(Source: Business Wire)
Survey Analytics announced today that it has officially launched IdeaScale, a unique application that leverages social media, surveys and messaging to allow companies to engage with customers and employees. IdeaScale augments Survey Analytics' existing suite of online customer and information-focused tools, including micropoll, QuestionPro(TM), and ContactPro(TM).
Based on the unique principles of "crowdsourcing," IdeaScale begins with an idea that is posted by customers or employees to their IdeaScale community, which can then be expanded through users' comments and voted up or down, allowing the most popular ideas to "bubble" to the top. Feedback, including open-ended text, can then be captured and quantified.
"We are tremendously excited to be adding IdeaScale to our suite of innovative online services," said Vivek Bhaskaran, co-founder and CEO of Survey Analytics. "IdeaScale will help a broad array of companies and organizations better engage both their customers and employees and create dynamic communities around their products and services."
A number of customers in a variety of industries have or are currently beta testing IdeaScale, leveraging the technology to engage customers and employees in order to harness feedback including:
-- Choice Hotels International, one of the largest and most successful lodging franchisors in the world;
-- ThinkWorks, a provider of educational product and training services for teaching thinking skills in classrooms, and;
-- NAVTEQ, the leading global provider of digital map data for in-vehicle navigation systems, websites, and the leading brands of wireless navigation devices.
"The concept of IdeaScale is appealing to us as it provides a relatively simple way to canvas customer opinions and then give those same customers a voice to watch their ideas come to life," said John Thompson, Director of Hotel Performance Training, Choice Hotels. "We believe it represents one of the new frontiers in customer feedback technologies."
IdeaScale is part of broader, growing trend of companies using online tools to engage with customers and employees. Starbucks, for example, recently launched mystarbucksidea.com in order to provide an online community for its customers to share ideas about its products. Similarly, in 2007 the computer maker Dell launched "IdeaStorm" to better assess what is most important to its customers. These types of communities can also be used to engage not only customers but employees, too.
"We look forward to making IdeaScale a featured part of our internal toolset. We anticipate it will create a high-impact channel for our employees to communicate their ideas and get them into practice, which is a critical component of our overall innovation strategy," said J. C. Groon, Head of NAVTEQ's Innovation Office.
About Survey Analytics
IdeaScale is the latest application offered by Seattle-based Survey Analytics, which offers a suite of user-friendly, robust and affordable online tools that help businesses and organizations communicate with customers and prospects to gain key insights and drive sales. Its online tools include QuestionPro, market research software for the creation, distribution, and analysis of online surveys; ContactPro, its email marketing service that makes it easy to create and manage email distribution lists to both attract and retain customers; micropoll, its online polling service. More information on Survey Analytics is available via the Web at www.surveyanalytics.com.
