Survey Software Here, There, Everywhere
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Feb 19, 2009
George Colony, founder and CEO of Forrester Research, in a blog post about how companies purchase during the recession, listed the following as his second best practice:
Cut back on software proliferation-use these times to create fewer, stronger standards and rationalize licenses. Cut back on rogue proliferation of software as a service (SaaS) offerings.
Survey software has certainly been one of the categories that's "gone rogue". Our prospects and customers are often surprised to learn how many different survey systems they are currently subscribing to. Because of this, we offer a complimentary feedback assessment to serious prospects to help them assess the situation.
We will field a survey across your organization to determine the actual feedback needs of your staff and how they are being met today. We typically find many more research initiatives underway than the market-research department or marketing department is aware of-and far more money being spent than anyone realized. The survey results enable us to determine the appropriate number of users who would be interested in using online community software and enterprise feedback management. We are able to provide a cost assessment and estimate an ROI that can be used in preparing a business case. By implementing an enterprise feedback management system, we were able to save one client $500,000 in a year in software subscription costs and a similar amount in labor (by automating common tasks using web services).
An assessment is an excellent way to determine the financial benefits of implementing MROCs and EFM. Since the assessment is valuable regardless of the platform vendor you end up choosing, consider conducting a feedback assessment today.