SurveyMonkey today added additional artificial intelligence (AI) tools that promise to make it simpler for organizations to launch surveys that have been validated against a set of best practices.
At the core of that effort is an AI Analysis Suite and augmented survey creation tools that enable end users to invoke a natural language interface through which they can describe their intent or expose a document or email from which the survey will be automatically constructed. The SurveyMonkey platform will then also analyze the survey created to help, for example, maximize responses.
Additionally, it’s now possible to directly copy and paste data from spreadsheets without any manual filtering required.
Finally, the AI tools provided can also analyze the results of open-ended questions without having to first tag each response.
As part of that effort, SurveyMonkey is also bundling existing sentiment analysis and response quality management tools it already provides into its AI Analysis Suite.
The overall goal is to dramatically reduce the amount of time currently required to create surveys, predict how well they perform and analyze results, says Mike Greenberg, director of product marketing for SurveyMonkey. “It becomes possible to explore insights exponentially faster,” he adds.
In addition to marketing teams, it will now be possible for departments that lack the expertise required to craft a set of valid surveys, such as human resources, using a set of best practices embedded in the SurveyMonkey platform that help prevent, for example, confirmation biases from being baked into the survey, he adds
Previously, those teams would have depended on a set of SurveyMonkey templates that might not be as customized or granular as the surveys that can now be created using AI, notes Greenberg.
It’s not clear to what degree AI is already being used to craft surveys but as SurveyMonkey continues to collect data to train AI models it should become simpler to derive deeper insights. SurveyMonkey is already collecting 84 million data points a day that are being used to train its AI models, says Greenberg.
Each organization will still need to determine how often they might want to launch a survey but there is still going to be a need for individuals that understand best practices for conducting them, adds Greenberg.
However, just because it is easier to craft a survey it doesn’t necessarily follow that more people will be willing to fill them out. In theory, the better crafted a survey is, the less likely it becomes someone might abandon filling out a survey because the questions, for example, being asked were too convoluted to clearly understand
Hopefully, there will come a day when individuals might have AI agents that make it simpler for them to fill out surveys. After all, the percentage of individuals willing to participate in a survey is still fairly low. As a result, many survey results need to be taken with a grain of salt, especially if they might be used for anything other than assessing sentiment.
Nevertheless, the only thing worse is, of course, making a decision or changing a process without any feedback at all so in that regard, surveys remain indispensable.
