| Vovici
Vovici is the industry leader in providing companies and government agencies innovative survey tools to create, manage, analyse, and apply feedback data.
Organisations worldwide use our survey products to increase customer loyalty, facilitate collaboration, influence critical business decisions, and provide voice to online communities.
Vovici has over 25 years of combined industry experience that we leverage to make our solutions easy to learn and use, but full of the complex features needed by the most experienced researchers.
What is EFM?
A term originated by Perseus Development (now Vovici) and later adopted by Esteban Kolsky of the Gartner Group in early 2005, Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) is a class of software that enables centralised deployment and management of all feedback operations throughout an enterprise/organisations. EFM can help an organisations establish a dialogue with employees, partners, and customers regarding key issues and concerns. EFM consists of data collection, analysis and reporting.
EFM is typically supported by software or software services for collecting and managing feedback from customers or employees. There are two main types: traditional online survey software that solicits inputs to pre-defined questions, and new web two-way communication and community platform that solicits open-ended feedback and ideas from customers and have the customer community collectively rank the feedback and ideas.
Both types support advanced survey design with CRM integration and advanced reporting with statistical analysis, centralised panel management.
Survey software may provide a workflow process that provides a means for organisations to ensure consistent survey quality and enforce respondent privacy and IT security policies.
Applications of EFM vary widely from HR, IT, Marketing, Sales and continues to expand on its corporate implementation and scope. Departments within an organisation can collaborate on feedback initiatives, sharing results and gaining insights that enable the organisations to listen, learn, react and anticipate to the needs of their key stakeholders.
Enterprise Feedback Management is helping organisations obtain and rank feedback, providing a means for customers to drive product management.
Versions
Vovici survey software can accommodate a range of increasing requirements:
- Community Team – multi-user capabilities for teams and departments
- Community Standard – easily create online communities and panels to engage customers, employees and other constituents
- MR – functions for the unique needs of market researchers
- Plus the Community Builder add-on module (just released)
EFM Community is offered at two levels to align with your needs. EFM Community Team is designed for the multi-user requirements of teams and departments. EFM Community Standard is designed to meet the broad requirements for managing feedback across entire organisations.
Overview
EFM Community is a strategic and centralised enterprise solution that enables organisations to create and manage online communities and panels—providing voice to customers, employees, or other constituents. Organisations are able to maintain a secure knowledge base of their survey communities and online panels, share them within groups, and integrate the data into information from other business systems. With a comprehensive view of an online community organisations are able to protect the relationship with their members, gather regular, consistent feedback, and avoid survey fatigue.
EFM Community gives voice to the online community empowering organisations to easily and systematically collect, manage, and use feedback throughout the enterprise—building customer loyalty, facilitating collaboration and innovation, and influencing critical business decisions.
Features
EFM Community provides users the ability to quickly and easily create questionnaires, post surveys, solicit responses from community members or outside groups, collect responses, analyse results, and distribute findings.
- Easily create surveys with a word processor interface that is the most powerful and easiest to use on the market.
- Add advanced survey design elements such as branching, skip logic, and piping.
- Build advanced reports to drill down into data and create meaningful reports in real-time.
- Manage and control survey frequency by maintaining a comprehensive view of survey communities. Know who has been surveyed when—maintaining a positive relationship and avoiding survey fatigue.
- Maintain multiple profiles for each community member featuring unique demographics to target specific respondent groups.
- Import community members from established contact lists, or link community information to your existing customer or employee databases.
- Combine a wide range of reporting elements such as frequency analysis, correlation analysis, gap analysis, and summary of means to create insightful reports in minutes.
- SAS70 approved survey hosting environment with 128 bit SSL encryption and redundant firewalls; 24/7 monitoring and protection, and sophisticated data backup procedures.
Product details
EFM Community is a solution designed for organisations looking to build and manage online communities and panels, more effectively leverage existing communities, or need more advanced panel management. Providing a long-term, sustainable solution, it stays current with new trends and methodologies, while maintaining stability and reliability. Easy integration with other enterprise systems makes it an added value to initial investments.
With EFM Community, organisations gain actionable insight through community panels and community management to streamline business processes and align business goals. Incorporate regular customer insight into business operations, target company resources to increase productivity and enhance business agility, understand employee needs to improve hiring, training and management; and identify trends that drive profitability.
A comprehensive, enterprise-scale feedback solution, EFM Community can be used across the whole organisations allowing each department to manage their own projects at their own pace. User-based roles and permissions allow for easy collaboration to get relevant feedback to the right people at the right time.
Overview
EFM Community MR extends the power of EFM Community with features and capabilities designed to allow Market Research firms to easily work with and manage multiple accounts and large scale deployments. EFM Community MR provides Market Research firms comprehensive panel management capabilities to build, survey, and manage respondent panels.
