Yes, No, and Somewhat Likely
Survey the world with Web polls.
Published October 2007
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BUY A REPRINTThere was a time when you practically had to hire a scientist to research the market for a product or service. These days, you can choose among dozens of online tools for polling customers, employees, and complete strangers. Options range from free services that let you create quick polls for learning about visitors or entertaining them with results, to pricey "feedback management" systems that can analyze years of responses, storing gigabytes of survey results as securely as if the information were valuable company financial data. Which, in a way, it is. Most new survey tools are versatile and Web-based and require no software installation. Here are some ways companies are using them.
Assembling quick focus groups
Zoomerang zPro and Zoomerang Sample
The zPro software is for designing Web-based surveys and viewing results. Zoomerang Sample sends a survey to a portion of its 2.5 million-member online panel.
In action: In 2004, former advertising exec Patrick Raymond got the brainstorm for a shower curtain-rod attachment that created more elbow room in a shower by pushing the curtain out slightly. He needed affordable market research to see if anyone else cared. In 2005 and 2006, Raymond had Zoomerang send two 20-question surveys, which he designed himself using the zPro software, to samples of U.S. adults who had a shower curtain in their main bathrooms. He got about 400 responses to each and paid $5,000 total.
"The survey results blew me away," he says. Forty-three percent of respondents said their shower curtains crowd them; 28 percent said they probably or definitely would buy a product like the one he proposed. The numbers made it into his business plan, with which he raised about $500,000. The data also helped convince an industrial design firm that Raymond was worth taking on as a customer. The $19.99 ShowerBow started selling this year. One area in which the research hasn't helped a lot has been in winning retail distribution, Raymond says (though ShowerBow is sold at Amazon.com). And, although Zoomerang offers a service in which it will help devise a survey, users are on their own in making sense of survey results.
Pricing: $599 a year (or $199 for three months) for unlimited use of the survey software. $500 and up per survey for use of Zoomerang's panel. (Reaching more targeted groups costs more.)
Monitoring customer satisfaction
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is Web-based software for creating, administering, and viewing results of online surveys.
In action: Queensboro Shirt, a $12 million seller of custom-embroidered shirts, caters to small-business buyers whose average order is under $200. It never had salespeople dedicated to particular customers. But president and founder Fred Meyers always liked to have the company give clients follow-up calls asking about their satisfaction. As the business grew, and online sales took off, it became difficult to call everyone personally. So Meyers had his website programmers weave a connection to SurveyMonkey's polling software into the order processing system.
Now, in addition to receiving automated order and shipping confirmations, each Queensboro customer receives an e-mail--scheduled to arrive a day after the product does--with a link to a 10-question customer satisfaction survey. Buyers are asked questions that rate their happiness with things like product quality and delivery speed. Queensboro did some extra programming to convert the ratings into a sort of "grade point average" for each metric of satisfaction. The company's managers use the scores to guide their operational decisions. For example, when Queensboro noticed scores for shipment speed lagging, the company put more resources into delivering products within 10 days. "It's like bringing customers to the conference table," says Meyers.
Pricing: $200 per year for unlimited use or $19.95 a month for 1,000 survey responses per month
