Vovici Community Builder Hits the Market
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, May 06, 2008
Yesterday we announced the release of our Community Builder module. This is a significant release for Vovici and it is a product that I believe will be provide significant value for our customers - existing customers and new ones looking to leverage communities for research and feedback.
So the obvious question is: "why is this different from your EFM Community offering?". Well, Community Builder is about the respondent. While EFM Community has features to build and publish surveys to a community, the Community Builder module is all about engaging the community member. Community Builder has an interface that is specific to each panel member where the panelist can take surveys, view results of completed surveys, and interact with the community and the organization via collaborative tools such as wikis, forums and blogs. The goal is to create an environment where the community panelist will be engaged through both survey activity and the collaborative tools.
The melding of multiple types of feedback tools provides a compelling balance between quantitative and qualitative research. The survey process takes care of the quantitative side and really finds out what the community wants or is thinking about. Using the collaborative tools to further engage the community provides the how and why of the qualitative side. For example, in our customer advisory community the surveys are used to determine what features customers want, and then our product managers engage the community to see how these features will look and operate.
EFM Community has been modified to allow the survey authors and administrators to interact with the community panels through the EFM administrative interface. Community Builder is a point and shoot, no coding required operation with an impressive list of objects that handle the integration with EFM Community as well as power the collaborative functions. You can brand the interface so it looks just like existing sites. Customer can build their own community or attach community builder to add feedback capabilities to existing community sites.
Go to the web site and watch the flash file (http://www.vovici.com/products/online-customer-community-software.aspx) for a visual overview of the product and the concepts behind it. It will help you get your hands around the offering. Or better yet, request a demo. I have personally shown this to 15 people since last week and within minutes people really get the benefits as quickly as any product I have launched in the past.