User-based controls give MR firms the ability to manage access and sharing giving their clients the ability to modify questions and survey formats, as well as generate custom reports. Vovici's solution can easily integrate with MR systems and other applications because Vovici offers the most integration points of any feedback software.
All of this functionality resides on a feedback platform that has proven scalability and efficiency in enterprise-class deployments. Vovici delivers this platform from state of the art hosting facilities that ensure maximum reliability in a secure, certified environment.
Features
EFM Community MR’s advanced online panel management software includes features designed specifically for the Market Research firm.
- Use hierarchical questions to assign subsequent questions based on previous response.
- Display questions in rotated or randomised order.
- Easily collaborate with internal and external clients to draft questionnaires and analyse results.
- Manage users, groups, and roles from a centralised location to enable appropriate control over the survey process with customisable permissions.
- Populate dynamic auto-dropdown choice lists from external databases.
- Define metadata for surveys and questions that can be accessed via Web services or custom modules.
- Use quota management to restrict the number of respondents based on responses using complex logic.
- Auto-populate respondent information so they don’t have to answer the same questions repeatedly.
Product details
With specialised online panel management features designed to meet the complex needs of Market Research firms, EFM Community MR delivers centralised support and feedback management across the entire organisations—opening unique opportunities to develop broad, long-term engagements with clients that deliver tremendous value to both the client and the MR firm.
User-based controls allow clients to modify formatting, revise questionnaires, and develop customer reporting and analysis. Flexible deployment options allow Market Researchers to tailor the solution to fit the specific approach required for each engagement. The respondent panel management feature of EFM Community MR provides MR firms the tools they need to create online community subsets and avoid survey fatigue.
Overview
Vovici Community Builder module enables organisations to quickly and easily create online communities to engage their stakeholder groups of interest—customers, employees, or partners—for greater business agility.
The Vovici Community Builder module enables organisations to:
- Maintain a secure database of online community panels and capture deep profiles of the panellists.
- Select, invite to join, and confirm participation of community members through an opt-in function.
- Leverage profiles to eliminate the need to repeatedly request basic demographic and lifestyle data.
- Ensure that panellists are qualified for surveys before they are invited to participate to make certain that their time is respected.
- Vovici Community Builder is fast and easy. In just hours, in-house, non-technical resources can click-and-build an online community and launch recruitment campaigns. Surveys can immediately be deployed and data returned in hours for analysis. Survey authors use the industry leading capabilities of Vovici’s EFM Community product to build surveys and deploy them to the community—designating which members of the panel should be invited to participate based on the elements of their profile. Community Builder will send email invitations to the invited panellists to request they take the survey.
- Upon confirming participation, panellists can log onto the community site and complete their profile information, take surveys to which they are invited, or see the results of the surveys they have completed. Additional networking tools such as blogs, forums, and wikis are built into the Community Builder module and can be easily deployed to encourage additional dialogue within the community.
Features
Community Builder is an add-on module to Vovici’s EFM Community feedback solution, long considered one of the market’s leading survey tools. Community Builder leverages and extends the survey capabilities of EFM Community to provide companies a better way to gather customer insights with greater depth and enhance customer engagement with faster time to actionable data.
The Community Builder module enables companies to engage community panels in a customised community website that includes forums, suggestion boxes, knowledge bases, and more. These capabilities enable companies to:
- Gain actionable insight into customer sentiment, satisfaction, and loyalty to shape marketing initiatives, customer support, and pricing
- Evaluate the significance of market events and apply the insight to shape responses to those events as necessary
- Identify trends that drive sales and product innovation
- Deliver insights with the agility of hours instead of the days or weeks needed for historical methods.
Product details
The Community Builder module provides a simple WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment to easily and quickly build an interactive online environment to access and view surveys. The Survey Builder comes complete with objects to provide collaborative tools such as forums, wikis, and suggestion boxes. Companies can employ rich media—videos, flash, images, sound—to engage customers and encourage participation.
Community Builder is fully customisable so the visuals and branding look and feel like an extension of an enterprise’s existing marketing efforts. The module contains all of the functionality to build a stand-alone community page, or function as a complementary extension of an existing community site. All of this functionality is available without the need for specialised product knowledge or specific coding skills.
Vovici Community Builder is built on enterprise-class software that is used by more than 58% of the Fortune 500, is securely hosted in a SAS-70 approved survey hosting environment with 128 bit SSL encryption and redundant firewalls; 24/7 monitoring and protection, and sophisticated data backup procedures.
