I%20enjoyed%20your%20April%20Fool%27s%20joke%21%20%20But%20I%20have%20a%20question%20for%20you...

Customer Experience Management from CGA

Vovici is pleased to announce that CGA is using Vovici v4 to develop customer engagement strategies for leading brands.  CGA, a leading Customer Experience Consultancy in the United Kingdom, serves major brands such as Pfizer, Ikea, T-Mobile, QVC, Citibank, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's and many more. 
CGA projects vary in diversity and scale from advisory services through customer insight projects to  major customer experience strategy programs that define a brand's customer experience strategy and the changes needed within the organization to deliver it.
On behalf of its clients, CGA traces every step of a customer journey, from product research through retail and online shopping to the actual purchase and afterwards, monitoring how customers feel at each interaction with the brand. From this, CGA determines where customers are satisfied and where action needs to be taken to improve their experience.


CGA's approach to customer insight is different from traditional customer research. CGA will help you understand why your customers behave the way they do, rather than simply what their attitudes are, so that you can influence their behavior to drive sales and loyalty. CGA uses quantitative research to scale the importance of customer issues, and qualitative research to really get under the skin of why customers think and behave the way they do. 
CGA can help you answer these 4 questions:

1. What value does customer experience have for your organization? CGA will audit your business and your competitors to pinpoint how and where customer experience is supporting your business goals and profits .... or letting it down. 
2. What experience do your customers want? CGA will help you discover what it is like to be one of your customers, exploring the customer journey and identifying ‘Moments of Truth'. CGA's Customer Heartbeat^TM methodology will identify the gaps between the experience your customers want and the experience you are giving them. 
3. How can you improve the value of your Customer Experience?  CGA will show you how to convert customer insight into practical things that you can do to transform how your customers feel and behave. CGA's Breakthrough Workshops^TM will generate new ideas and initiatives which they will validate with your customers and against your business objectives
4. How can you implement a new Customer Experience into the business? - CGA offers a suite of tools to help organizations build an implementation plan. Its Experience Blueprint provides a focus for re-orienting the business. CGA can formulate pilot programs, develop time plans and measure improvements through Balanced Scorecards and customer-loyalty indices. 

Of course, behind the scenes, CGA is using Vovici v4 to gain deep insight into customer's needs and expectations, informing its strategy programs and providing a cost-effective method for tracking a company's Customer Heartbeat over time.  Be sure to check out CGA's innovative methodologies. 

Research Magazine Review of Vovici v4

Tim Macer reviewed Vovici v4 in the November issue of Research magazine:

Today more and more companies are realising the benefit of building online panels of customers to involve in research. The idea is simple, but the reality can be complex and costly to deliver from a technical standpoint. Whether firms try to build them for themselves or park the problem with a research agency, it is an area crying out for an off-the-shelf solution like the new Vovici Community Builder, which was released last month and effectively relaunches the concept of the panel management tool for the demands of Web 2.0-style research.

And my favorite quote:

This is a vast system with massive potential, which in its very design reveals some research-literate minds were behind it. Users I spoke to report that that the community functionality is stable, reliable and relatively easy to learn, and has enabled users to standardise and systematise their research and harmonise measures across very large enterprises. Perhaps the product's greatest strength is in its ability to integrate with CRM systems and other business intelligence sources, making research more relevant and mainstream within the corporate enterprise.

We have always spent a lot of time developing an understanding of how market researchers work and then shaping the software to match their expectations and work habits. It's nice to have that recognized.  Plenty more to do, of course!

I encourage you to read the whole article, "Vovici Community Builder And Feedback Intelligence Reviewed".

