The Launch of ClassCheck Sparked by Field Agent History - Words from Our CEO

It's a simple concept – listen to your customers or consumers, and they will tell you things about your product or service that you never imagined on your own.

I remember the first time this hit me over the head. It was early 2009. We were in the process of launching Field Agent and knew we had something special. What started out as a way to help solve a basic problem for our Clients started growing into a new Industry: Crowdsourced Mobile Research.

The Challenges

All we had to do was to create an app on a mobile device that had never been created before and convince thousands of consumers to download the app that would pay them cash (which had never been done before) to complete a task at a defined location. Oh, and we had to convince manufacturers and retailers (all who only used Blackberry's) that we could provide research and audit data at a lower cost, higher quality and in speeds measured in hours not weeks. No problem…

You can imagine our war room as we kept iterating and ideating week after week, month after month. The process of creating something special was all consuming. The core question for us all: “When do we stop the creative process long enough to launch?” When would we have exactly what our Clients wanted, when would we have the perfect UX for our Agents (users of our app), etc.

Inspiration

It was after watching a talk by Guy Kawasaki on the Art of Innovation that I knew what we had to do. You see, Guy had lived in this innovation world before - back in the early days of launching the Macintosh.  It was his words of wisdom that helped us push the "GO" button. Guy shared that when you have a technology that is jump curve, you need to get it in the market so the users can experience the product and tell you things that you would have never dreamed of.

Guy was right. Our Clients suggested new uses and processes, and they encouraged and supported us to expand Globally. Lets not forget about our Agents who quickly helped us reduce clicks and improved how we asked questions, enhancing our UX.

It has been an amazing journey over the past five years in the area of mobile research.  To put our journey in perspective, we often have to remind our team that we launched Field Agent in the "pre-selfie" era before the iPhone had a front facing camera.

ClassCheck – Field Agent Tailored to Universities

It's exciting for our team to announce today our new product for universities, ClassCheck.  We have been listening to our Clients who suggested we could use our current technology and use the engine from Field Agent to develop a location-based data collection tool for universities.

Our initial focus is within Athletic departments. They currently manually monitor and physically verify classroom attendance for many of their student-athletes. We have worked closely with the University of Arkansas to develop a platform that will automate this process by enabling students to take responsibility for their own classroom attendance, while allowing the Athletic Department to focus on helping the student-athlete be successful on and off the field.

Eric Wood and Ragean Hill played a key role in scoping out the opportunity and impact this could have on classroom attendance which ultimately impacts retention and graduation rates.

"It helps with accountability and also maturity. They're taking it upon themselves to get to class.”\n- Ragean Hill\nUniversity of Arkansas Director of Academics - Football\n

"Now we actually have hard data that tells us what our class attendance looks like for this population of student athletes."\n- Eric Wood\nUniversity of Arkansas Associate Athletic Director - Student Athlete Services

Changing the Way

It's always amazing to me how simple an idea can be yet change things that have been in place for decades. We have seen this with Field Agent and now see this coming true with ClassCheck as we take our solution's first approach to Universities and Athletic Departments.

Guy was right, without getting our product into the hands of different consumers, we would have never walked down this path.

We are meeting with Clients every day. If we listen intently, who knows what’s next…

Find the full release here.