What experience do you have with surveymonkey or other survey sites on line?

Hi Chad,

Disclosure: I am currently contracting with SurveyGizmo and prior to that I was contracting with Zoomerang. I am a freelance research and marketing professional and have been creating surveys for over 20 years so I have used them all over the years based on my client's specific needs. Each provider offers pretty much the same basic features with there being a few differences offered by each so it really depends on what features you must have. Here is a free account features comparison chart between SurveyGizmo SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang put together by Relevant Insights that may be helpful: http://www.relevantinsights.com/free-online-survey-tools/ and here is a SurveyGizmo features by account type list: http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-features/
There are lots of tips and suggestions posted on the SurveyGizmo blog http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/ that you might want to consider reviewing regardless of the provider you choose to help ensure a positive survey experience, my number one tip is to pre-test your survey with several people before deploying to help catch anything you might have missed. You can view user feedback under our twitter favorites http://twitter.com/SurveyGizmo/favorites and please feel free to email me directly with any questions: marketing@sgizmo.com
~Donna

We've used QuestionPro for years, because at the time we chose them, they seemed to have more to offer for the money than Survey Monkey.

We've also found a way to integrate QP with our helpdesk system so that we could survey end users after each ticket was completed. They would get an email indicating that the ticket was completed and there is a survey link at the bottom of the email message. We were able to auto-populate the general fields that we wanted such as client name, tech name, ticket number, etc. so that all that had to do was focus on grading us. It has worked out great.

Now that we are planning to implement Net Promoter Score-based customer experience program, I am reevaluating these tools again, so I will definitely keep an eye on this thread.

(I have a free Survey Monkey account that I still use infrequently for short, easy surveys for some organizations that I am apart of - great product).

From my experience, it's not so much the software as the survey itself. Poorly planned and executed surveys yield worthless data, regardless of the software used.

Survey's meant to distort a picture or reap as pre-desired result will do just that, but is the survey valid?

Chad,

I think Wayne hits a key point in saying that the effectiveness of the survey depends more on the design of the survey than on the software per say. However, having used a few different survey software providers, I would say the survey tool is important because it's what defines your user (respondents') experience. As much as survey softwares claim to offer 'full brand control,' the reality is the survey experience you provide for your respondents depends on the specific software's feature set, integration capabilities, and template (aesthetic) options. Each of these components (and others) are critical as they can directly impact the survey's incident rate and time-frame... and consequentially the amount of resources required for a successful study.

Having used a few different survey platforms (and demoed/ researched many others), I find it's not so much who offers the best platform, it's really more who offers the best platform for the types of studies you're trying to run. All softwares can ask basic multiple choice or fill in questions, but not all have what's called 'skip logic' (the ability to route respondents to specific questions based on previous specific answers) for instance. As I mentioned above, one way to think about what you capabilities you need vs. what you don't need is by thinking in terms of your user or respondent. What seems confusing? Tedious? Redundant? What seems compelling and exciting? What feels 'fun' for the user? From a researcher perspective, are you looking for simple quantitative statistics, or more nuance, more qualitative feedback, more angles to cover? I find many limitations to Zoomerang, my current provider, mostly because if I want to design a question type, I can't. There have been a number of small features I'd like to be able to provide my respondents (like a % complete bar for example) that Zoomerang doesn't offer... For me, flexibility is important. Particularly important for an online survey, as it is my belief that a dynamic experience (with little redundancy and varying question types) is what keeps respondents engaged so they actually complete the survey.

All things considered, most of the online survey providers will likely be able to handle any basic data collection needs. My best advice is to try a few on for size: take some demos, and even sign up for their free option. Run a simple survey on a small group of users and get their feedback. It's a simple, free, and great way to get a basic understanding of what the software can and cannot do.

Good luck!

Hi Chad,
I used Survey Monkey as part of research for my MBA. It was a few years ago now however I found it very easy to use and it enabled me to quickly generate reports on the data.

Whilst I don't have experience of using other on line survey tools I can say that it worked fine for me.

Andy.