Vovici – Our Story
Posted by Dean Wiltse on Fri, May 25, 2007
I have always had a passion for using technology and the Internet to understand individual preferences and the positive impact understanding those customer and prospect preferences can have on a business. When the Internet came along, suddenly understanding individual preferences became easier, faster, much cheaper and very fun.
In April of 2001 when I joined Greenfield Online as the CEO, the primary methodology for doing surveys in North America was on the telephone, face-to-face interviews were second, and online surveys were a distant third place - at that time only accounting for 10% of all surveys. Conducting surveys on the Internet in Europe and Asia was barely being done at all. Experts were still questioning if the method of gathering data over the Internet was reliable. Now, six years later, companies, research firms, and individuals are doing more surveys over the Internet then any other method.
I left Greenfield Online in September of 2005 after 4.5 amazing years. During my time there we built a great company and enabled an entire industry, Marketing Research, to adopt a new methodology of gathering feedback for research purposes via the Internet. Today the company continues as the leading panel provider to the Marketing Research industry. If you are looking for a specific type of person to survey, you will find them in the Greenfield Panel.
In addition to observing the fast adoption of online surveys for marketing research purposes, I have witnessed companies adopting Internet surveys to gather feedback from customers, employees and other constituents at an amazing rate. Businesses have quickly seen the value of getting feedback instantly versus doing a point-in-time customer or employee satisfaction survey once or twice a year. Immediate feedback is powerful.
The Evolution of Enterprise Feedback Management
I was first introduced to Perseus when a large online flower retailer expressed an interest in building a community of their customers to survey online. They wanted to survey people that frequently purchased flowers, as well as their own customers.
Greenfield and Perseus partnered to deliver a complete solution; Greenfield provided the survey respondents from their panel that purchased flowers regularly, and Perseus provided the hosted survey technology platform where the current customers and panelist could take the survey.
The online survey industry was evolving. Companies were using any number of inexpensive Web-based survey tools to do more and more surveys. Perseus had discovered that as businesses evolved in doing more surveys, new issues must be considered. How often were customers and/or employees being invited to take surveys? Who was inviting them? Should we worry about security? How secure is the data and the responses to the surveys when they are being hosted at one of those small online tool companies? What decisions were being made based on the data collected from online survey instruments? Should we track this data? What did the surveys look like? How can we integrate surveys in to our business process?
In 2004, Perseus introduced "Enterprise Feedback Management," a new industry term and technology solution. Many of their customers that purchased Perseus survey tools from 1993 to 2002 were now experiencing the need for more capabilities and expertise. They did not just want to build a survey on the Internet, they wanted to make building surveys easy, manage their communities of constitutes to gather feedback on a regular basis, and get advice from a professional from time-to-time.
Although we have seen surveys conducted online for several years, we are in the very early stages of this emerging industry. In the next few years companies will be looking for Enterprise solutions for their business. They want to make feedback an integrated process in to how they make decisions about new products, advertising campaigns, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, so on and so on. They need more control as to who is inviting customers to surveys and how often. They want to build "communities" of their customers and employees to gathered feedback constantly to give them a competitive advantage and to make their companies great.
The Birth of Vovici
I set out to build a company with the founders of WebSurveyor and Perseus that could lead the online survey industry to the next level. Companies are naturally evolving in their widespread usage of online surveys and they want/need more comprehensive solutions.
Austin Ventures and I worked together with the founders of these two great companies to create the leading company in the online survey and Enterprise Feedback Management industries. We put together WebSurveyor, the leading and award-winning online survey tool provider, with Perseus, the inventor of Enterprise Feedback Management solutions. Combined we have more customers, and host more surveys, then any other in our industry.
Vovici was born on April 2, 2007, to provide companies with a continuum product line, no matter where they are in their evolution of online survey data collection. A company or individual may start with our award-winning and easy-to-use survey creation and data collection tool, move on to our advanced reporting capabilities, and then use our technology platform to manage their "survey communities" and integrate online surveys into their business process. We also discovered from our own survey research that people building surveys may need some expert advice from time-to-time. They want advice on how to build the survey instrument, which questions to ask and how to ask the question or maybe just a simple review by an expert. Others have told us they may want some help with a review of the results and assistance from a "pro" with authoring the executive summary. That is what we do at Vovici.
Joining me in contributing to our Vovici blog will be David Alison, CTO of Vovici, and Jeffrey Henning, SVP of Product Management. David is the founder of WebSurveyor, and Jeffrey is a founder of Perseus.
- Dean