Company Background
Hughes Network Systems is the world’s leading provider of broadband satellite network services for businesses, consumers, and governments. Hughes has shipped more than 1.5 million systems in over 100 countries and reported nearly $1 billion in annual revenue for in 2007. Headquartered outside Washington, DC in Germantown, Maryland, Hughes maintains sales and support offices worldwide and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hughes Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:HUGH).
Challenge
Hughes is continuing to grow and succeed in this highly competitive market because the company is committed to delivering the highest level of customer service to all its customers—whether they are Fortune 500 companies, a small business owner or your average American family. In order to continually provide outstanding products and services, it is critical for the company to have accurate and up-to-date customer satisfaction information. More importantly, any new customer data collected needs to seamlessly integrate with other business systems and databases that store existing customer information. In this way, the various departments in the company are all able to access a holistic view of a customer’s history.
Since the late 1990’s, Hughes has tried a variety of survey tools, each having its own advantages and disadvantages. None provided a complete solution that met the full spectrum of Hughes’ needs—including a home-grown custom application developed in-house in 1999. The problem was none of these solutions were scalable or flexible enough to handle the wide range and heavy volume of survey needs. Hughes even outsourced the survey projects to third-party research firms, which proved to be too costly to maintain over the long-term.
Solution
Hughes initially became a Vovici customer in 2000, and the first implementation immediately reduced the time it took to design and launch surveys. However, dramatic benefits emerged when Hughes upgraded to Vovici’s EFM Community solution in 2005, which provided real-time feedback from surveys; integration with existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and financial applications; security and confidentiality; and an open platform that enabled custom coding to accommodate Hughes’ unique requirements. Centralising survey efforts also helped ensure all surveys adhered to consistent quality and customers were not being contacted by multiple areas of the company.
"We are expanding our use of Vovici everyday at Hughes. We literally have hundreds of surveys going out daily,” said Anida Carpenter, Customer Research and Business Intelligence manager at Hughes Network Systems. “We’re leveraging the centralised and automated feedback controls that Vovici provides to support multiple, departmental initiatives as an integrated strategic component of our success. It allows us to react faster to our customers because we have near real-time problem identification, which results in timely product and service response."
Among its many uses of EFM Community, Hughes collects information from customers at nearly every touch point. One of the key areas of measurement is the installation and fulfilment chain. Third-party auditors are employed to check on the quality of the installation at the client site to ensure all equipment associated with the satellite internet is properly installed and functioning. Capturing this information and tying it to the customer’s file allows Hughes to have a 360-degree view of the customer’s experience.
Also, new products are put to the test by customers who provide feedback through surveys. Because Hughes’ products are highly technical, and certain components of the product can only be tested after it has been installed at the client’s site, these “beta testers” provide a final opportunity for the engineering team to perfect new products before releasing them to the general public.
Results
Hughes gained a tremendous business advantage by centralising its survey efforts in-house with Vovici’s EFM Community solution. The company improved customer satisfaction by 35-40% since 1999, and since 2001 has saved $218,000 annually by bringing survey projects in-house. Among other operational benefits, call centres around the world automatically receive daily downloads of various customer survey results, which means customer service agents, no matter where they happen to be—India, East Coast, West Coast, etc.—always have the latest, most up-to-date information available.
Hughes is able to maintain its leadership position and continue to build loyalty among their client base because they are able to communicate so effectively through the use of interactive feedback surveys.
Company Background
BDO Seidman is a Chicago based accounting firm with 37 offices in the United States and 626 practice offices in 110 different countries across the world. One of the reasons for its success has been its ability to give regional and local offices enough autonomy and independence to capitalise on local market opportunities, as well as the ability to foster strong regional and local leadership.
Challenge
With a decentralised approach to business operation comes the added responsibility of providing a strong infrastructure of support for regional and local management teams and effective communication between national headquarters and its affiliate offices. However, the company did not have a centralised or consistent approach for gathering feedback from its nearly 2,800 employees across the US At times, BDO human resources personnel in various regional offices conducted surveys on an ad hoc basis to gather information from employees in their region; however, because there was no centralised process or structure for launching surveys, the quality of the surveys were varied and the survey results were equally unreliable for the purposes of forming national HR policies.
"What we really wanted to do was to take the pulse of the entire firm and get an accurate understanding of how employees felt about core issues that affect their experience as a BDO member,” said Sandi Guy, National Director of Human Resources, BDO Seidman, LLP. “We would then be able to confidently implement firm-wide changes and improvements that truly met the needs of the specific regions and at the same time complement the firm’s national vision and strategy."
