UK's Benchpoint named "Measurement Product of the Year in the USA

A small UK start-up company, Benchpoint, has won a US award for the best communications measurement product introduced in 2004. Benchpoint started off as a tool to measure employee opinions, but in reality it can help any management to measure and manage the soft issues which define competitive advantage. The award is from KD Paine & Partners, publishers of the "Measurement Standard", a portal for PR professionals

London, England (PRWEB) February 17, 2005 -- Benchpoint, the UK web polling and measurement business created by senior PR consultant Richard Gaunt, has been named as the "Best New Measurement Product of 2004". The award comes from the US-based "Measurement Standard", published by KD Paine & Partners, the measurement consultancy, which also organises the annual "Measurement Summit" conference.

Benchpoint was launched in the third quarter of 2004. It is a fully-integrated, multi-lingual, web polling system with very advanced features, including fully analysed results in real time.

The award states: "The simplest way to describe Benchpoint is SurveyMonkey* on steroids", but it's more like SurveyMonkey with an internal research department built in. Because the folks at Benchpoint are experts in research, and have designed their product specifically for communications professionals".

Benchpoint was originally conceived as an application for employee and customer surveys in the corporate sector, but it has powerful potential as a robust system for measuring virtually anything -- HR, training and development issues, supplier confidence, shareholder opinion, environmental and safety audits, membership issues etc.

Benchpoint is the brainchild of Richard Gaunt, a PR practitioner for over 30 years, and a devoted user of research from the outset. He has held senior jobs in companies like Sainsbury's and Alcan, and was also a founder of PR consultancy Gaunt Spreckley Williams (now Spreckley Partners) in the 1980s.

The technical brains behind Benchpoint are a talented team from application developers HurstPark Ltd.

Benchpoint carried out the first worldwide survey of the PR profession on best measurement practice last summer. The survey attracted over 1000 responses and the results were presented at The Measurement Summit, held on the campus of the University of New Hampshire, USA, last September.

Other Benchpoint projects include "values and behaviours" surveys for an international engineering group, a pan-European audit of sales force skills, knowledge and training needs for a Japanese company, and a survey on business confidence and job satisfaction for an interim management consultancy.

Unlike many other on line surveys, Benchpoint has a specialist team to configure the system and provide client service. A self-service option is also available.

Said Richard Gaunt: The system we have created has more power and flexibility than anything else currently available. We have some rigorous tools which can illuminate and speed up decision making and cut swathes through bureaucracies, which should (but often doesnt) make us popular."

Benchpoint is currently running two public surveys: London Parking Survey" shadows an official enquiry by the Greater London Assembly - www.benchpoint.com/parking.

The second, aimed at Manchester United fans, tracks reactions to the prospect of a takeover of the club by Malcolm Glazer - www.Benchpoint.com/MU.

*SurveyMonkey" is a popular DIY internet survey package

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Further information:

Richard Gaunt

CEO

Benchpoint Ltd

London W4 3AP

England

Tel +44 (0)77 11 69 19 28

gaunt@benchpoint.com

www.Benchpoint.com

More web resources -Downloads/websites:

Measurement Summit report on PR Measurement (2Mb): http://www.benchpoint.com/measurement/report.pdf

Benchpoint brochure: http://www.benchpoint.com/images/BenchpointBrochureEN.pdf

High-resolution photograph of Richard Gaunt: http://www.benchpoint.com/images/RichardGaunt.jpg

More news stories about Benchpoint: http://www.benchpoint.com/news.aspx

About HurstPark Ltd, Benchpoint's development partners: http://www.hurstpark.net/ More on KD Paine & Partners and the "Measurement Standard": http://www.measuresofsuccess.com/

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