SurveySparrow: A New Way To Make Surveys Effective And Engaging

We all encounter surveys at every walk of life in recent times. From your employer to your service provider, everyone wants to get meaningful feedback from you and work on the data. But the problem with surveys is that they are mostly monotonous and uninteresting. The intended respondents tend to largely ignore surveys and move on. A Kochi and US based Indian startup is now trying to change all that and make surveys fresh and interesting.

SurveySparrow was found by Freshdesk veteran Shihab Muhammed and a Zoho engineer Subin Sebastian in March 2017. With offices in Kochi & Palo Alto, the company launched its flagship product SurveySparrow, an online survey platform, in October of the same year.

SurveySparrow is the world’s first survey software to offer both a conversational and form-like output, increasing the survey completion rate by 40%. With Conversational User Interface (CUI), SurveySparrow let users create and share highly engaging, mobile-first surveys that offer a chat-like experience. It has a built-in automation that allows organizations to manage customer experience surveys, employee pulse surveys and market feedback surveys. It serves as a platform for organizations to arrive at meaningful business decisions based on the feedback received. SurveySparrow provides a continuous improvement platform, the first of its kind to close the feedback loop instead of collecting feedback and then forgetting about it. The company also provides customers with best-in-class experience with offline feedback collection and NPS survey solutions.

The founders believe that customer experience is a huge market with “aging” giants and a big global opportunity. The global online survey software market is valued at US$4.065 billion and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.25% to reach a market size of US$6.929 billion by the year 2022. The startup plans to take on its competitors with its unique spin on UI, moving surveys away from antiquated forms to conversations. The company is planning to hire extensively across engineering, product development, marketing, and inside sales in the coming months.

Since its launch, SurveySparrow has conducted over 20000 surveys so far and over 8000 customers in 108 countries including DiDi, PaySafe, FedEx, Deloitte Digital, SAP, and Siemens. The startup is on target to clock more than 20,000 customers by the end of 2019.

Like I said above, the software approach to surveys that SurveySparrow uses is very new and refreshing. The core idea is that people like conversations. As human beings, we are more responsive to interactive discussions and the interest grows when there is a common thread that is running right through the whole discussion. The team has ensured that the software is both a good listener and a responder. In many ways like a human talking to you. Shihab told us that there are clients who have managed to build a fully functional chatbot with the software that helps people when they are stressed at work. This acts like the first level of counseling too. This is a marked departure from the very boring and plain survey systems that exist today.

The founders also stated that SurveySparrow’s software sees a completion rate of 40 percent. This is a HUGE number given the competition. This year, the team plans to expand aggressively in terms of hiring for key positions and expanding the marketing efforts.

I gave the cloud-based software a whirl and found that it had the following advantages over other alternatives

1. Mobile-First Approach
2. Form-Factor free survey development
3. Conversational and response-driven surveys
4. Pleasing design aesthetics
5. Customizable survey domain names for branding purposes

The five points above may seem like simple things, but in the context of enterprises running surveys, these are big plus points.

The startup has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Prime Venture Partners. Like all other companies in the Prime Portfolio, this startup is solving an important problem and is scaleable and stable by default. It will be interesting to see what the future hold for this promising startup.