Social survey web tool Floq launches to the public today, after a private beta release in February. The Perth-based startup wants to help its users gather feedback via web-based surveys, and it’s placing a heavy emphasis on design, usability and comparative benchmarking with similar companies in a client’s industry. Floq is putting web-based survey leader SurveyMonkey squarely in its sights, and it isn’t being shy about that.
“If you create a survey or poll on Surveymonkey not only does it take ages but you’ll never know what anyone outside your group or clients think about the same topic and questions,” Floq co-founder and CEO Jonah Cacioppe. “Say you have a coffee shop, you might find out that the customer feedback for your business on average scores a six out of ten and think you’re doing kinda poorly.”
Floq’s major value proposition for businesses is to offer built-in competitive intelligence. Cacioppe says most other options stop short of delivering this kind of real value. “This is as far as most SaaS survey platforms go, if you wanted to go further you’d have to hire an expensive consulting or research firm to give you benchmarking for your industry,” he said. “It’s all kinda private, expensive in time and money, and not much fun.” Floq changes the game by allowing companies to compare responses against others in their space on any question and answer.
Another way that Floq differs from other solutions is by providing businesses with a simple way to connect their real-world business customers with online surveys and results, via receipt-printable QR codes. It’s fairly standard practice to direct customers to online surveys via printed receipts, but using QR codes and specially formatted mobile-friendly online surveys means they can complete the loop much more easily and quickly. Cacioppe likens it to “Google Analytics for real life.”
Cacioppe sees even more opportunity in the future for mobile surveys and tying them to brick-and-mortar businesses. “Ideally I envisage questions and answers being tied to time and location, too,” he said. “So say you have Floq on your phone and walk into a space – say a gym – ratings pop up for the gym or a customer survey gets emailed to you when you walk out the door.” Cacioppe said that his team hopes to have those features implemented sometime later this year.
Floq may be going after a firmly entrenched competitor by targeting SurveyMonkey, but it brings a lot to the table, including great design both for its cross-platform surveys, and for its automatically generated results which visualize responses. The basic service is free, but pricing ramps up from $49 to $499 per month based on user needs, and custom-tailored solutions are available above that for users with additional needs.
Gathering input from users is increasingly important to businesses, and Floq is betting that the best way to do that is to make surveys and survey creation more social, easy to create and share, and to wow with elegant design. It’ll be interesting to see if its focus on business intelligence can help it overtake the more established players in this space.
