SurveyMonkey is getting one of its biggest revamps since its founding in 1999.
Much of the upgrade, billed as Today’s SurveyMonkey, is designed to make it easier to use a range of AI tools to create and interpret surveys. But CEO Eric Johnson says the company, which promotes itself as “the world’s most popular survey platform,” remains as focused as ever on helping customers collect feedback from actual people. That comes as a growing number of startups offer AI tools for extracting consumer or employee sentiment from existing data or even generating synthetic survey data based on artificial intelligence models.
“I think that more than ever, the feedback from people—from humans—matters in making good decisions,” Johnson says.
Along with a general brand refresh, streamlined interface, and enhanced home page featuring recommendations for what to tackle next, Today’s SurveyMonkey includes upgraded versions of the company’s tools for crafting surveys via AI prompts. Users can quickly draft questionnaires using a mix of plain-language directions to the AI and traditional editing tools. AI can also help analyze responses as they come in, for example by highlighting some of the most interesting and important findings. More broadly, the platform has been redesigned to make it significantly easier to roll out surveys quickly and overcome the hesitation that can come with staring at a blank page.
“To build a quarterly employee engagement survey and deploy that, it used to be 77 clicks,” Johnson says. “It’s now down to six.”
A study conducted by SurveyMonkey found that 83% of small business owners polled said customer feedback is useful in making decisions, but only 54% collect it more than once or twice per year. The company is betting that making it easier to deploy surveys and understand the results with AI will help that number grow. The upgrades will begin rolling out this month to users across various plan levels.
Johnson was appointed CEO of SurveyMonkey in 2023 after the company, then known as Momentive, was taken private in a $1.5 billion deal led by Symphony Technology Group. That transaction came after an aborted acquisition the previous year by Zendesk. Upon taking the helm, Johnson vowed to focus on making the core survey product “even better, easier to use, and more effective for every user,” and the company in 2023 quickly launched an early version of its “Build with AI” feature to automate survey creation, powered by OpenAI’s GPT.
Now, SurveyMonkey users can design and analyze surveys from within other AI tools, including ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, with a connector for Google’s Gemini in the works. The company is also rolling out integrations with human resources information system (HRIS) platforms including Workday and BambooHR. Those integrations will make it easier to design and target surveys to particular groups of employees, while augmenting responses with data pulled from employee records, such as department, geographical location, or length of tenure.
By the end of the year, SurveyMonkey also plans to unveil a revamped version of its Benchmarks feature, which lets businesses see how they stack up against comparable organizations based on Net Promoter Scores and other feedback. The updated version will make it easier to see and understand how scores compare among businesses in similar industries and of similar sizes and geographies.
“It’s not just about exposing them,” says Johnson. “It’s really about what do they mean and what do you do with them, and building more and more of that into the product as we roll forward.”
Benchmarks also relies on SurveyMonkey’s years of accumulated data, which, as Johnson points out, competitors and generic AI providers can’t easily duplicate.
“I think it’s one of the largest data collections that’s not included in any of the LLMs out there,” he says.
The company has already seen encouraging signs from its AI features by tracking how quickly users roll out follow-up surveys. Another important measure will be how frequently users engage with the product and share findings with teammates as SurveyMonkey makes it easier to build surveys, send them to the right audiences, and extract insights from the results.
“We want people to be thinking about this continuous listening opportunity in lots of different ways,” Johnson says. “Think about how they talk to their customers, how they talk to their employees, how they engage with the data, and importantly, what they do with that and how that evolves over time.”