When DIY Surveys Become DYI Surveys

 

The problem for the future of research as a discipline isn’t so much that SurveyMonkey has made simple research more accessible, but that the people doing the research might not be very good at it. This could be, as the prostitute said looking at two lovers kissing, a great profession ruined by amateurs.

“It’s great on one hand because it shows how much passion there is to get information about customers, but if any monkey can do a survey, perhaps any monkey will. In some cases there will be no control over design, no control over the sample,” says [Brad Bortner, a Forrester Research analyst specializing in the market research industry].

 

 

Survey Monkey Feature Grid vs. Vovici

Support Model	SurveyMonkey	Vovici, Individual Edition	Vovici, Enterprise Edition
Email support	Yes	Yes	Yes
Online knowledgebase support	Yes	Yes	Yes
Phone support	No	Yes	Yes
SAS-70 Secure datacenter hosting	No	Yes	Yes

Questionnaire Design	SurveyMonkey	Vovici, Individual Edition	Vovici, Enterprise Edition
Survey responses	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Max # of Users	1 Only	1 Only	Unlimited
Brand your own thank you page	Yes	Yes	Yes
Save, copy and edit surveys	Yes	Yes	Yes
Add own logo to survey	Yes	Yes	Yes
Spell check	Yes	Yes	Yes
Basic skip logic	Yes	Yes	Yes
Advanced branching based on Boolean Logic	No	No	Yes
Screenout questions	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pre-loaded design themes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Build a mixed-type matrix/table question (ex. choose one + choose many + fillin or essay)	No	Yes	Yes
Edit question HTML directly	Basic	Advanced	Advanced
Export survey to Word	No	Yes	Yes
Import survey from Word	No	Yes	Yes
Import/export survey to XML	No	Yes	Yes
Find and replace	No	Yes	Yes
Include progress bar in survey	Yes	Yes	Yes
Rank order question type	Yes	Yes	Yes
Hidden Questions to augment response data set	No	Yes	Yes
Email Triggers based on responses	No	No	Yes
Scoring	No	No	Yes
Design from provided library of template surveys	Yes	Yes	Yes
Save questions to/Use questions from template library	No	No	Yes
Use themes from template library	Yes	Yes	Yes
Word Processor Questionnaire Design Environment	No	No	Yes
Conditional Choices - make a set of responses dependent on a previous question	No	Yes	Yes
Multiple End Page options	No	Yes	Yes
Custom URL at end of survey	Yes	Yes	Yes
Auto-next (proceed to next page automatically when possible)	No	Yes	Yes
Support for JavaScript in survey	No	Yes	Yes
In-tool side-by-side survey translation capability	No	No	Yes
XLIFF support for XML-based extract, translation and re-import	No	No	Yes
Randomize answer list	Yes	Yes	Yes
Data Piping	No	Yes	Yes
Customize text of Save, Next, Submit, Back, Reset and Jump survey buttons	Yes	Yes	Yes
Set Advanced Table Properties: column width, borders, text wrapping, color bands on odd/even rows, anchors, repeat table headings, separate N/A and DK from choice list and more	No	Yes	Yes
Page Rotation and Randomization	No	No	Yes
Hierarchical Questions	No	No	Yes
Answer required checks/Mandatory Question	Yes	Yes	Yes
Survey Mgmt, Publishing & Invitations	SurveyMonkey	Vovici, Individual Edition	Vovici, Enterprise Edition
Folder categorization of surveys	Yes	Yes	Yes
Open participation survey	Yes	Yes	Yes
Personalize email invitations	Yes	Yes	Yes
HTML email editing	Yes	Yes	Yes
Send reminders	Yes	Yes	Yes
Automation of reminder scheduling	No	Yes	Yes
Multilingual email variations	No	No	Yes
Store email lists	Yes	Yes	Yes
Thank you email	Yes	Yes	Yes
Import/Export email lists	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pre-schedule survey launch and close	Yes	Yes	Yes
Project Collaboration - assign a survey to multiple people	No	No	Yes
Workflow for survey approval	No	No	Yes
Workgroup administrator role based permission	No	No	Yes
Allow respondents to re-enter survey	Yes	Yes	Yes
Survey test mode	Yes	Yes	Yes
Quota management	No	No	Yes
Random test data generator	No	Yes	Yes
Allow respondents to change their original answers	No	Yes	Yes
Panel Management & Segmentation	SurveyMonkey	Vovici, Individual Edition	Vovici, Enterprise Edition
Panel is integrated into invitation sending	No	No	Yes
Capture profile information on each panelist	No	No	Yes
Segment panelists for individual survey invitations	No	No	Yes
Track panelist survey participation	No	No	Yes
Surveys that add panelists to the panel	No	No	Yes
Change panelist status	No	No	Yes
Panel basic health report	No	No	Yes
Random selection of panelists	No	No	Yes
Panelist filtering	No	No	Yes
Saving panelist filter rules	No	No	Yes
Sharing saved panelist filters	No	No	Yes
Response Collection & Data Management	SurveyMonkey	Vovici, Individual Edition	Vovici, Enterprise Edition
Password protect each survey respondent (unique password per respondent)	No	Yes	Yes
Ensure only one response per email address	No	Yes	Yes
Distinguishes between partials and full completes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Export responses to Excel	Yes	Yes	Yes
Ability to download responses to SPSS	No	Yes	Yes
Ability to download responses to CSV or TSV	Yes	Yes	Yes
Response validation - make sure all responses adhere to branching rules	Yes	Yes	Yes
Respondent data editor (edit respondent data)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Filter response dataset with boolean logic	Yes	Yes	Yes
Results can be exported - then cleaned -and re-imported to the system	No	Yes	Yes
Reporting & Analysis	SurveyMonkey	Vovici, Individual Edition	Vovici, Enterprise Edition
Download editable report in PPT or Word or PDF	Yes	Yes	Yes
Link to live, public reports on web	Yes	No	No
Download editable report in Excel	Yes	Yes	Yes
Filtering report source for one question	Yes	Yes	Yes
Filtering report source for entire report	Yes	Yes	Yes
Create custom report elements	No	Yes	Yes
Saving custom reports	Yes	Yes	Yes
Display summary statistics - avg, std dev, count, sum, min/max, mode, mean	Yes	Yes	Yes
Tables and charts are supported -options include show rows with zero counts, show coded-value counts, show not answered counts, etc	Yes	Yes	Yes
Trend report:Shows results (summary statistics) using week, month, quarter or year as banner. The report element uses the survey submission time stamp to determine breakpoints.	No	Yes	Yes
Live Instant Results Shown to Respondents	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pie chart (2D or 3D)	No	Yes	Yes
Column or Line chart	No	Yes	Yes
Stacked column	No	Yes	Yes
Stacked bar	Yes	Yes	Yes
Banner (crossbreak) definitions for comprehensive cross-tabulations	No	Yes	Yes
Report on top "n" and bottom "n" score	No	Yes	Yes
Correlation analysis with variance, kurtosis, simple regression	No	Yes	Yes
2-way Cross-tabbing	No	Yes	Yes
3-way Cross-tabbing	No	Yes	Yes
Show/hide empty columns/rows control	No	Yes	Yes
Reports access control by workgroup administrator	No	Yes	Yes
Architecture, Security and API	SurveyMonkey	Vovici, Individual Edition	Vovici, Enterprise Edition
Full library of web services to put data into system	No	No	Yes
Full library of web services to take data out of system	No	No	Yes
Role-based Security	No	No	Yes
User control to response tables, groups, or individual surveys	No	No	Yes
Regular password change control	No	No	Yes
Online Community add-on	No	No	Yes
Business Intelligence add-on	No	No	Yes

