Voxco Online

Pros

The software is geared to for survey research and works perfectly for our needs for our primary clients in the healthcare industry. Very easy to use, easy to program, lots of functionality to cover everything from simple surveys to the most complex. Lots of functionality for CATI, easy to use agent screens, easy campaign set-up. They have been incredible in terms of sales and support as well to help us as we continue to grow our call center services.

Cons

Needs to be updated to use more than Internet Explorer in Enterprise mode and would love to see some enhancements on being able to see agent states and moving agents seamlessly between projects to help with Workforce Management. Also more information on the dashboard to help get quick insights on projects - more customization ability there.

Pros

Lots of built-in features that allows programmers to create questions with the best practices of survey methodologists

Cons

Voxco’s help documentation is a joke. The company doesn’t seem to want to fix the quirky flaw that requires users to use two different sets of logical operators for programing skip or display logic. It is NOT user friendly where they have to remember to switch to a different grammar when they need to use advanced mode.

The description of all help documentation is only for tech savvy users, not written in layman’s terms. Even when I suggested this to the sales rep at conference booth, they just said this is due to a different development mindset. OMG, it’s customers’s responsibility to learn Voxco’s logic!!!

Also, Qualtrics has developed so many built-in options for validation, like recapcha. Voxco doesn’t seem to do more to appeal to the users that love Voxco for the rigor.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Voxco Online

Pros

Software is very cheap compared to the market place. It works as expected most of the time. Can include your own javascript to do things that the software doesn't do currently. The team will listen to your ideas on how to make the software better and work with you to accomplish some of those feats.

Cons

I think communication and customer support is lacking. If you have an issue, it can take hours before the issue is addressed. For critical items, no constant communication is given while the rest of the team sits to wonder. For higher level projects that require a lot of complex question types, the way the survey layout is currently, it takes awhile to do those. The selection tool that they have makes things longer to code than it really has to be. That's just a few examples.

Pros

I think the best feature of this software is the user friendliness of the programming system. It is very intuitive and does not take advanced programming knowledge to use, but it still has the options to do a lot more complex programming and manipulation than you would get out of other systems at the same lavel of user friendliness.

Cons

I think it would be helpful if Voxco had more support available around the area of accessability and someone that could work with us specially on proramming surveys that are more accesabile.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Voxco Online

Pros

Voxco offers very powerful tools and automations when programming surveys and personalizing respondent experience. No other platform offers such capabilities.

Cons

There is quite the learning curve using Voxco online, especially when it comes to its most advanced features.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Voxco Online

Reasons for Switching to Voxco Online

Pros

It's great that we can use our own servers to house this program and keep everything secure. We have a mandate that all data must remain in Canada so using some of the other programs is not a possibility for us. Voxco has a lot of great features that we use.

Cons

There is a learning curve to program in this software. People who are not survey-design savvy will need to step up their game.

Pros

We do industry surveys on specific topics - the Acuity4Survey system has been easy to customize for our projects; able to manage complex question formats, and their customer service is top notch! No matter what the question, they will provide a response - OR refer the issue to their development area.

Cons

No system is perfect, but there are no big issues that I have that they will not help me with a work-around until the issue can be resolved.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Voxco Online

Reasons for Switching to Voxco Online

Pros

Easy to use and easy to customise. You can get access to the results while the project is still in field easily.

Cons

The analytics part of it has proven to be somewhat difficult, all be it being a newish product this is probably likely to happen.

Pros

The CATI software is the most advanced available, and the Voxco team provides significant support, and work as partners with their clients.

Cons

Wish the A4S product was more robust and had more integration with command center for multimode work.

Pros

If you use it to it's maximum potential, it's one of the more powerful platforms out there.

Cons

It can be very slightly buggy sometimes. Not the most intuitive menus.

Pros

It's nice and easy, the all web interface (except for cati) means I can even do stuff on my phone if something is needed urgently, and the survey builder and other things are all well designed and make using voxco quick and easy.

Cons

The one weird bug that keeps coming up for me is whenever a respondent in a multi mode survey gets a call and sets up an appointment, but then before the next call they click into the web survey, their timezone sets itself to the UK for some reason.

Pros

The complex logic possibilities.

Cons

Alot of features not working and never worked for 2 plus years we had it.
Simulations
Panel overview/health
Auditing logs
Clunky text input and formatting
Panel provider portal (should save time but only makes it take longer)
Sampling is overly complicated
Speed and usability of UI could be improved

Pros

I am not involved in survey development, but the graduate student who are seem to be able to use it easily enough.

