Hospitals

With HospitalTrak, you get World-class Innovation and Project Management with Flagpole and StageTrak seamlessly integrated and designed specifically for health care organizations.

Empower your Six Sigma, Toyota, and Lean teams quickly gather actionable improvements using our new HospitalTrak software system. Don’t waste time with expensive studies, with HospitalTrak, you can answer critical questions in 3-5 days.

In the midst of your cost savings efforts, it’s easy to ignore the people. With HospitalTrak, you encourage ownership and participation of your organization, increasing employee engagement. Increasing your employee engagement by as little as 15% can have immediate impact on your productivity, profitability, and market share.

After you gather actionable ideas from your employees, seamlessly allow your project teams to investigate, build, and implement the best ones. Because HospitalTrak includes both Flagpole's idea collection and review as well as StageTrak's project management, contributors can stay informed (another increase in employee engagement) as the project progress. Team members can use the system to move projects through your own process (or use one of our pre-defined templates), and executives can monitor the progress of the entire portfolio of improvements, taking action where necessary.

New Products

The introduction of new products into the market is one of the most important aspects of maintaining your competitive edge. It only makes sense then, to solict feedback about your products from customers, suppliers, and partners.

With Flagpole, your Product Departments could gather information on each Product in your entire product family from the people who buy and use them.

1. You'd just set up Flagpole with each product that you want feedback on: Product A and Product B.
2. Either from your website and/or within the product documentation, you could solicit feedback and direct customers to your Flagpole site.
3. Users would be able to view all of your products and provide feedback regarding their use, possible problems, and even new ideas for improvements.
4. You could specifically challenge your customers with questions regarding your products, such as asking for the best new feature or improvement. Selected improvements could be result in rewards for the customers.

Technology

Software development can be complicated by such issues as the choice of feature sets, functionality/customer decisions, and product roadmaps. Resolving such issues can range from tedious to politically charged, and software managers/developers must continually balance the needs of the marketplace and sales with technical skills and resources. To facilitate the selection of functionality for upcoming software versions and releases, Flagpole is the perfect choice.

With Flagpole, your Software Development Group could gather Feature Requests and Support Issues from your user group.

1. You'd just set up Flagpole with two different capture types: Features and Support.
2. Put a link to Flagpole on your support site and/or your software and allow users to add new features and support issues.
3. Features: With Flagpole, you'd be able to view the highest ranked features, and comment back to the submitter your intentions to add the features into your upcoming software version.
   Support: You could answer their questions, and other users would benefit by being able to look at how to resolve their own issues.
4. Several months after you implemented Flagpole, you could tally the total number of feature requests and the value they've returned to you in terms of customer loyalty, reduced costs, and new competitive features.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing environment has always been a target for improvements, with programs like TQM, SPC, and a host of others usually implemented with expensive consultants and intricate processes. With Flagpole, you can harness the power of the Open Innovation and tap the knowledge of your shop floor employees to help improve your efficiency and productivity.

With FlagPole, your Manufacturing Facility could figure out ways to Reduce the Rejection Rates of a particularly troublesome shop line.

1. You'd set up Flagpole with a Question describing your problem—in this case the rejection rate of your particular line.
2. You'd add a list of email addresses into the system, and it would automatically send out invitations asking your community to solve this problem.
3. As users logged in and made suggestions, you could watch, in real time, as ideas were suggested, votes were made, and the top ideas floated to the surface.
4. Of course you'd implement the best ideas, but you would keep the others for possible implementation in other aspects of your manufacturing facility.
5. Your top submitter could be rewarded, and your community would be ready and waiting for the next challenge.

Best Practices

With FlagPole, your Six Sigma Team could gather and vote on Best Practices from your organization.

1. You'd just set up Flagpole with category types to represent the areas in which you're looking for best practices, such as: Bill Payment Process, Manufacturing and Customer Service.
2. You'd put a link to Flagpole on your internal site allowing members from your organization to add and vote on the best practices.
3. Bill Payment Process, Manufacturing, Customer Support: By viewing the Approved practices within each category, members throughout your organization would be able to quickly view and adopt the most promising best practices in their organization.
4. With Flagpole acting as your Best Practices repository, you would have a place that organizations and departments could reference to make improvements to their overall operations.

Marketing

Your Marketing Department could get realistic Consumer Feedback directly from the public through the WWW internet site.

1. With Flagpole, they would add a small widget to their main website directing consumers with feedback to the Flagpole site.
2. From there, consumers would be able to anonymously (or they could create an account if they wish) enter suggestions for improvements or vote on previously entered ideas. Because it is a public facing site, you'd be sure to activate Flagpole's Auto Spam Control to eliminate inappropriate comments and flag ideas that were not relevant.
3. As ideas were entered, your team would review them, add comments, and promote the best ones.
4. Armed with this information, you could present detailed information to your engineering department for not only improvements, but the number of people making the requests.
5. With integration with one of our partners, you'd be able to get detailed web traffic statistics such as where your consumers are located, along with other demographic information.

