August 9, 2007

Organize Group Answers and Boost Productivity with Circle Up

Asking questions of people is pretty easy. You dump their email addresses into your email program (Outlook, BlueTie, whatever) and fire away. The complication arises in receiving the answer.

You get partial answers, no answers and everything in between. Then you've got to compile those answers and make sense of them.

What's needed is a tool to make it easier for the person asking the question and the person giving the answers to do their parts of the equation much easier. CircleUp offers a solution.

CircleUp could be somewhat akin to a survey tool, but it's purpose is not really for surveys. It's to organize responses to questions. CircleUp is more of a messaging tool to help streamline group communications. The functionality that CircleUp offers certainly differentiates itself from other services that are limited to 1-to-1 communications; CircleUp is meant to facilitate messaging for many-to-many using a combination of platforms and channels (Email, IM, etc.).

CircleUp helps boost productivity in three ways:

Reduction of email volume - send one request to many people and get a single answer back

Time savings - no need to open emails and cut and paste or export the contents

Information sharing - enable the group to access summarized and/or detailed responses in real time, where it can be used immediately instead of waiting for a group leader to aggregate and disseminate.

Whether you're asking 10 colleagues what they want for lunch or asking sales representatives for help with a customer service question - CircleUp is something worth trying out.

Next week CircleUp is launching a widget to add more enhancements to this already quite useful service.

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