Cons

I have a serious issue with it's data retention. Everything is stored unencrypted in the database, so personally identifiable information is natively protected. So the second part comes from a recent experience of ours where one of our researchers discovered that some of our imported data was going missing. I tracked down the specific cases, and opened a Voxco support ticket. They are very responsive, but their immediate answer was that they couldn't be causing it. More digging, more logs, and I presented the exact URLs that were being used to access the surveys, showing them where the data was being lost. Again, this couldn't possibly be them and it had to be due to the University's network or something because all the cases were from the same IPs (since students were testing it in our offices). So I log into the Voxco web server and get the IIS logs showing them the data showing up and that it was indeed their software losing the data. They denied their own server logs. After getting the sales rep added on to the ticket, I got an apology email about 30 minutes later stating that it was indeed Voxco losing our imported data, and that we needed an update. So digging into the updates, we were on version 28 (simplified number) and the current version was 71. There had been 30 updates since they had last touched our system. After inquiring about this, they only do these minor update versions to your system if you report an issue that one of these fixes. Nice job...

Pros

The updated interface is easy to use, and the new look has greatly improved the overall experience. It makes it much easier to navigate, and it encourages the use of tools in a more cohesive manner. Tech support is frequently available to video chat to navigate issues in a very timely manner.

Cons

The "help" section only provides very basic answers regarding the functionality and purpose of certain tools. Examples would help new and experienced users optimize their usage of all available features. Additionally, sometimes the tech support services do not meet expectations. For example, the toll free help line is understaffed, as representatives are not always available during work hours to answer quick questions. Furthermore, on occasion I am encouraged to open a support ticket via email when I believe that my question could be answered quickly with a phone call. Lastly, when I clarify in a support ticket that X is not an issue, help representatives periodically suggest that X may indeed be what is causing my issue, though I have eliminated that possibility before opening my support ticket.

Pros

Not much.

Extremely simple surveys can be done quickly.

Importing a second language into an existing survey can be fast.

Cons

It is time-consuming to program anything beyond the most simple of surveys in it.

It lacks many basic features.

Their documentation is terrible, poorly written, completely lacks examples, and is poorly indexed. It seems that a search of the online documentation will either yield so many results it's impossible to find what you are looking for or no results at all.

Many of the "features" do not work.

You can't search past projects effectively. If you know you have similar questions in past studies it is difficult to copy them. You need to manually find the survey, find the section, find the question then drag it into your new survey. At which point Voxco only copies the question itself and not any logic (unless all question numbers and variables match). Voxco makes it impossible to "pin" a second survey in the development environment.

Validation is very time-consuming. You need to create separate questions with your error messages, then set that error message question, pipe in the value of the error message question into your original question, then redirect back to the original is the error message condition is true. Ridiculous.

It is difficult to re-use answer lists unless they are 100% identical.

There is no inline filtering or masking. You need to make separate masking questions all the time. Again adding programming time.

I had more cons but ran out of space but you get the idea.

Pros

You can integrate an auto-dialer into the survey platform and reporting relatively simply, so that agents have one spot to go for their on-dialer activities.

Cons

The agent-facing reporting is lacking; optimally, the agents should have a dashboard that shows them their rate of completes per hour, their incidence, dialings per hour, contacts per hour, and even overall stats like the needed remaining completes, but instead you can just see your callbacks and your completes. There should also be communication methods between supervisors and agents, such as a pop-up or static right bar chat where announcements for changes in field can be made. When navigating the survey, you can enter in the option of the number or select it from the on-screen lists, however in order to switch between in-survey navigation like selecting options, and navigation like skipping back in the survey or quitting, you have to hit 'ESC' to allow those options to be available. Then you have to hit ESC again if you, for example, select 'Quit' and then need to use the options for the reason. That should not be the case - you should not have to switch modes by hitting ESC and should be able to select any options available to you on-screen at any time. This is particularly problematic when pop-ups appear (when a respondent hangs up, or you hang up and a pop-up comes up to confirm), because then you are no longer in the in-survey module, may be in the middle of doing something, and need to hit 'ESC' to get back to the options you need. Lastly, when you are on-dialer and you end a call, you have to select 'Ready for call' or there is a 3s delay before it starts dialing.

Pros

I honestly can't think of a single redeeming feature.

Cons

The interface is one of the worst I've used, doing anything is a chore, everything is buried under a myriad of clicks and menus to find what you want. Options are counterintuitive and some plain don't work. Worst of all is the system is unreliable, we have missing data with no explanation as to why. The very basic, number one feature a data collection platform needs is confidence your data is correct, we do not have that with Voxco.

