Thinking Outside the Survey Box
Posted by Nancy Porte on Thu, Apr 21, 2011
In his book, Behind the Cloud, Marc Benioff describes the path of success for himself, his team and his business – Salesforce.com. Here is the short version of their story: surviving the dot-com implosion of 2001, Salesforce.com went on to define itself as the leader of the cloud computing revolution and sparked a $46 billion dollar industry. Today they are the CRM solution for over 92,000 companies.
Many people know that Salesforce.com started in a rented apartment in 1999. What most people don’t know is that the product started as a simple user interface. Beyond simple. There were three tabs and a few buttons. But it was so highly customizable that businesses could create a system that reflected their business needs.
Like Salesforce.com’s users, Vovici’s customers use our platform to meet a huge variety of business needs—both straightforward (customer satisfaction, employee feedback) and the wholly unexpected (from in-processing soldiers to scheduling departmental lunches). Here are 14 of the hundreds of innovative ideas and uses our customers have devised over the years:
- Issue tracking – Allow internal and external customers to submit product issues. Generate alerts and deep summary reports that include everything you know about that customer.
- Social media surveys – To gather more information on a conversation or sentiment, launch a survey through Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
- Product development – Collect new feature ideas and, then, accelerate iterative, consumer oriented product development by creating followup data collection.
- Inventory/Inventory control – Collect information and track corporate assets.
- Product registration – Allow customers to register purchased products.
- RFP database – Capture standard responses for RFPs, creating a centralized database.
- Resource requests – From conference rooms to personnel, create a centralized request system that starts with a form and results in a customized request.
- Sweepstakes entry – Create a randomly generated number upon completion of entry. That number is entered into a separate website where a third party can select the winners.
- Coupons – Customize a survey’s end page to create a printable ‘coupon’ for each participant.
- Testing and exams – Build a quiz for participants of a training session to gauge whether the material was understood.
- Streamlining a process – To help in-process soldiers, enter specific demographic information and relevant criteria. Print responses and have the soldier take the form to the next in-processing station.
- Polls and Pulses – Quick 1- to 3-question surveys that assess a very specific topic. This includes everything from politics to office lunch orders.
- Meeting times/locations – Find a date/time/location that works for everyone!
- Event registrations/Conferences – Beyond the traditional surveys after the event, use Vovici to capture registrations.
Vovici’s simple interface and highly customizable nature - in combination with customer creativity - make it a fertile ground for supporting a consistent crop of new ideas.