Survey Solutions Keeps Surveying Simple

Perseus's new Web-based software makes conducting customer research easy and affordable.

Ramon G. McLeod, PCWorld.com

NEW YORK--Small or large, no company can survive without good customer research, and the best way to get that is to ask customers what they think.

But hiring a company to do surveys can be prohibitively expensive, well beyond the means of small and medium-size businesses. Enter Survey Solutions 4.0 for the Web from Perseus Development, introduced this week at PC Expo/TechXNY.

Starting at under $300, this product is particularly handy for creating fast surveys because there is no scripting, programming, or difficult dialog boxes to master. It includes many design wizards that make it easy for novices to produce professional-looking survey forms, says Jeffrey Henning, Perseus's president of software services.

It can also produce instantaneous results on a Web page, he says, and will put those results into Microsoft Access databases. The software features built-in capabilities for creating summary statistics, cross-tabs, and frequency reports, and will export results directly to Microsoft PowerPoint.

A starter version costs $229, with no limit on the number of completed responses to each survey. The professional version costs $495 and includes tools for doing in-person, telephone, and mail-in surveys. An enterprise version, priced at $2495, writes results to Oracle, MySQL, Sybase, Informix, DB2, Access, or SQL Server databases.