Academia

Your Academic Institution could create a community of current students and alumni so you could Tap their Collective Expertise in improving the institution's outside appeal, academics, and facilities.

1. With Flagpole, you could create a community accessible to current students through internal web links and to your alumni through your public website.
2. Both types of users could easily create accounts using their existing Facebook, MySpace, or other partners' profiles, saving them time.
3. As they log in, they'd be able to select different areas to investigate, such as Athletics, Library, or the Math Department.
4. In each of these areas, they would add, vote, and comment on improvements germane to the university, all the while receiving feedback on their contributions.
5. They'd be able to check on other users by looking up their profiles and making connections to other students who share similar interests.

Conference/Trade Show

Deciding on next year's venue and topics is always a concern for Trade Show organizers. Get a fast start by using Flagpole to capture the opinions of your attendees. With the easy-to-use software, attendees can intuitively enter their choices. Spur innovation further by offering a prize for the top-rated suggestions.

With FlagPole, your attendees could enter suggestions for and vote on the possible venue and topic areas for next year's event.

1. To encourage participation, you might include a 3x5 note card in each participant's welcome bag asking them to go to the web address of your Flagpole site and enter suggestions.
2. Beforehand, you would have configured the system to collect New Venues and Topics, and would have allowed for anonymous ideas, but required users to create an account to vote.
3. During breaks in your conference, you could alert attendees to the site, the current vote totals, and encourage them to enter their choices.
4. At the end of the conference, you would have a list of final entries and could reward the submitters with free attendance to next year's conference along with a small prize.

Kiosk

Need a quick and easy way to gather customer suggestions from your lobby or other public place? Use Flagpole's Kiosk templates to enable a touch-screen version.

With FlagPole, you can tap the expertise of a large group of people without access to their own email accounts or personal computers, such as a group of shop floor employees, retail customers, or networking gathering.

1. Since you don't want to burden everyone with an account and login information, you would install a Kiosk that has been pre-configured with Flagpole.
2. When people approached the kiosk, they would see you'd requested they enter ideas to improve the service they receive at your location.
3. You'd ask them to enter their own suggestions as well as rate the suggestions of others.
4. You'd let them know they could also vote online and at the end of the month, the top suggestions would be implemented, and the participants awarded.

Customer Care/Service

Customer service agents need to rapidly and politely answer customer questions, concerns, and issues. While many automated tools help, there is still room for improvement, as customers, solutions, and technologies are always changing. Your customer service agents are on the front line. They see areas for improvement out of necessity.

With FlagPole, your Customer Care Center could gather Customer Solutions and Technology Improvements directly from your agents.

1. You'd just set up Flagpole with two different capture types: Customer Solutions and Technology Improvements.
2. Put a link to Flagpole on your agent call center site so that they could easily add new ideas as they pop into their minds.
3. Customer Care managers could evaluate the suggestions and approve the ones that were considered best practices or improvements to existing problems.
4. Agents would be able to search for approved suggestions while they were still on the phone with the customer, as well as learn about new best practices from other agents.
5. Your benefits would be improved customer service, but you'd also see increased employee morale and better call volumes.

Banking

Maintaining your current customers, establishing new customers and accounts, offering services and programs customers want and need while satisfying your shareholders are the primary concerns of the banking industry.

With FlagPole, your branches could gather and enter information from the people who use your bank.

1. You'd just set up Flagpole with each program that you want feedback on: Customer Loyalty, Points and Rewards Programs, Investment Ideas and Growth Opportunities.
2. Either from your website and/or within the product documentation, you could solicit feedback and direct employees and/or customers to your Flagpole site.
3. Users would be able to view all of your programs and provide feedback regarding their vaule, benefit and interest.
4. You could specifically challenge your employees and/or customers with questions regarding your programs and services, such as asking for their opinion, feedback or suggestions for new offerings or improvement. Selected responses could be result in rewards for the submittor.

Non-Profit

Pursuing your goals and charter, funding research, challenging your constituents, networking opportunities, innovative and breakthrough ideas while satisfying the Board of Directors are some of the primary concerns of any non-profit.

With Flagpole, your committees and/or beneficiaries could provide you with insightful information every day.

1. You'd just set up Flagpole with each challenge that you want feedback on: Grant Applications, Research, Fund Raising, Cost Savings perhaps Partnering Opportunities.
2. Either from your website and/or within the product documentation, you could solicit feedback and direct employees, partners and/or beneficiaries to your Flagpole site.
3. Users with proper access would be able to view all of your programs and challenges and provide feedback regarding their value, benefit and interest.
4. You could specifically challenge your employees, partners and/or beneficiaries with questions regarding your programs and services, such as asking for their opinion, feedback or suggestions for improvement. Selected responses could be result in rewards for the submitter.