Crossroads 2002 A-List Award Winners

BetaSphere, Inc.
Palo Alto, CA

Feedback Management Server
> Customer Collaboration in New Product Development

CUSTOMERS AT WORK

A new product introduction is a critical event for any company in today’s markets. BetaSphere’s customers are focused on tightening the loop between new product development teams and their customers. High-tech manufacturers comprised the reference customer group. Common strategic objectives included:

§ Improving the market performance of “first-mover” products

§ Early identification of showstopping issues

§ Boosting the productivity of new product engineers

§ Developing more customer-oriented documentation

WHY BETASPHERE?

BetaSphere gives a company’s product marketers and engineers a means of validating customer requirements and product stability before products are introduced to the market. Using the BetaSphere solution, organizations can drive the consistent use of best practice processes and have access to product feedback in real time. Companies can recruit evaluators from their own ranks or BetaSphere’s pool of pre-qualified third parties. Product organizations are able to configure the BetaSphere Web-based application to fit their business needs, organizational structures, and security requirements.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Near-term value: Time to market is the top-level concern for BetaSphere’s customers. Almost all product groups reported significant improvements in this regard. One company had a third-party consultancy verify a one-third average time savings in field-testing activities.

Enterprise innovation: New product innovation is a high-stakes game, and the top companies recognize that process discipline is the only way they can pursue consistent improvements and positive outcomes. Companies are using BetaSphere to improve their return on beta-customer activities and are incorporating the feedback into product engineering, packaging, and marketing activities. By moving product engineers to a common process, they have reduced product-launch costs across the board.

Technology gains: Companies have traditionally managed the customer feedback process via email, telephone calls, etc. This resulting data was typically fragmented, and learning opportunities were often missed from one project to the next. BetaSphere allows companies to have a single repository for customer feedback program data and to establish common methods of reporting, analyzing, and communicating trends and events.

SUCCESS FACTORS

Project strategy: BetaSphere’s customers observe that engineer and customer time is the clearest quantitative value in measuring the success of a BetaSphere implementation. Companies using BetaSphere should first look at how the technology can be used to improve the experience from both perspectives.

Learning: Companies found that training engineers on communication and agreeing upon escalation procedures across organizational silos was more complicated than learning how to use the BetaSphere Feedback Management Server. As one company pointed out, the technology does not find more bugs. Rather, people using the right processes make the improvements.

Resources: Companies can use BetaSphere’s solution as in-house or hosted software and choose from a range of value-added services . The majority of reference customers found working with BetaSphere as a hosted solution provider was the most effective way to impact the organization quickly.

Fit: High-tech companies where product velocity is a top priority should consider BetaSphere as a potential resource for their businesses.

COMPANY INFO

BetaSphere, Inc. is a private company with 65 employees.

650.930.0200
www.betasphere.com
Published: January 2002