Online Surveys are gaining importance in India: SoGoSurvey CEO

Over the last few years, online surveys have transformed drastically. The time span needed to complete an online survey is much shorter than that of traditional methods as information is gathered automatically. There are many advantages of using online survey. In an interaction with Dataquest, Hamid Farooqui, CEO, SoGoSurvey, talks about the growing importance of online survey in India.

Q. What is so special about your offering and how does it help the user?

In 1990’s employers did not care about the job satisfaction of their employees because the general thinking was that the employee should be happy to have a job in the first place. But post license Raj abolition in 1991, things have been slowly changing. And in last 10 years things have just turned around 180 degrees. If employees are not satisfied, they will leave the job and find another one in no time. Companies need help – to measure employee satisfaction. Similarly, customers also need to be satisfied or they will not waste any time in switching to a competition’s product or service. We came up with the idea measuring satisfaction using online software and thus SoGoSurvey was formed.

SoGoSurvey is a cloud based software company which provides one of the best enterprise feedback system/ survey tool in the world. We cater to small, medium as well as large businesses that need to conduct different types of surveys such as employee satisfaction survey, customer satisfaction survey, employee engagement survey and others to have the pulse of their customers or to know the state of their employee’s satisfaction with the company.

We offer a cloud based survey tool that is used by our customers to design and distribute online surveys. Then collect responses from participants and use our powerful reporting engine to run various reports and gain insight into their issue. This insight can be used to then come up with actionable changes to the business.

Earlier companies were conducting paper-pen based surveys which made it far more expensive, time-consuming & error-prone. Over the years, evolution of online survey tools has eliminated these drawbacks; thus making survey creation simple, distribution quick & analysis accurate.

Q. How do you plan to grow in the Indian market?

The potential for business in India is enormous - in billions of dollars per year. Currently we cater to a lot of fortune 500 companies as well as top educational institutes in the US, UK, Australia, India etc. Just to name a few, EBay, Citibank, UNICEF, Marriott, IBM, HP, FedEx etc. are already our customers. We are tripling our customer base every year since inception & expect to continue the same in 2016. We are on path to profitability this year.

Q. What will be your GTM strategy?

Our belief is to offer the best product and support for low cost and customers will flock to you in droves. So we are focusing 80% of our energy on Product and Support. One has to try our product to see how sophisticated it is and how superior it is to the competitions, especially the user interface and usability.

We are hiring a lot of very senior level employees for Sales and Marketing roles in USA as well as in India. Since we are a global product, we are now dividing responsibilities in our teams by geography. Already we are seeing positive outcome from this focused approach.

Q. What is the total investment that you have done in India?

The total investment in the company is about 2 million USD. We have used this money to build a great cloud and mobile based survey platform. Most of our investment was spent in product development. Rest was spent on infrastructure, equipment and hosting.

Q. Can you please name some of your key customers ?

Some of our customers in India are Accenture, Zeus Consulting, Hindustan Oil Exploration Company Ltd., CCPL Worldwide, Plexu MD and Central Institute of Business Management Research & Development (CIBMRD).

We also have customers worldwide like Citibank, Ebay, Apple, Marriott, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), IBM and Unicef.