CAPABILITIES

Here is a "bird's eye" view of ATHENA's overall capabilities (for an in depth view of ATHENA's features, please go to the "Features and Comparisons" Section):

Shopper Recruitment

ATHENA's online shopper registration allows for extremely rapid recruitment, and can be configured to capture any shopper demographics your company needs for reporting or screening purposes. It encrypts all transmissions of personal data to ensure proper data security.

Automated Scheduling

ATHENA's Autoscheduler is designed to create, advertise, and assign extremely large numbers of shops with only a few clicks.

Shoppers are pre-screened according to your criteria for each shop (i.e. age, gender) and receive direct emails with shops in their area.

Statistics for each shopper (quality rating, last shop, number of recent shops) are displayed during the assignment phase, allowing your schedulers to make rapidly decide on the best shopper for any given shop.

Upon assignment, shoppers are automatically emailed all necessary information to perform their shop (instructions, web site address, login info, shop location, shop date)

Bulk Electronic Mailing System (BEMS)

ATHENA's proprietary B.E.M.S. servers are each capable of mailing over 10,000 emails an hour, allowing you to reach shoppers almost instantly with newly available shops or company announcements. No matter the size of your shopper database, BEMS can reach your shoppers rapidly, allowing you to fill shops within the tightest of deadlines.

Job Board

Your company can opt to post any shops to your private Job Board, where your shoppers can enter their zip code and a distance to search for all shops within their area.

Powerful Survey and Scoring options

With over 15 question types, text size and color formatting, conditional question logic, company logos and European units, ATHENA has immense flexibility for creating your clients' forms. Furthermore, ATHENA allows for sectional scoring, subsectional scoring and cross sectional scoring. If your clients require unusual scoring systems on their forms, our custom scoring feature can implement even the most complex scoring logic.

Online Survey Collection

Your shoppers will fill out their surveys online, allowing data to be entered directly into the database (no re-keying in surveys, no faxes, no phone calls). ATHENA™ also screens shopper surveys for missing answers or insufficient answers and immediately highlights the problem areas to shoppers.

Survey Review/Edit

ATHENA supports multiple levels of review for those situations that require two or more reviews, and includes powerful tools such as spell checking and grammar checking in multiple languages.

Report Distribution

Multiple tools are at your staff' disposal for distributing survey results to your client. Automated emails can notify managers when a new shop is ready for viewing. Bulk Distribution tools can email every manager a personalized list of instant links to online reports. Finally, ATHENA's remarkable PDF constructor engine can compile thousands of reports into one PDF "book", allowing your clients to print a batch of surveys in one pass.

Shopper Management

ATHENA streamlines the arduous task of managing your shoppers by giving them tools to manage their own accounts, by tracking their performance on previous shops, and keeping a log of your reviewer's comments. Specialized exports allow to track which shoppers require 1099 tax forms each year.

Shopper Payment

Shopper expenses are calculated automatically and are capped at your defined spending limits. ATHENA's billing system allows you to track and export paid shops and notifies shoppers which payments have been made and which are pending. ATHENA™ has integrated Paypal functions that allow you to consolidate and process thousands of shopper payments in minutes.

For those situations where the surveys are not pre-scheduled, ATHENA now offers an on-demand mode to create shops "on-the-fly". This mode enables ATHENA™ technology to be used for applications such as marketing research surveys and customer response forms.

ATHENA surveys can now be entered into Palm PDA devices and then uploaded into your online ATHENA database. With the transportability of handheld devices, ATHENA can now be used at the point of purchase by mystery shoppers or by the actual customers themselves

ATHENA surveys can now be put into Excel format, allowing shoppers to enter data into their laptops from remote sites where internet connectivity is not available (data can then be exported into your online ATHENA database). This offline capability is useful for extremely long surveys or hospitality situations which span several days.

ATHENA technology can be utilized for online testing applications. Our user authentication systems ensure secure individual access an our pre-built reports allow for in-depth item analysis.

Online web polls can be constructed with ATHENA™ technology, from the simplest public opinion polls to sophisticated projects.