At its annual conference in Chicago this week, Vancouver market research firm Vision Critical revealed the newest edition of its cloud-based customer intelligence platform, Sparq, with a redesigned user interface and a slew of new features.
Vision Critical’s software-as-a-service offering is designed to make market research more accessible and real-time for marketers, by helping them create and manage customer communities that can be segmented and surveyed on an ongoing basis. It automates much of the process of recruiting customer panels, distributing surveys and analyzing feedback in real-time.
Vision Critical’s community visualization tool
The latest version of Sparq includes a new data visualization tool for monitoring the size and engagement of a customer community, a drag-and-drop editor for creating and deploying new activity surveys, and an extensive library of survey templates that have been vetted by Vision Critical’s research methodology experts. It’s also added a new “Stories” feature for putting together reports and sharing them across the organization.
“We spend a great deal of time listening to our own customers,” said Andrew Reid, founder and president of corporate innovation at Vision Critical, in a statement. “In response to what we heard, we have built the next generation of Sparq to enable our customers to engage their customers with a deep, flexible set of tools geared to today’s always-on, mobile-savvy customer.”
Vision Critical’s second big announcement was a new survey app that brands can whitelabel and distribute to their panel to get more direct and timely feedback. Survey questions can be set to trigger based on the user’s location, using GPS coordinates or iBeacons, so brands can get access to their thoughts and opinions in the moment, while they’re actively engaging with the brand.
A demo version of Vision Critical’s Engage app
Lori Iventosch-James, group research manager at Adobe, said in a release she looks forward to how the changes will improve Adobe’s access to the customer panel that it has built using Vision Critical’s platform.
“With our Vision Critical insight community, we are able to keep our finger on the pulse of our customers and respond to their needs immediately,” she said. “The key customer insights provided by our community has informed early product concepts and development, business strategy and marketing, new acquisitions and many other highly visible and critical outcomes for Adobe.”
