Survey software is a self-service tool with which anyone in a company can build a questionnaire, send it to people and read the answers, without hiring a market research firm. It is also called a survey tool or an online survey platform. Most people have answered at least one survey made with it.
Before such tools, research was a service that a company ordered. A research firm wrote the questions, found people to ask, collected the answers and wrote a report, for a fee. This could take weeks. Survey software lets an employee do most of this alone, in days.
How does it work? The user builds the survey from ready question types: multiple choice, a rating from 1 to 5, a ranking, or a box for a written answer. The survey can use logic. For example, a person who says they own a car is asked about it, and a person who does not is skipped ahead. The tool then gives a link. The company sends it by email, SMS or WhatsApp, or puts it on its website or receipt. As the answers arrive, the tool counts them and draws charts. It can split the results by group, such as by city or by age. Newer tools use an AI model to read the written answers, sort them into topics and summarise them.
A common question is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). It asks: "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend, from 0 to 10?" People who answer 9 or 10 are promoters. Those who answer 0 to 6 are detractors. The score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.
Take, for example, an online mattress company in Bhopal. Before it designs a new mattress, it wants to know what its buyers think. An employee in the marketing team builds a survey with 12 questions in Hindi and English. She sends it on WhatsApp to 6,000 customers who bought a mattress in the last year. Within a week, 1,100 answer. The most common complaint in the written answers is that the mattress feels too hot in summer. That shapes the new design.
The company's own customers are not always the right people to ask. To reach people who are not yet customers, a company buys answers from online research panels. To see a person's reaction, not only their answer, it uses emotion AI. Social listening shows what people already say in public, which helps decide what to ask.
Companies that survey their customers after every purchase and support call use customer experience management (CXM) software, which joins survey scores with other feedback. Surveys of a company's own staff are run on an employee engagement survey tool.