Most Popular Blog Posts of 2008

Blog posts are ephemeral, and before these get washed away completely by a tide of new postings, I wanted to point out the most popular posts from Voice of Vovici for last year:

• The Top Ten Reasons for Building an Online Community in 2009 - Even though this wasn't published until December 16, this post summarizing a presentation Brian Koma and I gave quickly became the most popular post on the site.  Ten great reasons to stop postponing the establishment of an online community for your organization and start one today.
• Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research - I compiled this as a slide for a presentation, but never ended up using it and turned it into a blog post instead:  it's a table comparing and contrasting the two schools of research.
• Survey Software vs. Enterprise Feedback Management - How do survey software applications typically differ from enterprise feedback management solutions?
• The Apostle Model - A recap of a seminal Harvard Business Review article that segments customers by loyalty and satisfaction. This ended up becoming the first in a series of six posts on the Apostle Model.
• The Long and the Short of Questionnaire Length - Six detailed, practical tips on how to shorten the length of questionnaires, thereby mitigating one of the most common respondent complaints: that surveys are too long.
• Quality - What's Love Got To Do With It? - A recap of the MRA Conference's keynote, where Robin Pearl, vice president of Market Research at Estée Lauder, looked at how to achieve high-quality market research.  
• Father of EFM - A Father's Day post I wrote about my dad, relaying how he came to coin the phrase "Enterprise Feedback Management" and thereby name our market.

Thanks to everyone for their encouragement and their readership and, most of all, their comments.  I'm looking forward to a productive 2009.  Please let me know if there are topics that you would like to see me cover.

Vovici v4 Extends Survey Authoring & Analysis throughout Enterprise

Today we announced the release of Vovici v4, the latest expansion of our flagship feedback platform.  Vovici v4 extends feedback throughout the enterprise: its assisted survey authoring empowers managers to write their own surveys in conjunction with internal mentors, while its powerful business intelligence empowers employees to develop and customize their own analysis of surveys reflecting their domain or geography.

Key features of Vovici v4 include:

• Uniquely combines Proprietary Panels, Online Surveys and Business Intelligence
• Embeds feedback into business applications and leading CRM systems to allow 360-degree views of customers
• Offers industry's most powerful analytics, data visualization and reporting
• Helps you manage survey creation workflows and approval cycles to protect your brand and eliminate feedback fatigue

Vovici v4 helps your organization:

• Improve strategy with deeper knowledge of customers and employees
• Drive enterprise efficiencies and cost reduction with robust, fast, accurate EFM
• Deliver enterprise-grade protection for your brand and critical business data

Vovici v4, formerly known as Vovici EFM Community and before that as Perseus SurveySolutions/EFM, is the fourteenth major release of the product that pioneered the Enterprise Feedback Management industry.

Employee Satisfaction Benchmark from Walker Information

I'm pleased to announce that Vovici has partnered with Walker Information to offer our customers access to the Walker Loyalty in the Workplace benchmark.  A Vovici EFM Community customer can load the Walker employee satisfaction questionnaire into their account, add some additional questions to customize it, then field it to their staff through our survey software.  Once the results have been collected, Walker consultants will prepare a custom report and presentation contrasting our client's results to the Walker national benchmark.

The survey covers the following topics and takes about 20 minutes for an employee to complete:

• Attitudes toward the organization
• Work-related behaviors
• The organization and your work
• Work factors and their influence
• Opinions about the organization and its integrity
• Other comments
• Demographic information

Once the results have been analyzed, Walker provides our client with:

• An executive summary of the results, with comparisons to the national benchmark
• Detailed reports that break out every question on the survey by every demographic group (each segment with at least 5 employees)
• Loyalty segments by each demographic group
• The booklet A Guide to Understanding the Results
• A booklet that walks the client through developing an action plan to implement improvements inspired by the employee feedback

Interested customers should contact us today to start measuring employee loyalty.  Walker has been in business for almost 70 years (incredibly rare in the market-research industry) and is a great partner for Vovici, helping our customers transform employee-satisfaction surveys into increased employee loyalty.