To qualify this response, I've worked nearly two decades in the industry and think I've used pretty much every major and most minor data collection platform there is out there. None are perfect, but most are better than Voxco. I'd even put WSC above it, for all the pain it is to program in WSC, I at least know my data will be recorded accurately (and their support guys are absolutely wonderful).

Support is slow as everything has to be escalated to Canada (probably due to the high volume of requests you're going to have to make using it) and rude, on occasion they've been flat out wrong, someone using the software for two months shouldn't be telling an escalated support staff how to do their job. But here we are.

Every time I come to do something, I find a new frustration or fault.

I don't have final decision on which platform we use, but, I will be making multiple, loud, comments to those who do.

Pros

The drag-and-drop interface for editing questionnaires is extremely easy to use. The Look and Feel editor affords a very wide breadth of options. Distributions are very easy to manage. What I like most is the ability to augment the native features of voxco using html, css, sql, etc., as well as the ability to create entire custom questions and integrate them into your survey.

Cons

It would be extremely useful if Voxco projects could communicate with each other. For example, being able to implement a skip pattern in one survey based on a respondent's answer to a question in a different survey (obviously contingent upon the presence of a common user-defined unique identifier in both surveys). As it stands I've been able to get around this with the use of an external table and SQL commands in both surveys, but it would be much more convenient (and I imagine less error-prone) if it were a native voxco feature.

Another shortcoming is the lack of a "clear" (CLR) function in voxco online, where it is present in the Design software. Again, there are ways around this, but since the function already exists elsewhere in voxco, it would be nice to see it in voxco online as well.

Pros

It is a fairly straight forward platform and the service team is easy to work with. No platform is perfect but you learn do some work arounds and make it work how you need it to. It is an easy interface that can work without a lot of coding experience.

Cons

Easier masking options. Would like to see the question numbers when you are viewing a respondents answers since a lot of the times we don't have them in the question themselves. Progressive grids.

Pros

It's easy to pull data and make custom sample and data pulls

Cons

It's clunky and has bad programming compatibilities.

Pros

- Easy to use in term of scripting the online survey

Cons

- Don't have Conjoint/Maxdiff functions
- Taking long time for support team to feedback
- Reports/Analysis tools is limited

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Voxco Online

Reasons for Switching to Voxco Online

Pros

Majority is easy to program and support when you get stuck is great.

Cons

Writing script! It is not my strong point, so I need help with this occasionally.
The new look and feel is not very easy - needs way way way more work.

Pros

Good overall software that requires work on some feature (speed of servers, support on Sendgrid [domain authentication], possibility to send an email to two seperate adresses for each participant, etc.).

Cons

We can't add a second email for our participants. We want to be able to send our invitation emails to a primary and secondary email address, but right now we have to update the $email variable than create a second distribution to do so. This complicates thing a lot and creates a lot of extra work.

Pros

Ease of retrieving survey results. Ability to customize the reports.

Cons

Would like to be able to EDIT responses from the VIEW RESPONSES page.

Pros

The ability to run multi-channel data collection in a single platform

Cons

Would prefer a cloud solution based in Australia instead of on-premise

Pros

the ability to deal with complexe studies and multicanal (cawi,capi,cati) ease of use for non IT people .

Cons

the command center is not compatible with all browsers only IE8 i understand tha they use active X but even with IE 9 or 11 it doesnt work with the way we want.

Pros

from my experience with Voxco CAWI & CATI:

Flexibility to create survey

Powerful and more detailed reporting

Quality of support help

possibility to create complex quests

support for multiple data formats for exported files

the highly flexible quota system

Cons

from my experience with Voxco CAWI & CATI:

the difficulty of creating a nice ergonomic questionnaire

Use HTML4 instead of HTML5 which makes it difficult to integrate new components.

the builder "DESIGN" is not well optimized

the worst is the incompatibility with other browsers Chrome, Firefox

Pros

i appreciate field management the ease of setup and deploy surveys reporting tools is easy and we can save a model of it

Cons

the commande center is only compatible with internet explorer 8 we cant use it with chrome for exemple or in a mobile device.

Pros

We have looked at other platforms that often seemed to offer more bells and whistles, but as of yet no other was able to offer us the technical flexibility provided by Voxco.

Cons

The learning curve may be steeper for beginners, and workarounds are sometimes needed, but the advanced featured for more complex surveys far outweigh the cons.

Pros

The survey builder tool is very intuitive and I also like the help and sample questions provided.

Cons

More advanced features that have "excel" type coding are difficult to figure out without lots of training and support. Also, want the ability to combine the results of two surveys for analysis.