Solution
In 2007, BDO decided that a single survey solution was needed to conduct a firm-wide survey, which would be managed and maintained by the national HR director. Vovici's EFM Feedback solution was selected and deployed for the national survey to measure six key areas of performance by the company:
- Compensation and Benefits
- Core Values
- Career Development
- Work Effectiveness
- Leadership
- Overall Satisfaction
The company-wide survey was successfully launched and the results were analysed quickly, however, it became necessary to change the way the data was structured and analysed in order to help meet the new direction of the national HR team. “When we hit a challenge with the first survey project, Vovici’s Research Services team jumped right in and they did a fantastic job. They blew me away. Under a very tight deadline, they worked non-stop to get me an end product that met our needs. It was very impressive,” said Ms. Guy.
Results
The results of the nationwide survey showed BDO’s leadership where their strengths were as a company and also provided specific areas where they needed improvement. For example, the survey revealed that nationwide employees desired greater clarity in how compensation and promotion decisions were made. At the same time, the survey also revealed that certain regions scored higher than others when it came to communication with employees on these same matters. “Now we know how to focus our efforts so specific local offices that have greater communication needs will get the support they need when they need it,” said Ms. Guy.
Additionally, BDO has centralised all its survey activities on Vovici, giving Ms. Guy’s HR team the ability to control the quality, frequency, and scope of all surveys being conducted. More importantly, with a centralised process on EFM Feedback, Ms. Guy can compare results, spot trends, and have total trust in the reliability of the survey data.
"We may not always like what the answers are, but we have confidence in the reliability of the data because we’ve partnered with the experts," said Ms. Guy.
Company Background
The Department of Education, Training and the Arts is building a clever, skilled and creative Queensland.
The purpose is to engage Queenslanders in life long education and training and to build a strong arts and cultural sector which enriches the lives of Queenslanders.
Education - Education Queensland delivers high quality education to more than 70 percent of all Queensland school students at prep, primary and secondary levels.
Training - Queensland's entry point to jobs, careers and training, apprenticeships and traineeships, and employment and training government assistance.
Arts Queensland is an enthusiastic supporter of Queensland's dynamic arts sector by developing cultural policy and funding ongoing initiatives, supporting industry organisations, festivals, groups and individual artists.
Customer Challenge
The Survey Unit of the Performance Monitoring and Reporting Branch often conducted surveys on a variety of subject matters with the schools. These include surveys on local and foreign student feedback, staff improvement feedback, training evaluation feedback, new-intake registration feedback and industry surveys. Enrolment collection is one of the biggest surveys undertaken by the department yearly. The collection involves all 1,300 school principals reporting enrolments for their school within a 4 hour period. Based on the results, $3 billion worth of staffing resources are allocated within a day of the collection.
DETA did not have a common process or tools to conduct these surveys. Some were done manually on paper with responses recorded later on a spreadsheet. Other surveys were conducted through email, while some utilized customized in-house programs where questions had to be re-programmed for each different survey questionnaire. All results and responses of the surveys were stored in network folders or individual PC files.
The department needed a systematic approach to conducting surveys that would also empower users to manage the survey themselves and to release IT personnel for other jobs. They wanted a proven ready-made solution with minimum customization to suit the needs of the various faculties, and have the information centrally stored in a database for easy access by all users.
Vovici Solution
The Department decided to acquire an enterprise survey solution system to meet all survey requirements of the users. The Department did an intensive evaluation of many survey providers and selected Vovici Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) solution due to five core factors – ease of use for creation of surveys, advance survey design features, wide range of reporting elements, ability to build respondents’ communities and solicit responses from specific respondent groups and excellent support/training.
With Vovici EFM solution, users who have Internet access can use their browser to easily create surveys and automatically publish them on the Internet. Responses from the online surveys are automatically collected in the secure database server. Real-time reports such as frequency analysis, correlation analysis, gap analysis, and summary of means can be generated on the fly to create insightful reports in minutes. Reports can also be shared out to authorized users or exported to Microsoft Words, PowerPoint or Adobe PDF format. All these capabilities help the Department save time and resources on compiling the responses, allowing them more time to concentrate their efforts on analyzing the survey results.
“Vovici solution has met our requirements and our users are happy with the software. EFM Community provides our users the ability to quickly and easily create questionnaires, post surveys, solicit responses from our community members or outside groups, collect responses, analyze results, and distribute findings easily” said Mr Adrian Seabrook, Manager of Survey Unit. “The support team has been responsive to our needs and we hope to keep up the good working relationship.”
About Vovici
Vovici’s Enterprise Feedback Management solutions represent 25 years of industry leadership, and our software is the established leader in providing a comprehensive view of customer, partner and employee feedback. The combination of Vovici’s software-as-a-service model and the most open feedback platform of any feedback tool on the market make it easy to integrate feedback processes directly into systems and applications. We deliver the enterprise-class requirements demanded by the world’s largest organizations in a secure, reliable, and efficient hosted environment.
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