Vovici 6: Enterprise Feedback Management, Enterprise-wide
Posted by Vovici Blog on Tue, Feb 15, 2011
Back in 2004, we realized that corporate usage of online surveys was changing into something much more strategic for large organizations. They needed the ability to empower staff to create surveys while enforcing central policies regarding data quality, brand standards and privacy policies. They needed to actively manage access to customers as survey respondents, to prevent oversurveying. They wanted to move surveys from projects to processes, providing ongoing measurement and monitoring while supporting the ability to take action to satisfy dissatisfied customers.
Enterprise feedback management has come a long way since we first named it in 2004. Now Gartner, Forrester and other analyst firms use the term and track the market, and over 50 of our competitors have adopted the phrase.
It’s incredibly rewarding to pioneer a new market, but of course that doesn’t end the challenge – it takes a lot of hard work and persistence and follow-through from there. After 18 months of planning, we’ve released the sixth iteration of our EFM platform, Vovici 6.
One of our primary goals when designing Vovici 6 was to facilitate broader adoption within our customers’ organizations. We already support firms that have thousands of users who create surveys, view reports and conduct analyses—that’s right: thousands of survey authors running amuck! The product provides a mix of decentralized empowerment with centralized control: you can set those survey authors up as assisted authors, with the Customer Insights department reviewing their surveys before they go live.
As usage of Vovici systems has grown within organizations, those organizations have wanted additional features while improving ease of use for the casual user. To achieve that, we leveraged our long tradition of conducting usability research. When we launched the first dedicated web survey software application back in 1997, we didn’t require survey authors to write questionnaires in a scripting language, as used by CATI tools of that era. Instead, our questionnaire designer used a word processor interface, inspired by the many questionnaires that researchers forwarded us during our design work. That word processer UI lives on today, to the point where you can copy and paste a questionnaire from Word into our questionnaire designer.
For Vovici 6, we conducted the largest usability research in our history, inviting users in to use the software while monitoring what they found intuitive and where they had trouble. We then did mock-up after mock-up of redesigned screens and tested user response. We also ran the longest beta in our history in order to fine-tune some of our design decisions. We believe the resulting system is the easiest-to-use enterprise feedback management platform on the market.
That said, many of those are benefits are for new users. We understand that existing users bought and enjoy the application as it was. Such users can continue to log in using the Vovici 5.5 interface – we will support that until the third quarter of the year. We realize the last thing a user wants to do right in the middle of a project is change interfaces. In fact, different users within an organization can use different interfaces even while collaborating on the same surveys and reports. When users are ready to switch to Vovici 6, they will find a wealth of integrated computer-based training videos as part of a much expanded help system.
We’ve come a long way with EFM these past seven years, but the field is still young and there is much to do. We’re eager to continue to learn from our customers and prioritize their requests as we build the next versions of our flagship product. And we’ve got a lot we want to do before we celebrate the tenth anniversary of enterprise feedback management in 2014.