Customer Story
How ColorWorks built a more scalable assessment experience with Brilliant Assessments
“Brilliant Assessments is a great platform, and it’s a great platform that’s supported by an even better team.”
– Jessica Duquette, The ColorWorks Group
About Colorworks
The ColorWorks Group was founded in 2021 and works with nonprofits, schools and professional teams, with a growing focus on corporate clients who want to improve communication and team dynamics.
Their assessment is based on a four-color personality framework rooted in DISC and the four temperaments. It gives people a simple way to understand how they communicate, behave, and respond to others.
“We're using a timeless framework to apply to today's workplace drama and tensions.”
“We call it relational intelligence. We're helping people improve their communication by understanding their wiring and the wiring of everybody else so that we can work better together.”
– Jessica Duquette, The ColorWorks Group
The assessment behind the work
The ColorWorks assessment helps people understand their “wiring” across four colors: red, yellow, green and blue. Each color gives people a simple way to understand how they communicate, make decisions, respond under pressure and show up in relationships.
As Jessica explains it through her own experience as someone with strong red wiring, “Everything to me is urgent. I use the phrase ‘hurry up’ a hundred times a day. I operate at such a fast pace. I speak in bullets. I'm a very quick decider.”
The assessment gave her a label for something she already recognized in herself. It also helped her see how that same wiring might feel to other people. She continues, “What I could not have told you is how other people perceive me. I didn't understand that there were three other types of people that maybe didn't think so highly of all of my red qualities.”
That external self-awareness is a big part of the ColorWorks approach. The report helps people understand themselves, then the training helps them understand what those results mean in real relationships, teams and workplaces.
“That's been the biggest learning for me: having external self-awareness of what it is like to be on the other side of me, both at home and at work.”
– Jessica Duquette, The ColorWorks Group
Why ColorWorks moved on from Pointerpro
ColorWorks had used Pointerpro for a long time, and it had supported the earlier version of their assessment. As the business moved further into corporate and team-based work, the setup became harder to manage. ColorWorks was no longer selling mostly individual assessments. They were selling more bulk assessments to companies, with managers who needed to issue assessments, manage groups and keep track of activity.
“Our business model had started changing. Instead of just selling a lot of individual assessments, because we had moved more into a corporate space, we were selling more bulk assessments.” That left too much of the admin sitting with the ColorWorks team.
“What was happening was we were doing it manually and then getting inundated with requests from companies saying, ‘How many do I have left?’ ‘Can you send this person?’ ‘Can I see the score?’”
The setup with Pointerpro had also become difficult to maintain. Even small changes felt risky because the assessment was so complicated behind the scenes. For a growing B2B assessment business, it was time for a platform that could support the way ColorWorks now works with teams.
“It just was not scalable.”
– Jessica Duquette, The ColorWorks Group
Building more context into the assessment
ColorWorks didn’t want to copy the old assessment into a new platform. They wanted to make it more useful.
Their previous assessment was simple: 40 questions, mostly based on choosing the adjective that best described the respondent. Over time, Jessica and the team noticed that people often needed more room to answer properly.
“People would say, ‘Well, I'm this when I'm at work, but when I'm at home, I would describe myself as this.’”
With Brilliant Assessments, ColorWorks could build more context into the experience. The assessment could look at how people behave at work, at home, in parenting, and, for teachers, in the classroom.
“We really wanted to broaden the assessment and have some more contextual examples, so that we were measuring people's behavior at work, at home, in parenting, and in the case of our teachers, in the classroom.”
That extra context has made the reporting more useful and helped ColorWorks shape the training around what people are actually experiencing.
“We really wanted to broaden the assessment and have some more contextual examples, so that we were measuring people's behavior at work, at home, in parenting, and in the case of our teachers, in the classroom.”
– Jessica Duquette, The ColorWorks Group
Less admin, more room to grow
As ColorWorks began selling more assessments to companies, the admin around group use needed to be easier.
With Brilliant Assessments, company managers can be given access to set up groups, add people and manage more of the process themselves. That has taken pressure off the ColorWorks team, especially when clients are running assessments at scale.
“It's been really great to delegate a lot of that administration to the company manager as opposed to us having to do it ourselves.”
Jessica says that shift has made the service easier to support.
“The burden of customer service has been lifted to some degree off of us and is now being delegated to the customer. That has been really great.”
It has also given ColorWorks more space to develop the assessment experience. The Team Insights Report, built with support from Molly, their Customer Success Manager, did not exist in their old setup. Now Jessica can see more ways to connect assessment results with training, reporting and other ColorWorks resources.
“I do feel a lot more creative freedom to be like, ‘Hey, what else could we do? We could also do this.’”
– Jessica Duquette, The ColorWorks Group
Support that feels like part of the team
A big part of the move to Brilliant Assessments was the support ColorWorks received from Molly, their Customer Success Manager.
ColorWorks had the ideas and the expertise, but they did not want to become technical platform specialists just to keep improving their assessment products.
“We are not super technical people, and it's been a gift to have that kind of customer service and support.”
For Jessica, the value was being able to explain what she wanted to create and work with someone who could turn that into something practical inside Brilliant Assessments.
“What's been great is I can be like, ‘Molly, here's what I'm trying to do,’ and she's like, ‘Oh,’ and she just does it. I'm like, ‘Okay, that's amazing.’”
“We are not super technical people, and it's been a gift to have that kind of customer service and support.”
– Jessica Duquette, The ColorWorks Group
Why ColorWorks recommends Brilliant Assessments
For ColorWorks, Brilliant Assessments now handles the parts of the assessment experience that had started to slow them down: group administration, flexible reporting, team-level insight and room to keep building new products around their content.
It has also given Jessica access to support from Molly, their Customer Success Manager, without needing to hire that technical expertise in-house.
ColorWorks can bring an idea to Brilliant Assessments and get help turning it into something that works.
Asked who she would recommend Brilliant Assessments to, Jessica was clear:
“I would say anybody that has content that lends itself well to that interactive experience where people are self-learning. Brilliant Assessments is a great platform, that's supported by an even better team.”
– Jessica Duquette, The ColorWorks Group
Start writing your success story
Ready to see results like our Brilliant customers have? Get in touch and tell us more about your assessment ambitions, or try a demo assessment for yourself.