At Marketing Systems Group, we believe that research is the key to any organization—product or service based—and we want to pursue creative solutions that help our customers to effectively and efficiently run their research projects. That is our core mission. As we pursue that mission, ARCS is evolving into something bigger and better. In this blog post, we want to give an update of the progress made and where we are heading.
Srinath Sankar, VP of Product Development puts it this way: “We’re looking to build a unified research operation platform that can help our customers to engage with their audience, collect insights, and manage the process as a whole. If you asked me ten years ago the definition of ARCS, I’d have said, it’s a panel management tool. Now we don’t see it that way. We want to cover as much of the research environment—the scope of recruitment, the administration of participants, the data collection piece, the management of people in the organization, governance and compliance, security tools, infrastructure, and more.”
We have designed ARCS to work within different contexts and multiple roles that our customers have to play. We are already known as a strong recruitment administration platform, and we help customers with their needs for compliance, security requirements, and consents. Now we are taking the platform into new regions to see how we can help you build research libraries, how to make process management better, and how to improve automation.
Communication framework
We have always felt that the communication framework is the core to the ARCS platform. We have taken strides towards improving audience engagement by partnering with Twilio. The result is a brand new product, ARCS Voice.
In the old ARCS, if you wanted to do a reminder call to participants, you would either do it manually or use our IVR system to make the call. Now you can accomplish the task with a simple web app; no infrastructure is required. Just log into the app, provide a script, and send the message across SMS.
Within ARCS Voice, you can create different projects and set up call flows and trigger different actions such as transfer call, play another message, and so on. You can also create and pull from call lists, control callbacks, and run reports.
Formerly, ARCS could send only outbound text messages to participants. Now we have a two-way street. You can receive inbound messages, and thanks to improved email queue handling, our smart priority queue feature can flag higher priority tasks and execute those critical actions in a timely manner.
We have also created an inbound message center within ARCS that permits various customizations. The message center can look for keywords present in the message and reply with a text or trigger a workflow. We are currently working on the ability to do text-based surveys in a more automated way using a bot or manual intervention, too.
You will see other improvements on the platform as well, including updated targeting tools, user experience improvements, new filtering and multi-value import features.
On the questionnaire side, we’ve made it even easier and faster to build questionnaires. We’ve added new command types such as ranking, and improved accessibility compliance.
In the security space, we have added native SAML support not just for the participant portal (which was already there) but on the administrative side.
As for recruitment, we’ve added support for time zone settings at the study level and location level.
On the participant side, we have added a feature where participants can now receive and iCAL or Calendar invite to add to their Google calendar, for instance.
The ARCS ecosystem
ARCS is maturing, evolving into a solution for research operations. At the core is the platform our customers have been using all along. Orbiting it is an ecosystem of products that take you beyond panel management, recruitment, and questionnaire building. Let us introduce you to these new products.
Atom
Atom is our insights engine product, our attempt to take insights and drive them into better understandings of how operations work. Access to more data, more reports, more dashboards—all of this is well and good—but you really want these insights to fuel better decision making and growth. Under the Atom umbrella we are introducing three tools. First, a friendly built-in bot to answer questions about ARCS, a self-service analytical module to give better control of data inside ARCS, and multiple partnership agreements to provide enriched data about your panelists: demographic, psychographic, behavioral, updated on a monthly basis.
ARCS Pay
ARCS Pay is our incentive distribution product. It handles rewards management and incentive management and distribution. It offers an improvement over legacy incentive management procedures. With ARCS Pay, you can incentivize any activity in monetary currencies or points—you decide on the right mix. The system can track both. On the distribution side, it lets you select a list of rewards vendors and allows your participants to redeem their own rewards. We have partnered with Tango to provide this piece, all integrated within the ARCS ecosystem in real time. Incentive management becomes an engagement tool now, because you can see what rewards are working and which are not. The setup is configurable, permitting you to try different scenarios.
Olà a Visitor Management
Olà is our visitor management product, released a few months ago. Our goal was to help customers with in-flow traffic, compliance, quota tracking, and reporting. It includes a receptionist module to ease the check-in and no-show process. Kiosk check-in is available. Text-based check-in is there too. On the compliance side, it supports visitor badge printing, an NDA option, emergency evacuation lists, and audit reporting. On the administrative side there are dashboards and reports to track who is signing up, which quotas are filling and not, whether there are no shows, cancelations, etc.
Coming soon: ARCS cloud and ARCS Survey
ARCS Cloud is a portal for cloud customers. On the horizon, you’ll be seeing an infrastructure upgrade for our cloud customers. Everything is getting updated: servers, hardware, software. There will be more endpoints across the country that will improve cloud-based performance across our customer base. We are looking to a third-party provider of a more flexible service on the delivery portal, which should improve user experience. Finally, we are working up a new version of ARCS Survey, which should be available by spring 2021. As you can see, we’ve been quite busy! Many of these improvements seen in ARCS stem directly from customer feedback. You have shared real world experiences and needs, and we have responded with more multi-faceted and powerful tools. If you’d like to see the newest enhancements in action, you can view a recorded webinar presented by Srinath Sankar. And for more information, contact your Marketing Systems Group representative.