SurveyMonkey Forms has new templates, pre-built prompts

SurveyMonkey on Tuesday released Forms, its new form building tool for businesses.

With Forms, the experience management vendor is including four pre-built question fields, new customizable templates and integrations with collaboration apps.

SurveyMonkey Forms costs $49 per month, or $336 per year. All the new features are generally available now.

An online survey pioneer, SurveyMonkey was founded in 1999. Its owner, experience management software vendor Momentive, was acquired in March for about $1.5 billion by a consortium led by private equity firm Symphony Technology Group.

The new ownership took the company private and in June returned the survey vendor subsidiary's name to SurveyMonkey after dropping the name in a rebranding in 2021. A Zendesk bid to buy Momentive for $4.1 billion fell through in 2022.

More options for customization

As part of the  release, SurveyMonkey added templates and design options for choosing form component colors, fonts, font colors and font sizes.

Adding design options gives customers more leeway to create forms that fit their brands' aesthetic and appeal to their target audience, and many  vendors are providing such flexibility, according to IDC analyst Lou Reinemann.

"Many vendors are now pushing to provide customized experiences for the users, as well as personalization -- understanding more about the end user before engaging with them and then providing personized experiences" Reinemann said.

Other vendors with customizable form offerings include Qualtrics, Google Forms and Typeform.

Inviting customers to connect

Offering forms that are inviting and easy to use is a way that companies can collect data from and connect with customers, Reinemann added.

"Having templates for forms is a very important piece in order to make their use easier, but it is only a piece of a bigger solution of how to get data from customers and make the interaction look appealing and feel satisfying," he said.

But how companies use this data is pivotal, according to Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller.

"The real gold will be connecting the sentiment and feedback from an engagement like a survey into the next actions that can be orchestrated with a form for an event or a demo," Miller said. "As with all opportunities to collect customer data, a strategy here is a must."

Forms that are disorganized, difficult to understand and received at inappropriate times can leave customers feeling frustrated, confused and indifferent, creating negative impressions of the brand. In addition, such disoriented data collection can infringe on regulations, Miller added.

"Random acts of collection can lead to unintentionally fragmented experiences -- not to mention more than a couple potential issues with corporate data policies and those larger regulatory guidelines," Miller said.

Fewer steps to build surveys

SurveyMonkey added four pre-built question fields that form builders can drag and drop into the form while constructing it, rather than having to manually build each field from scratch.

The pre-built fields also display the respondents' answers in a less cluttered, more concise way, making the data easier to manage, according to Mike Greenberg, product marketing director at SurveyMonkey.

These pre-built fields prompt form respondents to provide their names, email addresses, phone numbers and home addresses, which are common required fields in forms for sign-ups, purchases and donations.

SurveyMonkey Forms also includes integrations with collaboration applications Google Sheets, Mailchimp and Zapier.

Mary Reines is a news writer covering customer experience and unified communications for TechTarget Editorial. Before TechTarget, Reines was arts editor at the Marblehead Reporter.