I think FluidSurveys is appropriate for almost all scenarios. For now, the only time I used another product was when the survey I was managing was being done using tablets (such as Ipads or Samsung tablets) and I used ODK Collect. I think FluidSurveys now has the option of uploading the survey to a tablet and collect the data through it. However, I have not tried it. ODK Collect is an open source and free software compared to FluidSurveys. Thus, if the user wishes to use tablets, I might recommend using ODK Collect even if there is some learning to do in terms of coding your question in an Excel sheet for it to be "uploadable" to the ODK Collect "hub" (the server).
It makes it easy to move from design to development. We collect highly targeted feedback without organizing a meeting to discuss every iteration, saving time and effort. The comments are open-ended and unorganized. But with survey Nudges, we can ask additional questions about design UI/UX.
User-friendly. For the majority of the general and basic tools you can use with FluidSurveys to build surveys are simple to use and intuitive. When certain issues come up, the service is quick (chat room) and effective.
Anonymity: the software has the reputation of being safer in terms of safeguarding private information the respondents share by answering surveys (this is mainly due to the fact that the servers are in Canada). Thus, indirectly, they increase response rates.
Extensive possibilities: FluidSurveys offers a plethora of possibilities and options that really renders the experience interesting in terms of micro-managing each details of the surveys you are sending out there. When the invitation leaves by email, it is exactly how you want it.
It helped to develop a more focused approach towards customer discovery.
We can create any survey in minutes and deploy it to collect feedback to understand customers’ expectations and fears. We then channel this data into our optimization strategies.
We receive hundreds of responses each day, and Qualaroo reduces the feedback analysis time with its inbuilt AI-based analytical tool, helping us close the feedback loop quickly.
They could expand their templates to cover more scenarios (although it has been a long time since we needed their templates - we develop our own questionnaires tailored to our clients’ geographies).
On the other hand, there are way too many options in the targeting section, but we have gotten used to skipping past them while creating surveys. Perhaps that’s more for companies who target wide audiences. We only collect client feedback, so we don’t really use ‘targeting’ as such.
We are very happy with FluidSurveys. It is a simple and intuitive tool, has a good variety of sample survey templates, allows real-time response analysis and easy report-generation feature. We have been able to access support very quickly from their team when we had a question / concern. We will most likely upgrade to the Ultra version, though, as the branching options in Pro package are somewhat limited
The micro-survey landscape is evolving very quickly and it seems like there is a new entrant almost every month. I'm generally happy with Qualaroo (we got what we expected) and I like the folks on the Qualaroo team (support is fast and friendly and rarely needed), but there haven't been real improvements to the platform in the last eight months. We will be re-assessing Qualaroo's features and price versus other competitors when our current contract is up.
I think the average person can very quickly pick up on the basics of the system: they would have no problems programming and launching a basic survey. Organizations may benefit from having people of different backgrounds getting their hands dirty in the system: at a minimum, both web programmers and opinion research advisors should be solicited for input or help.
We know the value of consumer feedback and believe that users actually want to be a part of the process. With Qualaroo, we have learnt that people like answering certain types of questions, especially if you ask them something about themselves — like what they want most and their motivations behind purchases — they can’t resist typing a response.
I've never experienced an outage where Qualaroo was unavailable. I don't think I've even gotten notices for scheduled down/maintenance time. The platform is always available.
Our developers complain that Qualaroo is just one of several similar site add-ons that slow down our site performance. I'm skeptical that Qualaroo has any measurable impact on our page load times, but don't have any hard evidence either way. The Qualaroo admin interface and reporting mechanisms are all quick and reliable.
I have only contacted customer support twice, and they have managed to solve my problem every time. There is a slight waiting time between the query and resolution, but other than that I don’t need to contact them time and again to understand things since their help section is sufficient most of the time.
Qualaroo doesn't offer full-blown online training, at least not that I've used or needed. The online help documentation is adequate and Qualaroo-sponsored webinars are informative.
Have your technical team set up the "Identify" feature right out of the gate - this is a "fire and forget" feature. Once it's set up, your data is much more valuable. Also, if there are very specific kinds of page targeting you might imagine doing, have a technical person set up and test at least 2-3 examples of using Qualaroo's regular expression features to achieve this targeting. With a couple good examples in place to work from, it becomes much easier to create your own regular expressions for custom targeting.
From a Government perspective, FluidSurveys offers some qualities that make it stand out:
It is located in Canada;
It's servers are located in Canada;
They are willing to host user-group meetings, so that Government departments can explain how they have implemented a wide variety of tasks with it (and people can get very creative with FluidSurveys! If they can use an in-house option they've already purchased to conduct non-survey-related tasks, it introduced major cost savings to taxpayers. So it's also very important to share this type of creativity with other departments).
We decided to go with Qualaroo because it offered the ability to capture UTM data, as well as sent event information back to Google Analytics. In addition, the services Qualaroo provided was just right - not too many bells and whistles at a fair price point. Overall, Qualaroo was the right fit for us.
Qualaroo's simplicity has its down sides when it comes to scaling. Managing multiple nudges across multiple domains, at least in the Pro edition, is challenging. The active nudges all appear as a single list on the admin home page, automatically grouped by domains. Archived nudges are on a separate tab. It would be helpful to have a folder system to organize nudges. Also, once you have multiple active nudges that are targeted to different sections of your site using regular expressions, it's difficult to keep track of what is appearing where. It's also difficult, if not impossible, to figure out where you may have competing nudges. And there's no ability to assign reporting or configuration access to other members of your team. The Pro edition has a single login, which must be shared if you have multiple staff who want to use Qualaroo.
The cost savings in using FluidSurveys to conduct research, rather than outsource it, has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars over the few years that we have been using it. Contracting out research is costly, so if you have the right people/skills and technology to do the work in-house, you're able to conduct a lot more research than you would otherwise be able to.
Qualaroo gives us the insights we need to answer specific questions, connect with our customers, and in general feed ideation during early stages of product discovery.
The speed with which our product R&D teams can go from 0 to getting usable data is highly valuable to us. We operate and move quickly, so our tools must be self-serve and easy to use in order to be viably added to our team’s development process. Qualaroo is like that, so we have been sticking with it. In less than 5 minutes, teams can go from having almost entirely opinion-backed ideas to having ones that are data-backed by targeted customer feedback. This step in the discovery process makes us more efficient and increases the chance that the experiments we run will yield a positive impact.
Understanding and anticipating customer needs is the backbone of our product development strategy. All our employees are encouraged to identify and address these needs in some way as part of their jobs. We have an in-house feedback collection process that also runs on Qualaroo to see what our collaborative minds can think of.
