Market research plays a critical role in the life-cycle of any business since it helps in gathering new customers and retaining existing customers. Also, collating important facts [and working on feedback] from customers helps businesses to stay ahead of the competition and deliver a WoW value 🙂
Surveys come in very handy in order to gather feedback, brand awareness, understand customer’s buying patterns, insights into business expansion [derived from the data captured via the Survey]. It can also be used to investigate the characteristics, behaviours, or opinions of a group of people [Source]. In a nutshell, surveys are an effective tool for any business since they help companies with customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and other related areas.
Entrepreneur Hamid Farooqui wanted to address this problem by offering customers with comprehensive, feature-rich and modern online survey maker with beautiful templates.
Today we have a chat with Hamid Farooqui, Co-founder & CEO of SoGoSurvey about the startup, online survey business, how companies can effectively leverage data from surveys, marketing, etc. So, lets get started with the Q&A…
Every idea is born out of a problem, can you please let us know how did you come up with the idea of SoGoSurvey ?
In old License Raj India it did not matter if your customers liked the car you sold to them. It did not matter what your customers thought of the after-sales service for the fridge they purchased from you. You were running a monopoly business. You would mumble something like, ‘The customer should be so excited to get his car delivered so quickly – just 4 years from the date of booking!‘
Similarly, employers did not care about the job satisfaction of their employees because the general thinking was that the employee should be happy to have a job in the first place. But post-License Raj abolition in 1991, things have been slowly changing. And in the last 10 years, things have just turned around 180 degrees. Now consumers have a choice of products-cars that can be purchased and delivered within a day, electronics and appliances with so much choice that it’s hard to figure out which one to buy.
In every category of product there is a lot of choice for the consumer and companies need to ensure total customer satisfaction or risk losing many customers due to negative publicity on social media and other avenues. We came up with the idea of measuring satisfaction using online software and thus SoGoSurvey was formed.
Can you share some details about the team behind SoGoSurvey.
I founded SoGoSurvey along with my elder brother, Suhail Farooqui. Together we bring expertise as well as experience to the table having previously founded K12 Insight, which offers cloud-based solutions to enhance communication between educators and community members, and MouthShut.com, which is India’s most successful consumer review site, considered a pioneer of the internet revolution in India.
Today, more than 70 employees constitute the SoGoSurvey team.
What is the Total Addressable Market [TAM]Â that SoGoSurvey is trying to address ?
We cater to small, medium, as well as large businesses that need to conduct different types of surveys such as Employee Satisfaction Surveys, Customer Satisfaction Surveys, Employee Engagement Surveys, and others to check the pulse of their customers or to know the state of their employees’ satisfaction with the company.
What are some of the standout features of SoGoSurvey vis-a-vis other competitors in the market ?
We compete with a few other players in the online survey space. Our USP is to offer a really powerful, highly user-friendly online survey software at a super-low cost. When it comes to online survey software, users have had two difficult options:
a. The affordable, low-end, low-power solution, and
b. The more powerful solution that breaks the bank
We saw a need for a tool that would be high quality but for a low cost, and that’s how SoGoSurvey was born. And that’s not all. It comes with training and extensive support that existing customers are raving about. We’re changing not just how you collect feedback in a secure, collaborative setting, but also how you fundamentally view feedback from customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Our solution is easy for the beginner and powerful for the expert. This is what makes us stand out with the competition in the space.
As far as features are concerned, here are some of the top differentiating features of SoGoSurvey that set us apart from the competition.
What is the revenue model of SoGoSurvey [Freemium/Premium] and what are some of the features that enterprise customers of SoGoSurvey get as compared to standalone users ?
We follow an exciting subscription-based freemium model. The customers can use our survey tool by signing up for a free trial account and use it for real work and then upgrade to the paid packages, if and when they need advanced features or to reach a large number of participants.
Advanced features such as Google Analytics Integration, Exporting Data to SPSS, Switch Invitations, Custom-Branded Survey URL, and Merge Surveys are a few of the options our Enterprise customers are entitled to.
How does your team ensure the authenticity of the survey results and what sort of technologies are used to ensure there are no fake reviews, etc.
Responses are collected to surveys in real time and they get updated in the tool immediately. There is no bias or tampering involved in the response collection process. Restrictions based on cookies or IP address can be set on public links, plus single-access-use links help to avoid inappropriate usage. Finally, once all of the data is in, we can also run a report by IP address to ensure that no one’s stuffing the ballot.
Since Surveys are more about ‘Decision Oriented Results’ i.e. Decisions are taken based on results obtained from the survey(s), how does the back-end logic of SoGoSurvey ensure that the organization takes the correct decisions based on those results ?
