More posts from derek

Stuff We Like: iPhone Survey & Data Collection App

This is one of the coolest integrations with the SurveyGizmo API we have seen in a very long time. The guys over at SurveyDeck have integrated with SurveyGizmo to create a great new way of taking surveys – through an iPhone App.

So what is SurveyDeck?

SurveyDeck allows SurveyGizmo users to download their surveys onto an iPhone and then collect responses anywhere — even where there’s no 3G or Wifi connection! These responses are then synced with SurveyGizmo once you have an internet connection and appear as usual in the response list. It basically allows you to do offline surveys.

Let me repeat that. You can collect survey data on the iPhone/iPod Touch even when you don’t have network connectivity!

Not that AT&T ever has network problems…

We see SurveyDeck being used when you need to gather information directly on-site without an internet connection, when you’re doing in store customer satisfaction surveys, and when interviewing. We hear the iPhone app is even being used at a school for students’ fieldwork – the whole class has either iPhones or iPod Touches!

SurveyDeck is extremely easy to use and a great offline survey tool. They offer online help to get you going, an index of questions to let you jump to a particular question in a survey, and a slick presentation. SurveyDeck is owned and designed by our partner Human Factors Solutions.

Big Apple Meetup a Big Success

Last Thursday I hosted a meetup of SurveyGizmo users In the New York metropolitan area. In a break with recent tradition, we did this one as a happy hour instead of lunch.

The topics flowed easily, and we didn’t even need the alcohol to lubricate the discussion. ;)

• Lots of questions about our upcoming new reporting system
• Very positive feedback about application speed since we migrated to a new server farm
• Interesting stories of how some of our clients are using the API
• Shoutouts to our always-awesome customer support team

There was also a lot of cross-discussion about everyone’s respective jobs and research projects. It’s always so interesting to hear about the various research areas people use SurveyGizmo for, and it gives us a great feeling to know that we’re helping them get the data they need to make good decisions.

We held the meetup at Vintage, a hip little bar in Midtown. It has a cozy area in the rear with couches and chairs, isn’t too loud and has a huge selection of martinis.

Web 2.0 is the Sizzle, but Customer Service is the Steak

Last week TechCrunch ran an excellent post about customer service by Andrew Scott. In it he discusses the generally dismal levels of customer service we’ve all unfortunately come to expect, and the fact that many Web 2.0 companies are no different from the rest of the pack.

It brought to mind the book Peak, which we’ve been reading as part of our book club. We first heard about the book at Tony Hsieh’s keynote at South by Southwest, in which he explained how exceptional customer service enables Zappos to sell a billion dollars worth of shoes every year.

We’ve always been very customer-centric at SurveyGizmo. Heck, as a bootstrapped company with no outside funding, we had to be because it’s been very clear from day one who really pays our bills. Practically every employee started out doing some degree of customer support, and we now have a program in place where we rotate all developers through customer service shifts once per month. In our hiring we look for people who are naturally tech savvy, friendly and helpful. (Check out the job application we have all potential employees fill out before we look at their resume.)

But it’s not as simple as that. We (and particularly co-founder Scott McDaniel) spend a lot of time in training, mentoring and motivating our support team. It’s not just knowing the software. It’s the little things like having a friendly tone of voice, being patient when a customer has trouble understanding a particular concept, and forthrightly acknowledging and fixing bugs when customers stumble across them. And we try to empower our support reps to, first and foremost, do the right thing. This shows up in the many testimonials we’ve received about our customer service.

We track our results via (what else?) an online customer service survey and particularly track whenever someone receives a WOW! (defined as five-star ratings across the board). We review the results frequently and reward WOW! recipients with prizes and accolades. The result of this intense focus on service is, as we hoped when we set up the program, a lot of WOWs, so much so that it’s become almost routine.

Sometimes, though, customers surprise us with their gratitude. Last week for example, we were pleasantly surprised when the postman brought us this:

It came from a customer who was especially appreciative of the help we’d given him on a very complex (200+ pages!) survey. We can’t wait to throw some of these babies on our grill.

How SurveyGizmo Does Employee Profit Sharing

Incentives are an important part of anything you do in business, and employee profit sharing is an obvious example. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about our profit sharing plan and struck on something that seems to be working for both employees and customers. We thought we’d share it with the world.

We asked ourselves, what kind of outcome do we want for the company overall? The obvious answer is revenues and profits, but we took it down a level and looked at the key drivers of those metrics. The short answer: customers, but more specifically happy customers.

So that led us to decide that our profit sharing program should have five key features:

1. Incent employees to grow the customer base
2. Incent them equally to keep existing customers happy
3. Incent them to help the organization run efficiently
4. Be transparent and engender teamwork
5. Reward should be on-going and immediate

Growing the customer base, while satisfying existing customers

Second, we asked ourselves what we value as customers of other companies. Is it good service? An awesome product? All of the above? Obviously, it varies, but we felt that for a service like ours, both product and customer service are critical to success. The thing we valued least was salesmanship. So that means at a core level we value not just making the sale, but building a great product, and offering fantastic support to go along with it.

Each role inside SurveyGizmo contributes to the whole and we wanted to respect that. Our sales people aren’t commissioned and the wall between support and sales is a pretty small one — easily jumped over. It’s fun explaining this when we hire to either side. We wanted a plan that got everyone involved.

Efficient and Team Oriented

Finally, one of our core values is teamwork. As a small company we need to pull together and pitch-in without regard for who gets the credit. So we wanted our profit sharing plan to reward all employees, not just star performers. Based on those principles, co-founder Scott McDaniel came up with a simple, yet effective structure. So simple we can say it in one sentence. Here it is:

For every active customer we have at the end of every month, we place $2 into a pool to be shared equally by all employees.

And that’s it. New employees must be with the company for 60 days before they can participate, but that’s the only string attached. There are no complicated formulas or hidden agendas. We don’t hold back until the end of the year and hand out checks disconnected from the day to day effort. And most important, we are equally incented to delight existing customers as much as we are to get new ones.

Employee Feedback

Last week at our book club meeting we asked employees to give us their feedback on the profit sharing structure and it was overwhelmingly positive. Here are some of the reasons we like it:

• It’s very simple to understand.
• It’s transparent. Our admin console keeps a running tally of the number of customers, so all employees know at a glance roughly what to expect in their next paycheck.
• It rewards retention as well as new business. A lost existing customer is just as painful, perhaps more so, than a lost new customer.
• It serves as a natural break on hiring too far ahead of growth. Every new employee decreases everyone’s percentage slightly. So if we bring on new people and don’t gross up the difference in 60 days (when the new hire’s share kicks in), it affects everyone’s share. This forces us to ask, “How will bringing this person on help us grow our customer base?”
• It’s a terrific recruiting tool, particularly in this economy.

Of course, no bonus system is perfect. For example, you could argue that this one is flawed because it has a short-term bias. But this has worked well for us, so we’ll continue to let it ride.

How do profit sharing or bonus programs work in your companies?

Tops in Online Survey Accessibility

Recently were pleased to learn that Ohio State University recently conducted a study of accessibility in online survey tools. We pride ourselves on standards-compliant web design, and we have a strong focus on usability. OSU picked up on this:

The administrator interfaces in SurveyGizmo are a model of usability. Interfaces are clean, navigation elements are easy to find, and “flow” through the creation process seemed to us more intuitive than any of the other survey tools.

The final grade on SurveyGizmo was B+, so we still have room for improvement, but we were the highest rated of those evaluated.