Is giving advice to customers part of your job? A recurring part? Then you’ve probably encountered this dilemma more than once: “Should I dig deep and give highly personalized advice or go for the more generic feedback and be time-efficient?” After all, time is money.
What if I told you that you could do both: offer personalized advice in no time?
I recently discovered Pointerpro, an online assessment tool that automatically generates personalized feedback reports for your customers - or potential customers that you want to attract, with your professional expertise. It’s all based on your input, no generic stuff. Basically, you put in the effort once. After that, your users get served on autopilot.
Let me explain how it works below and share my first experiences with you.
Pointerpro is probably one of the most complete assessment platforms out there. It has four key components for you to plug and play (plus many other features):
We’ll dig a bit deeper into the weeds below.
You create questionnaires, like assessments or surveys, using the Questionnaire Builder. This interface has templates, widgets, smart outcomes with formulas, and different question types.
The questionnaire answers are then turned into useful output (feedback) for respondents. This could be a score, category, maturity level, personality type, and more. You can preset variables, rules and scores, based on answer options.
What I found to be unique in this tool, is that you can convert the output into an auto-generated report, containing personalized advice for every respondent. Thanks to the drag-and-drop Report Builder with a large variety of widgets, you can offer customers or prospects personalized advice without putting in manual effort for every advisory meeting or report.
It’s the first time I ran into a tool that includes both of these functionalities: a questionnaire builder and a report builder.
You can also aggregate the results of multiple respondents in one single report. This can be useful for team evaluations in a working environment, for example.
Other examples of common assessment use cases:
Do take into account that Pointerpro doesn’t offer the content of these questionnaires. It’s up to you to upload your questions and knowledge into the tool and create your own assessment and report. They offer templates and an onboarding session to get started. You might need this, given the complexity and wide range of possibilities Pointerpro offers.
I’ve added an example of a digital maturity assessment that reflects the output of the tool. It’s interesting to see what you can do, and I was also curious to see how “digitally mature” I was, myself. This is particularly useful for marketing professionals who want to generate MQLs effectively.
I found this feature to be particularly interesting: the Report Builder. That’s why I wanted to dedicate a chapter to this subject specifically. As you can see, you can drag and drop content blocks into the report, enabling you to easily preview your report.
Some blocks will be fixed elements, like a (sub)title, your company logo, … But a lot of elements will contain variable information, such as a score, charts, and personal feedback tailored to your respondents’ answers. For these elements, you’ll need to add formulas in order to display the correct data in the report.
Here’s an example of the different elements embedded in the report draft, in the Pointerpro report interface:
Once you’ve finished working on your report, it will result in a custom-made PDF report, containing your variable text, scores and charts. Here’s my example of what it could look like:
Pointerpro can integrate with practically every tool. They use Zapier and Make, but don’t have any direct integrations.
Pointerpro offers pricing plans based on your specific needs. If you are a researcher who needs to collect data, without having to give feedback, you can try out the Professional or Enterprise plan, starting at $69/month.
If you need more advanced features, for example when you are a business consultant who wants to automate their advice by generating personalized advice reports, the ReportR plan will be your go-to solution. This is the one that I tried.
Pointerpro even allows you to build an entire business model with their tool. The DistributR plan lets you monetize your ready-made assessments and reports most effectively. It’s based on the Distribution Portal component that I mentioned earlier. Really cool!
I was really happy to see how quickly my questions were answered. The help guide is very intuitive, with a lot of visuals.
And when the help guide didn’t answer my exact question, I still had the option to chat with support. They are really nice, helpful people who take the time to listen. No matter how complex my questions were.
I also had a great onboarding experience. The demo from the Sales team made it a lot clearer what the tool can do. When you sign up, you get a detailed, personal onboarding session where you can ask questions live, which is a huge advantage compared to sending emails back and forth.
They also care about your project results. They check in with you from time to time to see if everything is going according to plan. If not, they help you to steer by where it’s necessary.
So the customer support here is very personal and engaged.
There aren’t really any one-on-one alternatives to Pointerpro. I don’t know of any other all-in-one solution of an online questionnaire builder that generates personalized advice reports automatically, allows you to aggregate responses, distribute/monetize assessments and create advanced visual dashboards within the same platform.
If you’re looking for a user-friendly survey builder to collect data you want to analyze, you can consider using Typeform, Jotform or SurveyMonkey. If your research takes on more academic proportions, and you’re in need of something very sophisticated, Qualtrics is a well-known versatile tool. It’s mostly used by large enterprises as an experience management platform to gauge customer, employee, brand, and product experiences.
If all you’ll ever do is publish a customer sign-up form on your website, or streamline an internal workflow at your company—like getting people registered for the next corporate event—a very simple online form builder like Jotform will probably do the trick.
With the right integrations, you can combine most of these tools with a reporting solution. But none of them have all the features in one tool, like Pointerpro. That’s what makes them unique.
Pointerpro offers a large number of functionalities that allow for in-depth analysis, complex data processing, fancy reporting and even monetization and distribution of assessment services. Compared to other survey creators, questionnaire builders, and assessment tools, it’s a more comprehensive solution.
The most important pros and cons, if you asked me?
Pros:
Cons:
I see a lot of applicable situations where Pointerpro is the optimal solution: start-ups, scale-ups, agencies, consultants, coaches—basically, any business that offers valuable and sophisticated advice, and wants to grow without directly needing to expand their payroll.
It can also be a valuable tool for marketers for lead generation. HR professionals who regularly assess candidates or employees can use this tool to do so efficiently without the loss of a personal touch and added value. And I could still go on for a while.
If any of these situations resonate with you and you need a versatile solution with personal, human support, I would definitely take a look at Pointerpro.
Irina is a Founder at ONSAAS, Growth Lead at Aura, and a SaaS marketing consultant. She helps companies to grow their revenue with SEO and inbound marketing. In her spare time, Irina entertains her cat Persie and collects airline miles.
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