The thing that has been most valuable is the access, so that people are able to leverage the platform no matter where they are physically located in our system. 

Also, the backend algorithm helps us filter the ideas or comments that carry the most weight to the top so that management has a more manageable list of focus-items to go through.

The dashboards and reporting are helpful from an administration standpoint, for us to really know what's going on within a challenge. They help give us a snapshot of what the high-level themes are that are coming out, as well as monitor engagements so that we can push additional communications if need be, if engagement isn't quite where we want it to be. 

The customized reports really allow us to tailor the use case exactly for individual sponsors. What the platform and the customized reports are getting at is providing one solution where a number of different stakeholders can engage in a very customized way and get the feedback they're looking for. The flexibility that the platform and the reports provide is part of the value that we're seeing in our organization.

The insights and analytics capabilities — the dashboard views as well as the reports — are pretty critical for us to be able to measure whether what we were trying to get out of the challenge is actually received. We can track it on an ongoing basis during the challenge to make sure that we're trending in the right direction and, if not, we can make some pivots to improve things. We also look at them to assess the overall success of the challenge.

In addition, the workflow on the backend is customizable from the beginning. We understood the levers that we could pull in order to adjust the workflow to match exactly what we are trying to do. And it is very flexible. From the very beginning this wasn't a problem because we designed for exactly what we wanted.

The ability to collect ideas for people to be able to comment and vote. We like the pairwise portion of it. It is just a simple way in which people can post ideas and review other ideas. We have used it out-of-the-box, without doing much customization.

Spigit's dashboards and reporting are great. We generate a post challenge report with as much data as possible. E.g., a summary with the number of participants and how the participants contributed. We also get asked questions about users and where they come from, such as, how many people in my department participated in it. We connect our platform to Okta, which integrates single sign-on. Once people are signed into our internal system or their email, they can sign in through Okta to this system. It ports over a bunch of user attributes that we are able to track as part of the data. So far, so good.

I went into the Spigit Insight analytics platform last week and found a report that I needed for understanding how many active users we have out of the total number of people that are signed in. This helps us gauge our level of participation and where we're at so far.

I like the flexibility in it. The majority of our challenges are traditional, time-bound challenges, where we do the submission, the crowd-validation component, expert review, and then the pairwise. Each one typically runs a week to two weeks so you have a month to month-and-a-half long challenge. Those tend to work well for us. They're easy to communicate. We can get materials and leverage resources that we've used in the past to make that pretty smooth.

We really like some of the functionality to have faster-paced challenges or do pairwise-only challenges. It could be something where you have a prioritization list, where you have ideas or solutions and you want a group to prioritize the most important aspects; or you really just want people to submit ideas and then rank them. It's neat to have a tool that can take a group of senior leaders, submit something to a quick challenge that takes them five minutes, and then they rank them and prioritize them and specify the pairwise during a break later on in that meeting and it's done. Whereas some challenges last a month or two months with very high engagement and more time on them. I like that the tool is flexible for that. That is probably the most valuable part for us.

The solution's dashboards and reporting have two purposes for us. One is for our own group, since we house and support Spigit across Ameren. We do a lot of benchmarking and reporting to see how well our metrics are stacking up. We use the solution's reporting mechanisms for that, and they're automated to easily generate them. That works tremendously well, creating very little work per project for us. Our group uses the standard stuff where we're getting the number of visitors, number of ideas, number of ideators, etc. We just plug and chug that into a metric that we use. And it compares them to past challenges and to benchmarks.

And then there's how we present the information to the challenge sponsor, to the executive sponsor, or the executive group sponsoring challenges. Typically, they're looking at it from a different perspective. They do like to know how their results compare to other ones we've run, or to Spigit benchmarks. But usually they have their own things that they're looking for. Sometimes the leaders are more interested in how many ideas are generated. Sometimes leaders are interested in how many people engage. I like that we can very easily generate reports, or take results and put them into our own formats if needed, to present them to all the different types of stakeholders very easily.

Usually, the sponsors of new challenges don't care for the granularity in the reporting. We provide it to them but they're usually more interested in diving into particular aspects of engagement. Sometimes that means they want to know which types of coworkers participated — whether they're front-line or managers or directors. Sometimes they're more interested in who submitted ideas but not necessarily who voted or ranked. It's really easy within the tool, after listening to what they want to get for feedback on, to generate a report, on the spot very quickly.

Spigit's functionality helps us to prioritize and select the best ideas. The one caveat with that is that "best" is usually a subjective term. What's neat about the platform is the transparency so everyone can understand. There are clear rules on what it takes to move from phase to phase. Things get communicated through the tool or individually, and that creates a lot of power. What's often tricky for coworkers is when they don't know what happened to the ideas they submitted, in general, or why an idea gets acted on or not. They can say, "Hey, my boss didn't want to do my idea," or, "I'm upset about it." 

What's neat about using Spigit is that they can see why ideas are doing better. In pairwise, the coworkers themselves are judging them. Some people might still think some aspect of that is unfair, or they don't get it, but it's very clear: This idea had a higher percentage of thumbs-up to thumbs-down than that one did. It was more broadly well-received and that's why it got selected. That type of transparency is really important.

The most valuable feature of Spigit is the fact that we can reach so many people with crowdsourcing. We can go across departments and branches, still being engaged and doing it so quickly.

The most valuable thing we've seen is how much it is such a great opportunity for our team members to have a voice. Now, we have all of the analytical options in the back-end to be able to provide real results, metrics, and impact to our executive team and also show results. So, it's not just the conceptual part, but we were able to transition that all the way through. Being able to bridge that gap has been a very valuable aspect.

It's been pretty easy to use. Overall, most of our team members who are using it to submit ideas are very happy with the layout, the format, etc. The experience for me as an administrator of being able to set up the challenge and make the changes within the website could be a bit improved. When you're going to edit a page, that tiny little page that pops out, not being able to click and drag things, everything being in columns, or it being just text-based. It has a lot of limitations. For that piece, our marketing and communications teams have taken a look and navigated, as an administrator, inside of the site too, giving pretty much the same feedback.

Those have been the only issues.

The voting ability is its most valuable feature. Teammates can vote an idea up or down. They can also offer feedback, and that feedback is instantaneous. It is a tool which allows us to gauge the temperature of certain product enhancements. Our system enhancements are potential areas of gaps that we have in our business.

The solution’s functionality helps us to prioritize and select the best ideas. The voting and amount of activity an idea gets in the comments section helps us know how to move a presented solution forward to investigate it further or if it's something that we're not getting good engagement on because people haven't bought into the suggestion or identified it as a problem. This usually helps us to table ideas so we can focus our resources on the most valuable problems to solve. There are also sometimes teammates who say, "Yes, this is a problem. Here is my workaround." This helps with the collaboration as well.

As a global organization, we are able to allow all our associates around the world to contribute and collaborate.

We use the Spigit's dashboards and reporting. It puts all the information in the hands of the expert role. Therefore, they don't have to page through different ideas on the platform. They can look at a spreadsheet and see everything in one place.

The solution’s functionality helps us to prioritize and select the best ideas. Many times, we will use an expert team to help pick roles. At the same time, we also rely on the Pairwise to simply go off of the input from the crowd. 

The crowdsourcing feature and having an open, transparent platform where people can submit ideas are among the most important capabilities of Spigit. Collaboration begins immediately upon submission. Users have the ability to bring others in through "@so-and-so" mentions in comments.