Survey Monkey vs. Vovici Individual Edition

SurveyMonkey lacks many of the capabilities of Vovici's Individual Edition to control, protect and support your survey research.  These Individual Edition capabilities include:

Control

• Promote your brand by managing custom domain names or subdomains (e.g., www.yourcompanyhere.com or surveys.yourcompanyhere.com)
• Enforce brand recognition and personalize the look and feel of your surveys through more flexible configurations
• Save time by importing surveys directly from Microsoft Word
• Generate professional reports through one-button export to Microsoft Word or PowerPoint
• Build smarter surveys by using existing responses to tailor follow-up questions
• Leverage pre-existing information (e.g. history, transaction) to enhance the value of response data through hidden fields
• Help respondents understand questions through customizable tool tips

Protect

• Lock out security threats to employee and customer data in Vovici's SAS-70 certified data center
• Protect surveys with passwords to ensure the identity of the intended respondent

Support

• Rely on Vovici's live customer support team to get the help you need
• Leverage Vovici's web-based training to get a fast start, or refresher, on your next survey project

To learn more about Vovici Individual Edition, check out the three-minute demo or the product and features page. Join the customers who moved up from SurveyMonkey to Vovici in migrating to a survey business platform that you won't outgrow.

Survey Monkey Wrench

Successful online surveys often grow from projects to processes:

• That one-off survey project to determine satisfaction with the help desk about a particular upgrade is now a regular process used each time IT rolls out a new application.
• That annual corporate climate study is now a monthly employee-feedback process with the results distributed to over 1000 managers in personalized hierarchical reports.
• That occasional survey to measure satisfaction with the call center is now a weekly census used to measure the satisfaction with each of 500 customer-service representatives.

