Ideas out of the box concept on green blackboard

Vocoli Takes Suggestion Box To New Level

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Has Vocoli saved the suggestion box?

The traditional suggestion box has long been thought of as a thing of the past. The dusty wood box that no one can usually find, sitting with a couple of broken pencils and some half doodled pieces of paper, has been in desperate need of an upgrade for years.

Vocoli, a product of a Brighton-based Web development firm Massachusetts Technology Corp, was launched in September and is attempting change the way you think about suggestion boxes.

Any company founded on the will to continuously improve needs voices to push it along. Often times, these voices tend to get choked out in a dusty box. They get forgot about, left for too long, and by the time they make it into the hands of someone who can make a difference, it’s a lost cause. In attempts to spark innovation, collaboration, and maybe most importantly, participation, Vocoli is a cloud based, virtual suggestion box that allows employees to submit suggestions, comments and ideas from anywhere, anytime, from essentially any device.

Vocoli is a pay-for-service software that allows organizations to offer a fully interactive platform for employees and managers to rate ideas, add comments and input additional data on how a particular idea impacted operations.

Vocali suggestion boxVocoli Benefits

Create Campaigns

A nice feature with the Vocoli software is the ability for leaders to target specific organizational challenges and allow the team to collaborate on finding a workable solution.

  • Set campaign start and end dates
  • Set reward amounts for motivation
  • See number of related ideas and pre- and post-campaign.

Social Collaboration

Contributors will have an option to improve each other’s ideas with the organization’s collective knowledge.

  • Discuss and rate ideas before submitting to management
  • View the latest and trending topics
  • Incorporate comments into the submission
  • Up- and down-vote to bring the best conversations to the top.

Established Workflow

Never lose a great idea again!

  • Program administrators can assign department heads to review ideas and then accept or decline them
  • Dashboard tools help quickly keep ideas progressing through each step of the process
  • Mange the idea process with reminders to department heads, follow-through and status tracking
  • Ideas can be set aside for further evaluation and clarity from the author.

User Friendly

Employees want something that’s user friendly and allows them flexibility. The interface Vocoli offers is easy-to-use, allowing contributors to focus on their creativity, instead of how to figure out how to use it.

  • Customizable screens to meet your organizations needs and audience
  • Desktop, tablet, and mobile compatible from any browser, anytime, anywhere.
  • Users can upload documents and images to clarify and support their ideas
  • Contributors can share credit with others
  • Save an idea and finish it later.

According to Boston Business Journal reporter Sara Castellanos, the company has about a dozen customers after the first few months and anticipate further growth in the upcoming year. Their target market, according to their CEO Richard Kneece, is for companies with more than 100 employees, but their site claims the benefits could help any organization.

We are trying to create an avenue.. to allow somebody who has these ideas to submit them in an organized way.

-Richard Kneece

Tools like these can be an encouraging sign to your employees. A sign that you care about their opinion and value their input on serious challenges facing your organization. Employees that feel like they are a contributing factor in the progression and continuous improvement effort, are more likely to put forth and more importantly, sustain the effort needed to make programs like these a valuable asset to your organization.

Engaging your employees is a critical part of your operations. The first one to put out a suggestion box years ago was forward thinking and innovative for the time, but over time, it became misused and abused. The Vocoli software is innovative and forward thinking as well, overtime, we will see if it can help to sustain improvement in organizations and keep them moving forward as well.

Additional Resources

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