SurveyMonkey has been around for more than a decade, and according to CEO Dave Goldberg, it’s used by a number of enterprise-sized businesses. Yet the company hasn’t offered an enterprise plan or enterprise-focused features — even if you were signing up to use SurveyMonkey at a giant corporation, you were still signing up for an individual account.
That’s changing today with the launch of SurveyMonkey Enterprise. It gives businesses a way to manage multiple users, as well as pay a single bill for all of those users and claim complete ownership of the data collected from their surveys.
Goldberg said these new features address frequent requests from both existing SurveyMonkey users and potential customers who weren’t comfortable signing up until these “control issues” were resolved.
If anything, I was surprised that the company didn’t offer something like this already. Goldberg said it hasn’t felt like a necessity until now. Plus, the company supposedly had to “rebuild our whole technology architecture” to support these plans and features, a process that took several years — Goldberg suggested that we can expect the launch of more products that take advantage of the new architecture.
He also pitched this launch as part of a larger trend toward “the consumerization of the enterprise,” where large businesses start using more consumer-style products.
Not that SurveyMonkey was really consumer-focused before this. Instead, Goldberg described it as a “weird hybrid” between the consumer and enterprise business models. Although it’s sold to individuals, he said it’s mostly used in “a work context,” and the company already offers a “Platinum” plan with features like phone support and HIPAA compliance. (The Platinum features will also be included in SurveyMonkey Enterprise.)
Initial customers of the new enterprise product include Aetna, Hearst Corporation, the New York Giants, and Yamaha.
