Survey Software

Your business needs to reach out to customers to know how satisfied they are with your products or services. You may also need to collect ideas or feedback from your employees.

Running surveys allows you to engage with your customers and employees to receive unbiased feedback and data that can be used to improve.

Whether you're a large or small organization, it’s advisable to invest in survey software instead of collecting data manually. The software helps automate the process of creating surveys, communicating with and collecting data from respondents, and analyzing the results.

We’ve prepared this guide to help you select the right survey tool for your business.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is survey software?

• What are the typical features of survey software? 

• Who uses survey software?

• What are the potential issues with survey software?

• What are the trends in survey software?

• What is the cost of survey software?

• How do small and midsize businesses use survey software?

What is survey software?

Survey software is an application that is used to collect data for conducting market research, measuring customer satisfaction, and collecting employee feedback. It allows users to design questionnaires, send them to relevant audiences, and analyze the collected data to gauge performance and make improvements.

Survey tools provide a range of functionalities that include sample selection; data collection; data analysis; and data representation using bar graphs, line graphs, and cross-tab reports.

Online survey software allows users to conduct surveys, questionnaires, and polls by sending survey links via email or social media or by embedding the links on websites.

Find out more about how you can make your business more customer-centric.

What are the typical features of survey software?

Understanding the common features of survey software will help you shortlist products that match your organization’s needs. Here are some common features of a survey tool:

• Multichannel distribution: Reach out to customers and increase the response rate by sharing your survey link through multiple channels, including websites, social media, email, and text messages.

• Reporting/analytics: Export survey results to analyze data and derive actionable insights. Use an online dashboard to track survey responses and create comparison and trend reports.

• Survey builder: Create an online survey and share its link with your target audiences. 

• Email marketing: Send surveys via email campaigns. Embed the surveys in your emails so respondents can answer the questions directly via email.

• Skipping logic and branching: Create a custom path for a survey based on the respondent’s answers. This survey logic allows respondents to skip one or more questions and jump to a different question, page, or survey.

• Randomization: Display survey questions in random order. You can also lock certain questions in a specific position or hide specific questions.

• URL customization: Create customized URLs for your survey respondents. 

Key questions to ask a survey software vendor before you buy: 

• What are the common features of your survey app?

• Are there any special or additional features you provide in your survey tool?

Who uses survey software?

Survey software is commonly used by the following businesses:

• Research firms: Surveys are the most commonly used research tool, and survey software helps researchers analyze and draw meaningful conclusions from their research projects. It assists research firms in obtaining a large number of responses, allowing them to work with and analyze volumes of data. 

• Human resources departments: HR departments of organizations use online surveys to understand employees’ attitudes, feedback, motivation, and satisfaction. They design questionnaires and polls to identify improvement areas at the workplace. Such surveys help connect employees’ roles, work, and performances to their companies’ business goals.

• Marketing teams: Customer experience is the key to sustainable business growth. To create a remarkable customer experience, marketers need to measure audience reaction to the content, ads, and campaigns they produce. With the help of an online survey tool, marketers can perform market research to identify decision-making triggers, understand customer needs, study purchase patterns, and discover new trends and pain points. 

• Product teams: Survey software allows product teams to gather customer feedback. With the help of surveys, product teams can discover how people feel about a product’s features, identify use cases, and compare their products to their competitors. These insights help identify improvements, add functionality, and create new solutions to address customers’ challenges.

Key questions to ask a survey software vendor before you buy: 

• What makes your survey software a fit for my role or department?

• Which teams can use your survey software?

What are the potential issues with survey software?

Here are some issues you may face when using a survey platform:

• Security issues: When you collect survey responses, you collect respondents’ personal information, and it’s your responsibility to keep this data safe. If survey data falls into the wrong hands, your business can be penalized by the government, and you’ll end up losing your customers’ trust. Choose a product that complies with data privacy and security regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Also, look for security features such as single sign-on (SSO) and encryption to protect your survey data from unauthorized access.

• Integration issues: Lack of integration with your existing software apps (e.g, email marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence software), your website, or your social media accounts will make it difficult to share data with the survey software. Integration with:

  • CRM software will let you export customers’ contact details, purchase history, and interactions for your survey.