Survey Analysis & Business Intelligence

Last week we announced the latest product in our enterprise feedback management suite:  Vovici Feedback Intelligence.  Most EFM and survey software applications take a traditional view of survey analysis, providing frequent reports, verbatim lists and cross-tabulations.  While a survey tool can report on each question intelligently, using a pie chart for a choose-one question, a bar chart for a choose-many question, and so on, most survey tools are not meant for ad-hoc analysis.  Such tools often make it difficult to manipulate and share survey data.  In fact, many of our prospects were exporting survey data to Excel, SPSS or SAS.

The genesis of, and the genius of, Vovici Feedback Intelligence is that it for the first time marries the flexibility of Business Intelligence with survey data.   The new system:

• Puts powerful data mining, survey data analysis and reporting in the hands of everyday business managers
• Dramatically reduces the time and cost of creating usable data - from weeks to hours
• Allows easy configuration and sharing of executive-level dashboards with drill-down capability
• Enables easy online report sharing and hierarchical report management

Feedback Intelligence is available as a new module in our enterprise feedback management suite.  Watch our two-minute tour or sign up for a demo!

TNS (Taylor Nelson Sofres) Partners with Vovici

This afternoon at ESOMAR, we announced a new partnership with TNS:

TNS will adopt the Vovici EFM Platform and Community Builder Module as its standard platform for building custom online panels and communities for its customers.

Over the past 5 years, the TNS Custom Panel team has built qualitative, quantitative and mixed-use custom (proprietary) panels for consumer and B2B audiences, capitalizing on TNS's 60+ years of experience in building, managing and maintaining panels globally. Custom panels are not new. What is new is the emergence of Web 2.0 and, in particular, the familiarity and wide-spread use of social networking platforms.

"The end-to-end solution we are offering with this partnership is unique and really powerful," said Leslie Warshaw, Vice President of Proprietary Panels at TNS. "TNS research and panel expertise together with the Vovici technology platform delivers an industry leading solution enabling us to build the most flexible and comprehensive custom panels and communities for our clients." 

I'm very excited by this announcement, as Taylor Nelson Sofres was our first customer back in 1993:  only then they were known as Taylor Nelson, and we were known as Perseus Development Corp.  If I had the good sense to frame the first dollar the company made, it would have been a British pound note from them.  Back then, we were providing Taylor Nelson interviewers computer-assisted personal interviewing software, which was the modern tech of the day.  Now, we're providing our feedback-community software.  This is a great opportunity for us to build a new partnership, given the many years of experience TNS brings in custom panel management.

Announcing Vovici EFM/CRM Connector for Oracle

So when I was looking over presentations to attend at the Gartner CRM show, one of the presentations I chose was Social CRM Meets the Enterprise.  I assumed it was a Gartner presentation, and once there was pleasantly surprised to find out it was an Oracle presentation, as we were in the middle of extending our partnership with Oracle.

Yesterday we announced that Oracle has chosen us as a CRM On Demand Inner Circle Partner.  Here's Julie Adams, Oracle Vice President:

Our product management team has thoroughly reviewed the partner ecosystem for the most synergistic solutions from our partners. We believe Vovici, as part of the Oracle CRM On Demand Inner Circle Partner Initiative, will provide our customers and prospects complementary value-added functionality in the enterprise feedback management arena.

We've been integrating our EFM systems with CRM systems since 2004, back when most of our clients were running proprietary CRM applications.  In 2004, we had a small suite of perhaps a dozen SOAP web service calls that could be used for integration.  By 2006, that had grown to an extensive layer with over 100 web-service calls.  Now, with the announcement of the Vovici CRM 2.0 Connector for Oracle CRM On Demand, we have taken a few weeks of custom development effort and reduced it to a few days of mainly data configuration.

Why integrate your enterprise feedback management system?  To treat your clients as if you actually know who they are when you survey them, to minimize the amount of information they must provide, and to avoid bad survey situations like the one Jim Davies of Gartner related. 

Why integrate your EFM system with Oracle CRM On Demand?  Because now, not only is it the right thing to do, it's the easy thing to do.