Communispace Plus Octopz: Make Better Decisions Faster, Kill Bad Ideas Sooner

Octopz

Communispace Corporation was founded on a principle of continuous self-improvement and listening to the voices of their customers.So when clients asked for a tool that would let them design and build something completely new within their online communities, Communispace went looking for a way to provide it.

Communispace Corporation is the leader in building, managing and facilitating invitation-only customer insight communities that enable businesses to generate continuous insights, speed innovation, and drive revenue.

Communispace is the only full-service community provider, offering all the components necessary to create successful communities, including strategic planning and design, a robust technology platform, expert facilitation, targeted member recruitment, ongoing community management, executive reporting and more. In addition, it is the only firm to have a research and innovation team of social scientists and data mining experts dedicated to uncovering new patterns and trends in online community behavior and customer engagement.

Founded in 1999, the company has created more than 300 customer communities for industry leaders such as Kraft, Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab, Hallmark, Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline, and Intercontinental Hotel Group. Headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, the company has offices in New York, San Francisco, London, Chicago, Austin, Atlanta and San Remo, Italy.

"Clients wanted a way to test new concepts in an open-ended, unprompted way within the Communispace environment, so we went looking for a white-boarding and image annotation tool that meets the high standards that our communities require. Fortunately, what we found was Octopz," said Julie Wittes Schlack, senior vice president of innovation and design at Communispace. "We were immediately struck by the range of stimuli that Octopz supported and its apparent ease of use. So we took a free trial to see if Octopz was as good as it sounded."
They discovered it was even better.

Flexible, User-Friendly, Secure

In addition to the fact that Octopz filled an important need in the Communispace product offering, trial users discovered that Octopz had an intuitive, user-friendly interface that allowed community members to focus on the task rather than the technology.

And because Octopz has fully integrated text, voice, and video chat capabilities, participants and facilitators can have the immediacy and creative spontaneity of a face-to-face discussion, even if they're thousands of miles apart.

Communispace was equally impressed by the flexibility of Octopz and its ability to facilitate the review of ideas expressed in a wide variety of formats, from static images to video and 3D (with more being added all the time).

Because Communispace develops communities in a variety of languages and cultures around the world, they were pleased to discover that the easy-to-use interface would lend itself easily to translation. Everything in an Octopz Meeting Room is manipulated using tool icons that are already familiar to many users.

"We were also reassured by the extremely secure environment," said Wittes Schlack. "Many of our clients are conducting early stage proprietary research, so security and confidentiality are crucial. In addition, because Communispace controls access to the Octopz meeting rooms, absolutely no information about our clients or the people participating in the research is ever shared with anyone outside Communispace."

Trial Project Proves Real-World Value

The next step was to conduct a project that would evaluate Octopz in action. Communispace partnered with one of its most innovative clients, a leading electronics retailer, to evaluate how much information, and what specific information would be most useful on their in-store product information tags.

The results were dramatic - and consistent. An unmistakable pattern developed that told the client exactly what information customers found useful and what was extraneous at certain points in the purchase process. And because all of these reactions were coming from individual members each in his or her own private virtual room, the patterns in their responses were that much more compelling.

"This innovative approach eliminates the 'herd mentality' that so often develops in traditional online or offline focus groups," said Wittes Schlack, "and the open-ended nature of the invitation to circle the items that first catch your attention, or that confuse you, or that seem extraneous to you, yield much more textured insights than standard surveys can provide."

Based on the success of the initial pilot, Communispace has done several more projects with other clients, soliciting reactions and refinements to everything from new product concepts and brochures to product packaging. 

"The purpose of our private online communities is to enable us, acting on our clients' behalf, to interact with groups of target or current customers from just about anywhere in the world. All anyone needs is a computer and Internet access," explains Wittes Schlack. "The volume of interaction and the level of honesty and spontaneity we derive from these groups of three or four hundred members is notable, and being able to revisit the same people for multiple iterations of a concept is invaluable.  Because Octopz makes the process of giving feedback and even elaborating or improving on a concept so engaging, the quality of input we get from these members is extraordinary."
This inventive use of Octopz has had a powerful effect on the application itself.