SoGoSurvey’s powerful reporting engine provides in-depth analysis and facilitates decision-making for both an organization’s clients as well as internally. First, embedding logic in the survey design ensures that participants are only asked relevant questions, resulting in the most accurate data possible. Then, reports such as Advanced Frequency, Assessment Summary, and Statistical Report help in viewing the collected data from different dimensions, giving a different perspective to problems and coming up with feasible solutions.
Set conditions and apply filters to drill down even further on results, leading to even more actionable data for specific groups and items. We know that results matter and that people are collecting data for a reason. SoGoSurvey uses these high-impact needs to prioritize features in its annual releases.
Can you please list some of the existing customers of SoGoSurvey [including SMB’s] and why startups should prefer SoGoSurvey over other survey softwares ?
Currently we cater to a lot of Fortune 500 companies as well as top educational institutes in the US. To name a few, EBay, Swiggy, Citibank, UNICEF, Marriott, IBM, HP, and FedEx are already our customers. Individuals and organizations prefer SoGoSurvey since we offer a powerful tool at a reasonable price. More details about the pricing can be found here
How many languages are currently supported by SoGoSurvey ?
SoGoSurvey currently supports 38 languages. To mention a few, we have Arabic, Bahasa, Bosnian, Burmese, Chinese, German, English [UK], Spanish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Malayalam, Russian, Tamil, Thai, Urdu, etc.
Does SoGoSurvey provide mobile based dashboard for viewing/editing/analysing survey results ?
We do not provide a mobile-based dashboard to view survey results, but our reports can be shared with colleagues to share dynamic, real-time results no matter your device. Plus, all of our surveys, forms, polls, and assessments are mobile friendly. They render beautifully on mobile and tablet, as well as computer screens as they are optimized to let respondents participate from any platform or device.
Any plans of coming up with SoGoSurvey SDK where developers can build software that can make use of SoGoSurvey’s features, data, APIs,etc.
SoGoSurvey is SaaS-based survey software used to design and deploy surveys and later run reports. We do offer API integration to users to integrate our tool with the systems they are already using.
Can you take us through the funding aspects of SoGoSurvey ?
SoGoSurvey has been funded by family and some very close friends. The total investment in the company is about 2 million USD. We have not needed extra funding after the initial angel round as we started to see good revenue coming in by the second year of operations.
Can you share some survey creation tips so that it drives maximum results i.e. customer satisfaction KPI’s enterprises need to use while using surveys ?
Taking a survey is not a core piece of work for most and hence participant engagement is the most important thing to keep in mind while designing a survey. Here are a few tips:
a. Keep the survey short and avoid displaying progress bars, page numbers, or question numbers.
b. Use branching and question display logic to make sure only relevant questions are presented to the participant
c. Use data pre-population and piping in surveys and mail merge in email invitations to personalize the participant experience.
Couple of blogs by SoGoSurvey for more information on this topic can be found here & here.
How according to you has the internet has changed over the post Web 2.0 era and the impact social, digital, mobile, NLP, AI, etc. Have created in today’s era ?
One of the biggest changes has been user participation. Content, ideas, and information are all capable of flowing from site owner to site users. A good example of that is Wikipedia, where anyone can edit or contribute. One of the most significant changes is Software as a Service [SaaS], which developed APIs to allow for automated usage.
The trend has been shifting to collaboration and an emphasis on feeling a connection, resulting in the need for more applications to seamlessly work together. Social channels emerged with an emphasis on online communities that called on their users to add value through commenting, uploading images or files, sharing, and linking to information.
Your views on Funding – Bootstrap/External funding and when according to you should someone look out for external funding.
To fuel faster growth to the next level, we may consider venture capital investments in the future. The idea is to take funding from a VC who, along with money, brings expertise and experience to our company to fuel the growth further.
Some closing thoughts for our readers
It’s an exciting time to be involved in this industry. More than ever before, people are talking and smart organizations are listening. We are happy to be part of making these conversations happen and giving customers the data they need to make smart decisions. With the rapid pace of change, we are always looking for feedback, too, and we are always taking action to better meet the needs of our customers.
In our new release, in May, we will roll out many new features our customers have asked for. Feedback really does make a difference, and we are glad to have our customers working with us to ensure we deliver the best product at the best price.
We thank Mr Hamid for his time and sharing valuable insights with our readers! If you have any questions for Hamid & his team about the market, pricing of SoGoSurvey, SoGoSurvey for SMB’s, etc., please email them to himanshu.sheth@gmail.com or leave your question in the comments section.