Prezza Releases Version 4.0 of Checkbox

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." Related articles: Feedback Mountain SPSS Offers Another Dimension