Fast Response in a Warp-Speed World

"Like Communispace, we understand that continuing success means keeping a close watch on the changing needs of our customers, and meeting new needs quickly and effectively," said Ron McKenzie, CEO of Octopz. "For example, as a direct result of feedback from companies like Communispace, Octopz can now be integrated in other applications and workflows

"Globalization of production and outsourcing, supply chain disaggregation, and increased demand for customized products are changing the way companies do business. Octopz helps companies integrate information from widely dispersed sources to maintain consistency, efficiency, and quality. Now we've taken accessibility an important step forward with new functionality, allowing other application developers to easily add collaboration to their applications by embedding Octopz."

Offered on a Software-as-a-Service basis, Octopz has won several prestigious awards for its power, versatility and ease of use. It enables up to five people to synchronously view and markup an unprecedented range of documents including digital media - such as video and 3D - and to communicate via built-in text, voice and video chat capabilities. Octopz uses intuitive navigation and tool icons, requires nothing more than a Flash-enabled web browser, and uses integrated SSL encryption to ensure security. In addition, Octopz can be integrated (via API, web services and Flash) with existing applications.

To this already impressive level of functionality, the newest version of Octopz, released recently at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, includes numerous enhanced features in response to requests from its users:

• the ability to issue on-demand multi-visit invitations
• expanded access to cloud-based resources, including document and digital asset repositories
• improved user interface, including
  • additional markup capabilities
  • ability to sort documents and markups by name, date, and user
  • expanded print capability (choose to print or pdf individual documents and views or a Meeting Room's entire contents)

"Listening and responding to our customers has transformed our business, and it's helping us to transform their businesses, as well," said Wittes Schlack. "We can still do traditional research, posing tactical questions - should the package be blue or green, is the product name large enough - but the real opportunity is to discover. What are the unmet needs, the emerging trends? Octopz is another great way to gather and analyze information as we engage with customers over the long term, and throughout the lifecycles of their products."

In short, Octopz proves to be an effective adjunct to Communispace as it helps its clients to avoid costly mistakes, make smart business decisions, and kill bad ideas sooner, based directly on consumer feedback.

Understanding this evolving market research model, now in demand by progressive customer-focused companies of every size, contributes directly to the success of both Communispace and Octopz.

According to a global survey by McKinsey & Company, a leading strategic management consulting firm, companies are using a variety of Web 2.0 tools to forge tighter links with customers and suppliers, and to more effectively engage employees. The McKinsey reports notes that these tools are especially effective when they augment applications already in use.
And it can lead to some surprising insights.

Results: Clear and Quantifiable

When Communispace helped GlaxoSmithKline test consumer reaction to a brochure for its alli weight-loss product, they were surprised by the strong positive reaction to a particular element of it. That discovery had a significant effect on the structure of their new marketing messages. When a major toy company conducted research prior to an international roll-out of a board game, their intent was to find out how the game translated into other languages and cultures. What they found was a powerful specific emotional connection to the game among the parents who are the primary purchasers of the game for their own children.

"The collaboration between Communispace and Octopz boosts the creative element of serendipity in this new research process," said Wittes Schlack. "Not only can we create a totally unique research experience for each client based on their specific needs, but we can capture the spontaneous revelations that help us enhance the personal relationship consumers have with brands. Some of these important insights may not be immediately actionable, but our clients quickly grasp that we're looking at a gold mine of data with significant long-term implications."

The bottom line is that both the service provider and the customer benefit from this creative, collaborative approach to meeting challenges and gathering data.

"Companies are now operating in a hyper-competitive marketplace that's constantly on fast forward," said McKenzie. "Product developers, marketing people and executives at all levels are under enormous pressure to work faster and produce more innovative solutions, often with limited resources. Companies are hungry for creative collaboration services like Communispace and Octopz that will help them become more flexible and responsive.

"Octopz isn't just extremely flexible, however. It's also amazingly easy-to-use with simple but effective navigation and tool icons. And because Octopz works inside each user's web browser, there is no software to download and install; Octopz requires nothing more than a Flash-enabled web browser. That's an enormous advantage - time-challenged business people want to be able to wade right in and start working. No one has time any more for a lengthy training process."

The results quickly become clear and perhaps even more importantly - quantifiable.  Better decisions are made in less time, speed-to-market is accelerated, and the results go straight to the bottom line.

For more information about Octopz, or to take a free trial, visit www.octopz.com. To learn more about Communispace, go to www.communispace.com.