  • Email marketing software will allow you to embed your survey links and send mass emails to your customers.

  • Business intelligence software will allow you to export your survey data into the program to create dashboards and interactive reports in real time.

Take into consideration all the apps your organization uses currently or is planning to use in the future, and choose a survey tool that provides bidirectional integration. This will help create and update data in any system as well as save you from paying extra for additional integrations in the future.

Key questions to ask a survey software vendor before you buy: 

• Which security measures do you follow? Does your product comply with HIPAA and other state regulations? 

• What are the integration capabilities of your tool? Will your tool integrate with the current systems in my organization?

• How does your tool align with my business goals?

What are the trends in survey software?

Vendors are continuously upgrading their software solutions with the latest technology to help users create more personalized surveys and perform advanced analysis of the collected data. In this section, we discuss the latest trends in the online survey software market.

• Increasing use of chatbot-based surveys. Unlike traditional surveys that consist of a long list of questions presented to respondents all at once, chatbots send short messages that respondents can answer one at a time. They help make surveys more interactive by providing a conversational interface and even offering respondents additional information, if required, about the questions. These capabilities help improve the response rate, get more meaningful data, and increase respondents' engagement. 

• Growing adoption of social media surveys. Social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and Twitter have become a great place for survey interactions. Social media surveys help identify trends and hot topics that customers are interested in. They can be used for market research, as they provide real-time data about the current interests of target audiences. Such surveys are also a good way to collect customers’ demographic information and measure customer experience by engaging with them in real time.

• Use of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven survey text analysis. AI technology in survey software can help categorize response data based on the most common words and phrases used, providing the ability to obtain insights within a matter of hours. For example, AI-driven text analysis in apps such as SurveyMonkey provides insights by automatically classifying text responses and displaying an aggregate view of respondent sentiment, simplifying the analysis of unstructured response data.

Key questions to ask a survey software vendor before you buy: 

• Which new technologies are you planning to incorporate into your survey platform?

• In which ways are you planning to implement technologies such as AI and machine learning in your survey software?

What is the cost of survey software?

Pricing for online survey software varies depending on the number of users or responses. Many vendors offer free survey solutions, but most products on the market are priced on a “per month” basis and can be broken down into three tiers based on their starting price: 

Price ranges*:

• $7 - $14 

• $14 - $22 

• $22+

These ranges summarize pricing for the base plans of most products. An enterprise or premium product that is priced higher may include additional features such as unlimited users, unlimited surveys, password protection, multilingual survey, advanced integration, and payment acceptance.

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offering found on vendor websites on August 27, 2021. These ranges correspond to the 25th, 75th, and 100th percentile of the pricing information gathered from vendor websites of sample products and exclude freemium plans.

With this in mind, you may come across additional charges such as:

• Implementation cost: Cost associated with consultants, software customization, data migration, and integration.

• Additional features/add-ons: Cost associated with advanced features such as advanced security management, payment acceptance, custom branding, and SSO.

• Customer support cost: Cost associated with priority support services.

• Maintenance cost: Cost related to software upgrades, patches, and updates.

Check these prices before committing to any survey software vendor.

Key questions to ask a survey software vendor before you buy: 

• What is the pricing model of your product? 

• Besides the subscription fee, what other costs are involved if I decide to purchase?

• Do you offer a free plan, free trial, or demo? 

How do small and midsize businesses use survey software?

Unlike large enterprises, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) have a handful of customers. To grow their business, SMBs need to focus more on customer needs, which can be achieved with effective market and customer research. By using an online survey tool, SMBs can uncover new opportunities to improve customer retention. For example, they can ask website visitors a few questions about their site or product to understand customer needs and challenges. 

SMBs, especially newer ones, can reap many benefits by investing in a survey software tool. The software can help such businesses reach out to their audiences, allowing them to track customer loyalty and satisfaction. SMBs can also use the software to track employees’ attitudes, feedback, motivation, and satisfaction for developing new workplace strategies or improving the ones already in place.

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