When you've outgrown that Survey Monkey survey and need to convert your survey projects into feedback processes, check out our robust, scalable and high-performing API (Application Programming Interface) for integration. When surveys are no longer tactical, but strategic, you want a strategic vendor as your partner.  When call-center representatives are fired or promoted based on their rolling six-week satisfaction rating, you want iron-clad and litigation-proof data to rely on.

And if you think with Survey Monkey and a wrench that you can build what you need, then by all means give them a call first. Then give us a call at +1.703.481.9326 in the United States and +44 (0)208.547.4040 in Europe to discuss your unique needs.

Survey Monkey in Silk

In "Survey Monkey Business", I wrote that "Whenever a prospect tells us that the competition for their business is between SurveyMonkey and Vovici, we know that one of us is in the wrong place."  Last week I gave some examples of customers who outgrew SurveyMonkey, some of whom moved up to enterprise feedback management, with panel management and CRM integration.

But many customers just need a more powerful survey tool.  The three biggest reasons such customers move up to a Vovici v4 Individual or Professional Edition account are:

1. Reporting - The prospects spend an inordinate amount of time creating reports in Excel and want the survey tool to do the heavy lifting. The user knows their life can be better, and Vovici v4 dramatically decreases their workload.
2. Branding - The prospects want more control over the look and feel of the survey and reports. They want all surveys to be driven from their own domain name (e.g., acme_surveys.foo) or subdomain (e.g., surveys.example.com).
3. Advanced Features - Power users of 'Monkey quickly realize the limitations of the tool, and its inability to do advanced branching, data piping and multi-language surveys.

You can dress a monkey in silk, but...

If you're interested in learning more, schedule a live demo or give us a call at +1.703.481.9326.

Survey Monkey Over a Barrel

Many Vovici customers came to us after outgrowing SurveyMonkey, which is an excellent "first barrel of monkeys" for playing around with web surveys. Some of our customers who moved upmarket:

• A professional association wanted a tool as easy to use as SurveyMonkey but with more flexible reporting and analysis.
• A market-research firm was using SurveyMonkey but ran into difficulties writing screener questions (which often require advanced branching) and needed rich analytics and application integration.
• A professional services firm needed to field a survey simultaneously in six languages and wanted all the results to collect in one data table rather than six separate tables.  
• A government agency was using SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang, among other survey tools, and wanted to standardize on one system across the agency.  
• A telecommunications equipment manufacturer wanted to move from pockets of survey software to enterprise feedback management across the company. 
• A university liked the free-form word processor of Vovici v4 and the time-savings of its report generation.

As a research analyst at the university said, "Everybody wants to do a survey for everything under the sun. The demand for surveys is already high because there is a culture of data-driven strategic planning. The power coming out of Vovici's app has stoked an increased demand. People get addicted to data through SurveyMonkey but realize how hard it is to create a great and successful survey. They ultimately realize how restricted they are, so they come to us to use Vovici."

Survey Monkey Business

Whenever a prospect tells us that the competition for their business is between SurveyMonkey and Vovici, we know that one of us is in the wrong place.

SurveyMonkey is great for a consumer or blogger doing a quick survey. Vovici v4 is designed for business professionals interested in the systematic gathering of feedback, not just one-off surveys. The key features our prospects are looking for:

1. Integration and automation. Our customers are often conducting ongoing transactional surveys to measure satisfaction after a customer-service contact, a product order, a warranty repair or some other standard event. Using SurveyMonkey, this requires regular manual intervention. Vovici v4's rich API enables organizations to integrate feedback management with CRM systems, HRIS applications, customer-support systems, help-desk applications, web portals and more. 
2. Panel management. As organizations do more and more surveys, they outgrow the simple list management of SurveyMonkey and want to maintain panels of customers, employees and resellers, with each panel storing a rich set of profile data: demographic, firmographic and attitudinal information that can be used to target survey invitations. They also want to track when individuals were last invited to a survey and how many surveys they've completed. The sophisticated clients want to use panel management to treat their respondents like valued partners.
3. Advanced reporting. Many organizations have unique, legacy report formats that have evolved over time to meet their needs. The standard SurveyMonkey reports won't do. Generating these custom reports each month can be quite time consuming and labor intensive. Vovici v4 APIs can be used to streamline this process. Other organizations wish to integrate reports with business-process data or disseminate reports throughout the enterprise, with individuals receiving their own unique views at the data. Vovici Feedback Intelligence is the solution for these firms.

If your organization needs any of the above, by all means call SurveyMonkey. Then call us: +1.703.481.9326 in the United States and +44 (0)208.547.4040 in Europe. When it comes to surveys, we mean business.