Ease of Use

No HTML or Web design experience is necessary to build a Vista survey. You can use predefined templates to have Vista build your survey for you or design your questionnaire from the ground up.

Vista will automatically check the logical flow of your questionnaire and flag spelling errors. You can even have Vista automatically match the look of your Web site simply by entering your site's address. The Vista Style Wizard will automatically extract your company logo, font choices, color schemes, background images, etc.

Results

Surveys aren't any use to you without top-notch data analysis. Other survey tools stop at data collection, whereas Vista focuses on the results you need to help you understand your customers and enable you to put together reliable marketing solutions.

Your results reports are instantly generated in print-ready format and include up-to-the-second results. You can access your account at any time and generate reports even while a survey is running.

Vista's innovative report generator uses Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) techniques along with a powerful collection of statistical methods to analyze your data. This is like having an expert review your data for you. Vista will be able to find correlations and patterns that you might never have thought to look for yourself.

If you want to perform your own analysis, you can download your raw data at any time. Just click the Download link and Excel will open on your computer populated with all of your data. From Excel you can transfer your data to any statistical application.

Compatibility

Unlike Vista, most web-based survey tools require a high level of client-side browser functionality in order to function properly. However, a large percentage of Web users have intentionally disabled this functionality for security reasons. If you use a survey tool other than Vista, it is possible that many potential respondents will not be able to take your survey.

If a Web user has chosen High security settings in their browser (Microsoft IE menu option: Tools / Internet Options / Security) Java, JavaScript, and Meta Refresh will all be disabled. This renders some survey systems completely non-functional. With other systems, features such as response validation no longer function. About 12% of Web users have disabled these features, and another 1% are using browsers that don't offer them at all.

Vista is engineered to be fully compatible with all Web browsers--even simple wireless phone and PDA-based browsers. Vista performs all complex processing at our servers rather than requiring the respondent's browser to perform these tasks. This makes Vista compatible with all Web browsers.

Reliability

We have designed our systems and procedures to ensure the highest level of reliability possible. Here is a partial list of the steps we have taken to ensure that your surveys operate properly and that you never lose data:

• Each of our servers is accompanied by a mirrored backup machine that comes online in the event of a hardware failure.
• Every component in the Vista system is monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. If any component fails, our engineers are automatically paged within 60 seconds.
• We maintain backup hardware for every network component.
• All systems are on an Uninterruptible Power Supply.
• All user data is backed up every hour.
• Backups are regularly performed off-site to ensure no data is lost even in the event of a disaster.

Security

Vista has been designed to provide a high level of security for your data and to prevent malicious responses from affecting your results. Here are some of the security features available:

• Only you have access to your data. Your account is secured by a unique user name and password. You can change your password at any time and secure all communications using SSL encryption.
• You can prevent unauthorized individuals from responding to your survey by using IP filtering to restrict access (e.g. allow only those individuals in your company to respond).
• You can prevent a respondent from submitting your survey more than once (ballot-stuffing) using a variety of techniques to identify repeat respondents.
• Vista's instant e-mail notification allows you to review responses as they are completed and, with a single click, delete responses that are obviously insincere. The e-mail notification gives you the respondent's IP address, time they spent taking your survey, and the completed questionnaire.
• You can secure all respondent's submissions using SSL encryption.