Pros

I like the ease of use that VoxCo provides and the way the data exports.

Cons

Honestly, I feel as if customer support could improve. Typically, when I am lost on how to program something in VoxCo, I do not look forward to reaching out as I feel the response is not always helpful at best or condescending at worst.

Pros

How easy it is to learn to use. Very intuitive and for someone like me who isn't an analytics professional, the learning curve was not nearly as steep as I had anticipated. I also think that the technical support is incredible. VERY fast and very efficient. All of my issues were solved quickly.

Cons

There are some design limitations. Might be that I'm not well-versed enough to design the surveys the way I would have liked to see them, aesthetically, but I felt as though the design options were dated and basic.

Pros

The functionality is definitely there, a good selection of question types and logic options.

Cons

It's quite buggy. I feel like we are finding issues quite often, and they have interfered with our productivity in the past. I also feel like the help menu only describes the features, and doesn't have enough examples of how they may be applied or any troubleshooting.

Pros

Everything, the latest version of the software has no issues.

Cons

Nothing really, i've used it for years and right now the software is perfect

Pros

The technical support you receive during the course of working with the platform. We use both the CATI and CAWI functionality. Many of our projects are very complicated and Voxco's system meets the challenge every time. If we have any problems, Voxco is there to assist and help us get back on track. The software is great but the support is the best.

Cons

The environment takes a bit of effort to feel comfortable in.

Pros

I like that Voxco allows for almost anything that you can think of when it comes to survey software. You can create almost any type of question, use anonymous or identified survey sends, setup sample groups, and so much more. You have to see a video or demo to begin to see the full power and flexibility it has. It has API extensibility and is able to silently pass through any data you want.

Cons

It has a bit of a learning curve, primarily because it has so many options. It is a bit difficult to fit every option they offer into a platform but they do a reasonable job.

Pros

Panel management, customization, basic navigation features

Cons

Very buggy, software gets overwhelmed and freezes occasionally, inconsistent features across question types

Pros

Voxco has great flexibility and features for the market research industry. The integrated dialers and online interviewing modules make working different kinds of surveys much easier than using multiple platforms.

Cons

Some programming and reporting can be a bit complicated.

Pros

This product is very user-friendly. I believe that someone with little programming experience could set up a simple survey with this and in time learn how to do more complex surveys. I also like that it works well with our online panel provider and that the phone and web platforms are integrated.

Cons

I would like to be able to make the web surveys more visually complex. Being able to change the way sliders, gauges, etc. look and add more icons and images would be good.

Pros

Ease of use. For those working in the industry, it's a much more user friendly (to learn) software than other popular ones on the market. It covers most all angles of what a research company needs to collect sound, quality data.

Cons

Hard to find anything, but in the past there have been iterations of new releases that were a little buggy. The good news is that their R&D team jumps on the issues to find a fix and will patch it quickly.

Pros

Overall UI and UX is great when setting up simple surveys.

Cons

Looping is made excessively difficult compared to solutions on other platforms.

Pros

I like the reliability and performance consistency of Voxco's products the most. We have utilized their software for many years, and have supreme confidence in its ability to deliver. Voxco's entire team at all levels is also fantastic to work with.

Cons

The reporting features and capabilities are not a great match for our database/project setup (we have over 1,000 projects).

Pros

The support team is very helpful and always provides a quick response.

Cons

The email distribution and templates are difficult to work with. Many features are complicated and not as flexible as I would like. Online resources are not very helpful. There are no training videos available.

Pros

Flexibility. The software allows us to ask a vast array of questions.

Cons

No JWT authentication mechanism. This would help our project immensely.

Pros

It is very user friendly. Easy to implement

Cons

There are certain things that could be more user friendly. True Multi-Mode needs to fixed. Custom Reports from the portal need to updated.

Pros

System for both CATI, CAWI and CAPI/mCAP, most complicated questionnaires can be programmed in the system

Cons

Needs o lot of training and learning to be able to use

Pros

Ease of use and the robust dialing rules.

Cons

There are very little training material like youtube videos.

Pros

Integration with our other systems. Survey deployment. Cost-effective. Excellent support.

Cons

Some functions can be obscure. Requires some learning.

Pros

It is pretty easy to use even though I don't know much about computers

Cons

It has lots of bugs and there are a lot of problems that pop up

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Voxco Online

Pros

I like having to ability to program complex skip patterns and data calculations within the software. Some of the calculations we do for clients are complex and no other software package has shown the capability to do this.

Cons

The software has lots of parts to keep track of. The latest version installed at our site (6.3) has made great strides to help with the setup and maintenance of projects.