So, if you’re one of our local users in the Denver/Boulder area, feel free to stop by Lucile’s Cafe in Denver a week from today (Wednesday, July 8th at 8:30AM) and have breakfast on us! You’ll get to meet other local users, ask us your burning SurveyGizmo questions, and put in feature requests for future versions of SurveyGizmo.

If you are interested in coming, please fill out our RSVP form, just so we can make appropriate reservations.

Hope to see you all there!

Well, we have a fantastic answer for you! If you have an Enterprise or above level account, you now have the ability to run a Page Fall Off Report. This report (shown below) can show you on what page people stop taking your survey in a visual manner.

We hope that by providing this report, it will help you with your survey design as well as increase your completion rates. After all, the most important part about creating a survey is to be able to analyze the completed data one you’re done.

Happy Surveying!

Just a quick note to let everyone know that tomorrow several updates to the API will be going live at 5pm MT. We are adding five new functions to the API — and making several small modifications to the existing calls. Keep an eye on the API documentation page at 5pm on July 30th for the latest changes (this release will be version 1.5).

Here is a quick summary of the changes:

New Call: sgAddContact - This call will add or update (upsert) a contact to an email invitation in SurveyGizmo.

New Call: sgSingleSend - This call will add or update (upsert) a contact to an existing email invitation in SurveyGizmo — it will also send them the initial invite message for that campaign.

New Call: sgCreateSurvey - This call, available at the Enterprise level, will allow you to create a survey based on an XML schema you provide in the call.

New Call: sgCopySurvey - This call, available at the Enterprise level, will allow you to copy a survey that exists in your account.

New Call: sgSetSurveyStatus - This call can be used to launched and closed surveys programatically.

Also, we have added a limit on the number of records that can be pulled with each the sgGetResponseList call. The API call will now limit any one query to 500 responses at a time. To make polling our service easier, we now order the records newest to oldest and you can use our new “start” parameter to loop through your entire data. Please see our updated documentation for this function.

Happy Surveying!

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?

So, if you’re in the Portland area on Friday, July 3rd around Noon and would like to meet other SurveyGizmo users, put in feature requests or just get your SurveyGizmo questions answered, please RSVP to our Official Invitation. And don’t forget, you get a free lunch at Rose’s on us!

We hope to see you there!

PS - Not in Portland, but want to meet us? Check out the cities we’ll be visiting later on this summer.

One of the great features about SurveyGizmo is the ability to style your own survey to look exactly like your brand. But let’s face it, you might not have the staff or the knowledge to design a theme for yourself.

The look of your survey is an important factor. Not only toward response rates, but also the perception of your company if you are emailing customers! A custom branded template maintains your brand experience as you collect responses. Here’s a quick example:

Just send us a design or brand that you want our designers to use as a basis. For example:

• The URL of your existing website
• A marketing piece (pdf)
• or just your logo

Important: Inside of your account you will see a button to a survey to upload any of the above information you have about what you would like your free template design to look like. All template designs need to take 2 hours or less of our designers time, this way we can allow everyone who wants to participate in the program to do so. The turn around time for the template is 2 weeks and we will give you a review of what we designed before we send it to you.

The best part is that the template is free for any annual account that signs up (or upgrades) between now and July 4th and you still get the 10% discount for an annual account!

Happy Surveying!

-SurveyGizmo’s Design Team

• New Feature: Question Library added
• New Feature: Page Falloff report added, providing two graphs of the same data (funnel type and ‘difference’) - Enterprise level
• New Feature: Textbox questions have extreme left and extreme right label options
• New Feature: In tables/matrices, you can now repeat the column headers every X number of rows.
• New Feature: If you alter your ExactTarget or SalesForce.com password, but do not update it in SurveyGizmo, you are now emailed about the issue
• New Feature: Tables/matrices improved with more averages and totals for rows and columns
• New Feature: CrossTab now available for open textbox questions and hidden value fields for the top 5/10/20/50 most frequent entries
• New Feature: Enterprise customers can now send a URL link to view the report as part of the scheduled re-run instead of the previous method of sending a PDF version (still available)
• New Feature: New Summary Report option: Hide rows in matrices that are unanswered

See the entire change log of survey software improvements.

So I called in and found out that apparently it’s “impossible” to use both and I had to choose one or the other. It hardly seemed fair to me that we couldn’t use both at the same time, when you can use their conference call line and VoIP at the same time. Which, I mean, we could use their conference call line, but it changes for every webinar and that just gets annoying, but I digress…

The real thing that irked me about the whole situation was how I was treated over the phone. First, I waited on hold for about 10 minutes (which wasn’t that big of a deal — time to catch up on emails!), but then when I was finally able to talk to someone, the girl talked to me for about 30 seconds, told me what I wanted wasn’t possible, and then hung up.

I don’t know about you, but that really left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I think I’ve grown so accustomed to what it’s like here (where our customer support team tries to help in any way they can imagine) that I kind of expect it from everyone I deal with in the outside world.

The girl that I talked to didn’t even think twice about my question. I mean, couldn’t she have thought of a work around or something?!?! Where was their creativity?? Where was my Mario, Marybeth, or Jonathan on the other end of the line?? I mean, couldn’t she at least think about how we could do some type of hack to get the system to work the way I wanted it to? It’s just a silly email invite that is automatically sent once someone signs up for the webinars — there’s got to be some way to change it. And not just say “No” and hang up.

Anyways, what I have realized is how much I really appreciate the creativeness of our customer support team and how much they actually do care about helping you with your problems. You can always tell when someone really enjoys what they are doing and is trying to help versus just giving you a “no” and hanging up on you. Not cool “Web events and online meetings” company — not cool!

OK, that’s the end of my rant about customer service for the day.

Wanted to give a shout out to all our Account Managers here — you guys rock! Keep helping everyone out the best you can, because trust me, the person on the other end of the phone really appreciates it!

Bigger Sample:

The steps are simple:

• Select your survey and go to the Overview page
• Right-click on the map and choose ‘Copy Shortcut’ (Internet Explorer), ‘Copy Link Location’ (Firefox), or ‘Copy Link’ (Safari)
• Place the link into the following code, replacing “PLACE_YOUR_LINK_HERE” (between the quotations)
• Add this code to your webpage or blog post, wherever you want the map to show-up!

<img src="PLACE_YOUR_LINK_HERE" width="400" height="172" />

You will notice that this is the same size as the one found in your Overview. However, you can get a bigger version by making a quick alteration. In your link you will find the following:

survey_response_map.php

Change it to the following:

survey_response_map_bigger.php

Finally, place this new link into this slightly different bit of HTML code that displays the image:

<img src="PLACE_YOUR_NEW_LINK_HERE" width="600" height="314" />

Congratulations, you now have the survey World Map available outside your SurveyGizmo account!

This has been long sought after by many users so we decided to rally around the effort and get this one out. Your Survey Question Library is available at all paid plan levels.

Right out of the gate the question library includes six standard libraries:

• Academic
• Business
• Events
• General
• Human Resources
• Rating, Comparison, and Calculation Questions

In addition, you can add your own questions to the Question Library by clicking on the “Save & Copy to Question Library” button.

This isn’t limited to run of the mill questions either! You can add Actions, Auto-Responders, Disclaimer text, and more to the Library — any survey element!

Please keep the suggestions coming! SurveyGizmo grows based on your feedback and input!

Cheers,
-The SurveyGizmo Dev Team