Doing telephone surveys right is as much an art as a science. SurveyMonkey set out to take the complexity out and turn a process that used to take days or weeks into hours.
Survey Monkey makes phone surveys easy and fast to set up and run. They enable data gathering in fields as diverse as politics and government; non-profits and unions; hospitals and pharmaceuticals; newspapers, radio and TV, and corporate marketing. Survey Monkey’s web-based survey design incorporates powerful features and sophisticated analytics for data gathering tasks such as determining support for a ballot measure or the viewership of a new TV show.
Polling can be hard for any organization, but the data provided is often invaluable. So companies put up with the laborious manual processes involved with large banks of telephone callers. Survey Monkey saw the inefficiencies and decided to reinvent telephone surveys.
Survey Monkey knew there had to be a better way. They briefly considered working with Asterisk, but after coming across Twilio, “We saw that they did the homework so we didn’t have to,” says Gaurav Oberoi, head of products at Survey Monkey’s Seattle office.
“We didn’t want to worry about the plumbing,” continues Gaurav. “With Twilio, we could rest assured it was covered and move on to caring about our customers.”
By relying on Twilio’s infrastructure, Survey Monkey was able to get to market quickly and offer services that could not be matched elsewhere. “No one else can offer a poll at 6:00pm and get results by 6:30pm,” says Chuck Groom, head of engineering at Survey Monkey’s Seattle office. “And what takes the best vendors 3 to 5 days we can accomplish in just two hours.”
Survey Monkey has completely changed the economics of polling by having a software-based, self-service product. “As just one example, the other guys can’t do local races,” explains Chuck. “But our model makes that simple and fast for our customers,” he continued. “That advantage comes in part by using Twilio as our underlying communications infrastructure.”