Corporate Blog & Users Community

We intend to build better information about our customers so that we can design better personalized products and our products and services will be highly tailored to meet client’s needs and great pricing flexibilities shall be maintained.

1. The risk that product proposition may not be fully understood because of lack of key references or experience in market
2. Getting the right employees with the right attitude and qualifications will be difficult
3. Product development delays due to lack of financial resources

Currently we do have a fully functional survey tool that is only a platform and not yet a product that can be offered. The next stage is to bundle on this platform several different services that will make it a truly complete business solution including all other aspects of user-ability issues and customer service interface. So the productisation process is still unfinished! The following needs to be made:

• Building external website
• The enhancements of the authorization and security system and users managing system
• To make survey processes upgrade
• To enhance the statistics manager
• To include multilingual switcher
• To build a Help system
• The creation and differentiation of Products (sthesis, qCourse, IR Pro, CA, MCA, TCA, NCA, HRM, Demo). Each of these tools will be built on Intres research tool platform and are products differentiated by contents and special functional parameters. These differentiated tools will be defined by special questions structures build on standard survey templates.

Various methods will be used such as, product promotions that will attract visitors to our website, easy on-web product information, interactive demo presentation, bulletin ads, personal selling and customer registry.

We will balance E-commerce activities with f-commerce. That is, the fulfilment of services that cannot be downloaded from the webpage. Such as the organisation of pre-sales info sessions and personal guidance on how to use Intres tools and what it can to do for them.

Therefore, experiential marketing will be emphasized to allow customer’s to experiment with our products in order to enhance perception on the value of using our products and services.

We will build strong image and relationship with customers that we will be the most valued partner and we tend to be very visible.

We will maintain presence in the market and in the professional and expert environments related to our key business and customer’s business areas.

Therefore:

• We will Participate in seminars, conferences, exhibitions, and discussions
• Make expert commentaries in professional newspapers

Survey tools, offered as an ASP based services, is a global business. Since it is Internet based and offered in the English language, it means that the services can be accessed from any corner of the globe. Making it possible for any company to compete in any national market. Most of these companies are American and all their services are 100% web-based and also payments are made through credit cards. They do have long product lines and competitive prices. 90% of the major players analyzed offer basic survey tools or marketing research tools. Their disadvantages are the language, the psychological distance and not being able to provide off-line supports and services, credit cards as the only means of payments. In my analysis I found that eight companies exist in this service category in Finland. Because of their specialized offerings, it was hard to find these firms as some of them are found in different industry categories. Consulting services are the baseline offerings made by three of firms and the online tool is offered as part of their consulting services. The other firms offer basic online survey tools with strong customer base. Analyzing their baseline value propositions and core advantage I discovered many market gaps and segments which can be targeted with completely new services.

In respect to developments in the sector, My intuitions tells that more and more firms will enter the industry as adoptions become widespread and when it is better understood that the business is lucrative. The online survey tools will become platforms in which firms will build personalized services for their customers. Emphasis will shift more to value-added services and where stronger relationships with customers will be the key competitive factor. Many firms will shift to more specialized markets where it is possible to operate with niche strategies. Also the market will grow further as the use of on-line tools like these will become widespread! As business processes will continue to be governed by information needs also, the abundance of information brought about by development in IT makes the need for personalized information needed for decision making to be difficult and time consuming! So the need for tools that allows anyone to source information they need easily, cheaply and quickly with real-time result analysis possibilities will always be there!

As a founder of Intres Consultings I’d like to tell you more about our history and background of Intres Tool services & solutions - a provision of Intres Consultings. It’s a bit academic here but I encourage you to continue reading.

The foundation of Intres Tool is based on customer perspectives and marketing orientation of competences rooted in the resource-based views. Also the tools are results of long academic work and empirical efforts emphasized in various articles, seminars workshops and conferences in Finland and abroad. About 150 companies have used these models in many of my workshops and seminars and the overwhelming feedbacks and the demand for it as a business tool was the major reason why I want to offer it as an ASP based services to companies. Although originally I wanted to offer it only through consulting services and the idea of bundling the tools as an Internet based solutions was something that came later! The idea came about because of my need to cut the time and costs of carrying out the survey work for my dissertation.  In so doing I contacted some local IT firms on the possibility for carrying out survey work through the Internet. It was supposed to be a one-time-use project. I received offers for software which I can only have access to until when my research is completed. Searching the Internet for options I discovered that survey tools are offered as an ASP based service. I also found out that survey tools are the basic offerings while various business solutions with great value propositions are the baseline offerings!

I set to work to find and analyze all accessible firms in this service category in Finland and abroad so as to understand what they offer, their baseline value propositions and core advantage.  By this I discovered many market gaps and segments which can be targeted with completely new services. My experience on working with small SMEs, research, my expertise and my on-going PhD research were very instrumental for generating the business ideas.  I set to define and design the requirements for the survey tool and apart from creating new service concepts in this category, my existing business tools were further developed so that it can be offered as part of the internet based service packages.