Spotlight: SurveyMe Provides Real Time Customer Feedback


surveyme real time customer feedback

If you want to run a successful business, you need to get feedback from customers. And with today’s rapidly changing consumer base, you likely need that feedback to happen in real time or close to it. That’s exactly the type of feedback that SurveyMe aims to provide.

Read more about the business in this week’s Small Business Spotlight.

What the Business Does

Offers a platform for businesses to collect real time customer feedback.

CEO Lee Evans told Small Business Trends, “We sell the most advanced real time customer/employee feedback and instant reward solution. Put simply, SurveyMe is a one stop resource for companies looking to increase their efficiency, profitability and successful decision-making by communicating with their customers and employees.”

Business Niche

Offering real time customer feedback.

Evans says, “Typically speaking, most customer feedback surveys are delivered via a code at the bottom of a receipt to go to website or an email directing consumers to take a survey potentially hours or even days after the experience has occurred. Because there is such a lapse in time, customers rarely if ever complete these surveys. SurveyMe’s app hosted surveys allow marketers to view real time responses from consumers that are most likely still on location. This empowers management to make improvements constantly and possibly even rectify negative experiences before a customer even has time to leave.”

surveyme real time customer feedback

How the Business Got Started

As a way to help people understand customers.

Evans explains, “The idea for SurveyMe came to me about 11 years ago while I was growing a retail business of my own. In the first 12 months, I had reached $5 million in sales! At first, when I was on the sales floor, I could listen to our customers’ ideas and give them the products, services and experience they valued about my shop. I wanted to stay connected to the desires of our clientele and ideas of our front line team but as the company / number of stores / employees grew, it naturally became harder and harder to engage with my customers on a one on one level to hear what they thought of our products.

“Fast forward a few years, I had sold the business and I was now advising other businesses who were in financial trouble — all because they had made bad decisions which resulted from becoming disconnected with their consumers. This lead my wife Nicola and I to create SurveyMe, a complete customer engagement and rewards solution that could be used by any company around the world.”

Biggest Win

Helping their first client.

Evans says, “You never forget your first client telling you how much your product just helped them. I’m addicted to the great stories we hear every day from clients but personally that first client win led to our biggest step, which was moving out of our spare bedroom and renting our first offices! That seems like a small thing but for any startup business that is the point when you really feel like a proper business. From there we’ve grown our team and we now have 10 team members and offices in the USA, U.K. and South Africa.”

Biggest Risk

Taking on clients as investors.

Evans explains, “We have a great relationship with all our clients. It’s so important to us that everything we do positively improves their lives. So when our clients said they believed in me so much and would back us financially it was both humbling and also came with great responsibility.

“If it had gone wrong, they would have lost everything and we would have also definitely lost everything too. Because our technology is so new and disruptive to the existing survey market, everything was still on a knife edge for the first seven months but then within a year the value of the company has increased by 15 times.”

Lesson Learned

Trust your own ideas.

Evans says, “In the early days of SurveyMe, we were too willing to listen to other people’s opinions regarding what was and wasn’t an achievable goal. I chose to listen to and trust individuals who ultimately did not deliver on their promises. Doing it all over again, I would have more belief in my own ideas and trust myself to realize the creative ideas I had in my head.”

surveyme real time customer feedback

Communication Strategy

Constantly sharing ideas.

Evans says, “We all muck in together and there’s no really hierarchy and no such thing as a bad idea. Regardless of your position or responsibility in the company or even where in the world you are, everyone communicates in real-time using an app called Hipchat and so everyone can have an input into the company’s direction.”

Favorite Quote

“You will never have the chance of success without the courage to face potential failure,” Captain Phil Harris (deceased) who was skipper of Cornelia Marie, an Alaskan crab fishing boat.

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Find out more about the Small Biz Spotlight program.

Images: SurveyMe, Facebook; Top Image: CEO Lee Evans

6 Comments ▼

Annie Pilon Annie Pilon is a Senior Staff Writer for Small Business Trends, covering entrepreneur profiles, interviews, feature stories, community news and in-depth, expert-based guides. When she’s not writing she can be found exploring all that her home state of Michigan has to offer.

6 Reactions
  1. Would love for you guys to take over the surveys of the fast food industry. Places like Arby’s, KFC, Papa Murphy’s, Chik-Fil-A, etc. all have those survey things on receipts, and I’d love it if they were more app-based and could be submitted at the business while I still remember (and don’t have to keep track of a receipt).

    • Hi Robert

      Thank you for the great comments on our coverage. This is exactly the type of ‘old system’ that we are disrupting along with email surveys. We are keen to also get the QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) industry to adopt our technology too and we are working on it so watch this space!

    • That seems like a great idea! I always end up throwing the receipts away and forgetting about the surveys.

  2. I think that a tool like this is great because customers can readily leave their feedback. It is tough because sometimes you need to ask them to leave a feedback before they will actually do it.

    • Hi Aira

      Thank you for reading our coverage. Yes we agree that it can be historically difficult to get customers to give a business feedback but by using a mobile survey app like SurveyMe you can give customer’s something to encourage them. If used correctly this provides the business with a marketing opportunity. So everyone wins!

    • Yes, businesses need to actively seek out feedback, but it’s such a necessary part of running a business.