Survey creation

A contact form collects a name, an email and a sentence. A survey that branches collects the thing you would otherwise spend the first twenty minutes of a call finding out.

What comes out of a session

A business owner replaced the contact form on his company site with a branching survey that qualifies the enquiry. A psychologist built a questionnaire for her own clients on the site she had finished the week before.

What a finished one knows

The questionnaire that came back a month later did more than collect answers. It records who opened the link and how many times. It times the answers, so a form filled in too fast to have been read looks different from one somebody thought about. It refuses a submission until every question has been answered. And the person who owns it can read the results without asking anybody for an export.

None of that is survey software. It is four small decisions taken while it was being built, by the person who was going to read the answers.

What it costs

Nothing recurring. This is the category where the saving is most obvious, because survey tools charge monthly for something the agent builds once and hosts on the site you already have.

What goes wrong

Two hundred questions is a starting point, not a survey. One session generated that many and then cut. Generating is cheap and choosing is the work.

A branch you cannot explain is a branch you should delete. If you cannot say why an answer sends somebody down a particular path, it is complexity for its own sake and it will confuse the person filling it in.

Design it in parallel. Six versions at once, then pick, beats describing what you want to a single agent and refining it.

The measurement worth taking

Count how many minutes of the first call you currently spend on questions the form could have asked. That number is what this is worth to you, and it is usually larger than people expect.