SURVEY SPARROW: AN UNCONVENTIONAL SURVEY EXPERIENCE
Getting acquainted with SurveySparrow and learning about their company culture was indeed an enriching experience for us. The Founder & CEO of SurveySparrow, Shihab Muhammed, is a Freshdesk as well as ZOHO veteran and his prior experience has helped him enormously in strategizing and planning for his new start-up.
The vision that drives SurveySparrow is to build an online survey platform that creates conversational surveys which, they believe, is the most effective and natural way to collect unbiased insights.
IDEA GENERATION
Shihab was struck with the idea of SurveySparrow while he was in the U.S. last year on a client visit for Freshdesk, his previous company. It was a norm in the company for employees to fill employee satisfaction surveys every month. However, the survey response rates were low despite several reminders and notifications from the HR because the surveys were time-consuming but not engaging or mobile-friendly. Shihab himself received a reminder email asking him to take the survey when he realized that the unfriendly user interface of the surveys was a major reason for the low response rates. He recounts the interesting story of how SurveySparrow was born in his blog.
Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger together handle close to 60 billion messages a day. Also, 6 out of 10 apps out there are already messaging apps. Shihab believes that the popularity of messaging apps is largely due to their personal and engaging experience, which he seeks to bring in through conversational surveys.
ABOUT SURVEY SPARROW
SurveySparrow was born out of their founder’s frustration with boring survey experience. He identified the problem, realized how common it was among corporates and started working on a solution for it.
One of the unique features that sets apart SurveySparrow from other survey platforms is their automation feature, wherein you can automate surveys to be sent to respondents regularly and thus eliminate HR hours spend to send them manually each month.
An extensive research was carried out before the start-up launch by studying the customer feedback and survey experience of other survey companies, identifying the market size and opportunities and also by gaining insights from the reports published by the likes of Gartner and Forrester Research.
The survey market is shifting to new innovative products focusing on real conversations and a friendly Conversational User Interface (CUI). Shihab observes that there has been a logical evolution in interfaces.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the widely used interface was Command Line Interface (CLI) which took months to learn and use. Later, Apple and Microsoft made Graphical User Interface (GUI) which grew to the most popular interface there ever was. However, in recent times, we witnessed a smartphone revolution, and everyone scrambled to make desktop-friendly applications to mobile-friendly applications. CUI exploits the scope of the smartphones the most they have used this possibility to design the survey experience. SurveySparrow resembles a messaging app so much so that the survey taking process transforms into a chat-like experience with SurveySparrow.
COMPANY CULTURE
Teamwork makes a dream work, they say. It’s imperative that you put in great effort and give attention to detail to build and maintain a great team.
Shihab had to shift his base from Chennai where he lived for the past dozen or so years because his cofounder was based in Cochin and they had decided to set up the company there. Shihab recounted the lengths he went to hire and put together the best team that we could find. Shihab traveled all the way to Calicut just to discuss and decide the terms with his Customer Success person. Because the said candidate was born and brought up in Mumbai and lived across the globe, he wasn’t at home with the traditional Kerala cuisine. Shihab addressed this discomfort by hiring an expert cook. The team is provided with free food and accommodation, and that is just one of the many perks they enjoy.
Shihab explained that he adopted this manner from the government practice of offering free accommodation and facilities at subsidized rates to the government officials.
It is just one of the many incidents which depict how they move away from the traditional way of treating their employees to make them feel good about being part of a good team. Also, SurveySparrow makes it a point to hire the people who possess experience across the world to bring in more insights.
HOW DOES SURVEYSPARROW WORK?
Even after we did our initial research of the company and learned of its distinctive features, we were all puzzled by how it actually works. Shihab invited us to use the private beta of the product so that we may have a firsthand understanding and feel of the product. We were delighted to see for ourselves how great SurveySparrow is.
Users are asked to create their SurveySparrow accounts wherein they can choose a template or build their own survey from scratch. One can add or edit questions, choose the answer types and also use the many options such as Display Logic, Automation, Drag & Drop, etc. Once the survey is created, the survey is shared with the audience. SurveySparrow lets the user share it across channels. Be it market research or a regular employee survey, SurveySparrow easily lets the users create and share the survey with their respective audience.
We were struck by how easy and fun it was to create conversational surveys. And the best part was how it could be previewed so we could see the survey questions popping up one after the other, similar to a real-life conversation using a messaging app.
Creating and sharing the surveys is not all that is to be done. SurveySparrow provide analytic reports and insights to the users so that they can understand the data collected and make informed decisions. SurveySparrow does the slicing and dicing of data and makes the deal simpler for the user. We found it a very user-friendly tool to create engaging surveys.
SurveySparrow is a curious name for an online survey platform. When asked about it, Shihab said that he wanted to name the product with the word parrot in it. The popular Indian depiction of intelligent parrots that talk to humans is what gave him the idea. However, the names he wanted weren’t available, so he chose Sparrow, widely associated as the wisest and most social of birds. SurveySparrow has a nice ring to it, and the name stuck.
CHALLENGES FACED
SurveySparrow, like every other startup, had its own share of hurdles to cross. Finding an appropriate office space was one among them. Thankfully, Shihab was assisted by government and the business ecosystem that help our startups. Within the short span of 4–5 months, SurveySparrow has a decent office in Infopark that fits its nine-member team. Government agencies like KSIDC were instrumental in aiding SurveySparrow, especially in the early days.
Another key challenge was acquiring great talent. Shihab believes that to keep innovating and surviving in a highly competitive world, you should have a great team that is capable of doing that. He was very particular about hiring only highly talented people with innovating ideas to join his team. He favors a competent workforce over the average team any day.
In a related context, Shihab spoke how the conventional job roles have evolved to new ones. Gone are the days of hardcore sales. Customers are smarter than before, and for them to stay loyal to you, you need to add value to their lives. Direct sales have shifted its focus to offering assistance and facilitating value exchange. Likewise, a lion share of the SurveySparrow market is expected to be in North America and coming up with unique content that will read native to the people of that region was a challenge SurveySparrow had to address.
The investment wasn’t really a struggle for SurveySparrow in the initial days. Shihab invested around $100k of his own personal savings into the company so that the sparrow have enough room to move around while it grows its wings. While he is actively talking with potential investors, Shihab said that he is putting off the funding until the product is launched. It is his belief that funds be used only for market scaling if one could afford to have it that way.
SurveySparrow acknowledges that what is groundbreaking today might risk being reduced to conventional tomorrow. But shrugging off the conventional mold is possible only through constant innovation. Inspired by the Google culture, Shihab hires smart people to keep the company smart and growing.
CATEGORIZATION OF CUSTOMERS
Explaining the categorization of his customers, Shihab used the metaphors of elephants, rabbits, and mice. The big enterprises and the likes of Fortune 500 companies constitute the elephants in the industry. The medium and small enterprises can be considered rabbits and the even smaller businesses are the mice in industry. The initial market for SurveySparrow, Shihab explained, would be the mice. They aim to target the rabbits and elephants later on, only once they establish themselves firmly among the smaller enterprises.
SurveySparrow has rich features that can track performance across devices. SurveySparrow believes that a conversational and engaging experience can improve survey completion rates by 40%.
SUCCESS MOMENTS
SurveySparrow believes in the moments that make up the journey rather than a single goal at the end of the road, Shihab said. It is good to know that they don’t consider a specific target and define their success as achieving it. Instead, they consider every fruitful moment to be a success. It is after all an eventful, continuous journey with new challenges popping up every other day. As long as they create fond memories and stay true to their vision, SurveySparrow is a success.
