Survey Software HQ

The February 2008 issue of Microsoft’s Technet Magazine has a feature article called “Building a Powerful Survey Infrastructure.”  Unfortunately, this shows that Microsoft’s survey solution has a long way to go.

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Prezza Releases Version 4.0 of Checkbox The company updates and renames its flagship surveying product, focusing on workflow and usability enhancements.

by Colin Beasty

Destination CRM Thursday, February 22, 2007

Prezza Technologies on Wednesday released the latest version of its surveying software, Checkbox Web Enterprise 4.0. The fourth-generation product offers improved capabilities around refined workflows and mobility. In addition to the matured feature set, Prezza has also renamed its technology platform from Ultimate Survey to Checkbox. Prezza also recently released Checkbox Mobile, an optional module for version 4.0 that allows customers to bring surveys onto their PDAs and laptops in support of field service agents.

For Checkbox Web Enterprise 4.0, the company refined workflows surrounding surveying templates and creating new surveys, and also around structuring and analyzing data received from survey results, including real-time analysis and reporting capabilities and a multilingual surveying module option. Version 4.0 also allows users to create Web-based surveys using only an intuitive Web browser.

Prezza offers both a hosted and on-premise version of their software, though nearly 80 percent of its approximately 900 customers use the on-premise version, according to the company. For its on-premise version, the company offers a “no-limits pricing model,” giving customers an unlimited number of users, surveys, and responses. This pricing model, according to Christopher Park, director of sales, gives the company a competitive advantage over many of the other EFM vendors that charge for such extensions.

Since its 2002 founding, Prezza has moved “upstream into the enterprise segment,” says John Craven, president. While many of Prezza’s customers currently use the solution as a standalone application, as part of the shift the company is increasingly seeing its midmarket and enterprise customers integrate Checkbox with other applications, notably CRM and HR. Checkbox currently uses a framework to provide customers “with a foundation to build and plug into other apps,” Craven says, though the company plans to offer its own custom-built module as a plug-in for Salesforce.com and other solutions.

Prezza’s emphasis on usability and analysis is representative of the push vendors in this market are making, says Esteban Kolsky, senior research director at Gartner. “They’re looking to embed templates and best practices that are representative of the types of interactions a company might have with a customer. They’re providing the end user with an outline based on best practices.”

Reporting has also gained importance among customers. “The big trend right now is customers want tools that provide them with reporting features that allow them to do something with the data, not just slice and dice it,” Kolsky says. “They want to be able to make business decisions based on a summary of the information.”

CRM has always been strong in providing behavioral and transactional customer information. Measuring and predicting a customer’s attitude toward a company’s brand and its products is quite new. Kolsky says these tools will help map this uncharted ground. “Reduce, reuse, and recycle feedback information with adherence to corporate goals. That’s the real benefit of EFM.”

Link to full story here.

Link here: http://www.crmchump.org/2007/02/checkbox_from_p.html
Data, according to web-based data collection/survey software producer Prezza Technologies, lives. To better capture and gather the tricky stuff, a philosophy Prezza calls “enterprise feedback management” is used, “both on the factory floor where your products are assembled, and on the retail floor where they’re sold.”

Founded in 2002, Prezza is currently benefiting from a wave of growth based on increased interest in both web-based surveying and paper-free data collection systems. The company’s enterprise feedback management program Checkbox Web Enterprise 4.0 has just been made available, featuring an upgrade in both name and function.

Prezza’s last major upgrade to Checkbox came in September 2005, when the flagship product was known as the more generic Ultimate Enterprise Survey 3.0. Ultimate Survey Professional Edition still exists as a web-based product for small- to medium-sized projects.

The software is a powerful web-based form, feedback, and survey solution that is easy to use; the main selling point of the Microsoft .NET-powered Checkbox 4.0 is its no limits pricing model, allowing as many users, surveys and responses as the largest company can produce. Also touted in the release are the web survey designer; reporting and analysis features; multilingualism; web farm and cluster support; and available source code kit.

Since emphasis on EFM is on gathering data and implementing information quickly, Prezza recently released Checkbox Mobile Edition. Mobile Edition is designed for those point-of-contact people in the customer service chain. Well notable in Mobile Edition is its flexibility; surveys and forms can be deployed on Windows mobile devices, tablet PCs, and laptops using Windows XP.

In terms of industry-specific solutions, Checkbox 4.0 can be shaped to individual enterprise needs in healthcare, with consideration of government regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley; public-sector, with emphasis on “citizen-centric” government programs; and financial services, in which Prezza seeks to address consolidation in the industry and hone “one-stop shop” capabilities.

As though Prezza would like to display a little of their own customer service expertise, the company has created a nice come-hither website with screenshots, example surveys and demos, test drives, downloads, and basically just a whole bunch of ways to play with Checkbox without spending a dime. And if it’s not enough, you can even order a live demo – as in live with a real person.

(This writer must say that playing on the Prezza ‘site is addictive indeed, and a thousand uses for Checkbox surveying instantly come to mind…)

For blogheads – and don’t we all love a good blog, really? – Prezza presents “Survey Software HQ.” The HQ is a good one: well kept up with and written on disparate enough yet vitally relevant topics, like McDonald’s versus Starbucks coffee. Pricing for Checkbox 4.0 and related products is available at the Prezza Technologies website. In the meantime, though, I’d get to playing with Checkbox a little. You too may soon see the possibilities inherent in rapidly implementing all that customer data you gather. That is enterprise feedback management.

This guy rips into the inability for “the survey software” to allow “don’t know” (or not applicable) as a choice, yet proceeds to go on to make a survey design error himself. LINK

This stresses why it’s important to send a test out to your colleagues before sending the survey outside, to your customers, where you can’t take it back quickly.