Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Welcome to UpYourStack Podcast. I'm your host, Noah Berk. Every week we feature some of our favorite app developers who've either built their applications on HubSpot or have integrated with HubSpot to help get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack.

And today I have a very exciting guest, which I know we all do all the time. I won't give it away what they do just yet, but Kamil welcome to the show. He is from Survicate. Welcome.

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Thanks. I appreciate you having me.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Well, it's absolutely fantastic. And what I want to start off with, if you can just share with the audience your role at the organization and what does Survicate do? And then also I want to add in, where does the name come from? Three questions in one.

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: All right. So, as you mentioned, my name is Kamil. I run the company. I'm the CEO and and Founder. And yeah, I've been doing that for around 11 years now. Yeah. And what is Survicate? That's that's a pretty difficult question. I must say, especially lately, and we are still trying to figure it out because quite recently we've we've went through a product revolution.

So it changed how we tell the story about about our product. So the best way to go about about it would be to break it down into pre evolution or revolution and after. So, if you would ask that question a few months ago, I would say Survicate is an effortless and powerful customer survey software or a hassle free experience software customer journey survey.

For HubSpot users out there I would position it as highest rated survey app in the ecosystem and one of the most popular ones. And that's a fact. Now, you could say there's plenty of different software survey softwares out there. So how it's different how it's better First of all, we focus on customer feedback solely and within that Niche you could say we are extremely flexible so you could run any customer survey Launch it Anywhere across the customer journey, so you can think of customer research, onboarding, segmentation, NPS, CSAT, CS, website feedback, post purchase, and so on and so forth.

So that would be one thing. 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So, so let me pause you for a second there. Where did this idea of this company originally come from? Like, why start this type of survey tool? And you said you've been doing it for 11 years now. So, so how did it come about?

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Well, initially that the initial idea wasn't about surveys, actually. And again that's a good question because it is somewhat related to HubSpot. So, as I mentioned, 11 years ago, I was working in a corporation. I was a product manager for office Management software. And I got really into inbound marketing and what was the best source of inbound marketing knowledge, if not HubSpot.

So I was reading everything HubSpot. I've done my inbound inbound marketing certified professional. Certification. So, and I was learning a lot about marketing automation, different Martek apps. I even tried to introduce marketing automation to the company, but as I was learning about the technology out there I really I wanted to connect my background in product management with that interest in marketing technology.

And came up with a pretty simple idea for software that was supposed to be a call to action that you can put on the website. Without any developer, but I wanted to give it a bit of personalization capability. So that was supposed to be a question that would qualify you for the best call to action to be shown.

So this is how. Yeah,

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: it grew in from there. Okay.

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: once we got there, we learned that there is actually a category of of survey tools that you can put on the website so that you can collect website feedback. And this is how we unintentionally got into. Website feedback software category. And this is where we started and we've been growing and developing the product for the first two years.

But once we got traction once we got started to started getting feedback from our users, they were asking. Can I put that survey into email? Can I run NPS surveys and so on and so forth? We had the fastest pivot in the history of the company which we pivoted from a point solution being website feedback tool.

Into a broad category of survey software slash customer experience with email surveys, NPS CSAT, and so on and so forth.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Yeah. And so you had mentioned that up until recently, a few months ago that you knew the business you were in. So what changed? What business or where are you now versus just even a few months ago, this point.

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Yeah. So, feedback happens not only when you ask for it it's out there. Whenever customers interact with you with your company, with your sales team, with your customers, customer support oftentimes they leave feedback and that feedback leaves in different tools, in different teams, it's siloed.

Apart from that feedback leaves outside of your reach or control within customer reviews. And since the mission of our company is to tackle the customer feedback problem, we wanted to go beyond surveys and enable customers to unsilo. Customer feedback and this is how insights hub came to life.

Which is, you could say a second leg or second module of of our platform. What it does is it enables you to connect all those apps all the sources with customer feedback. So. Chat conversations, emails, reviews tickets including HubSpot tickets fetch all those interactions, extract customer feedback and categorize categorize it into themes topics quantify that so you can.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So even if it's not directly being sent as quote, a survey, what this tool is enabling companies to do is essentially consolidate all customer touch points into. What would be had to like a survey, because at that point you have your, maybe people were asking questions on chat, or maybe they're giving feedback there.

Maybe they're saying something to support. Maybe they're saying something to sales. And essentially what you're saying is it can extrapolate all that information to say. Here's how you're doing. It's almost like a score of some sort how happy are your customers?

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Yeah, that's that's a good way to put it. I also like to say what we enable our customers today is to ask. And listen to customer feedback.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So, so over the years, what do you suppose is some of the key reasons you've gained traction? Like where's the growth come from and how have you gained traction over the years?

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Well, obviously, initially, that will be something that you could call, maybe not growth hacking, but guerrilla marketing. So, basically, you want to be listed here and there, whatever possible so that people can find you. We've been working on SEO so that certificate was easy to find, but what really gave us traction was integrating with popular tools out there, especially marketing technology.

And obviously since HubSpot ecosystem is one of the biggest ones that is one of the most important ecosystems for us.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Interesting. And who uses you? Who comes to you and says, I need your software. Is it the marketing leader? Is it a customer service leader? Is it a CRO? Like generally who's buying from you?

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Yeah. Well, we have users from all the teams. So, if I would put them all together into one bucket, I would call them go to market teams or go to market.

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Looking at personas that the most popular persona or where we are the most popular within that's marketing.

But again, that is somehow connected with HubSpot being very popular among marketers. Then product product marketing, user research. And then long tail sales teams customer success.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Interesting. Okay. So pretty much anyone who needs to gather that information and do their job better, which is a lot of people in an organization. If you're a go to market product marketer, for example, maybe your product marketing, whatever the case is, you need to gather as much of this as possible and know how to position the product.

So it makes a lot of sense. Now, obviously, there's a lot of different tools in the survey space, and I know you're evolving your product right now to be to extrapolate information from a Cross different resources to give you a better think of a customer satisfaction score. Like how are we doing? What are the key words?

But how do you differentiate yourself in this space versus your competitors?

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Yeah. So, well, one thing that makes us different different is for sure that that ability to to connect the different feedback sources and digest that to give you a birthday view on your customer feedback to listen to that. But that, that is that is something pretty new and maybe not necessarily that important for someone that is about to decide which survey tool to choose.

So, how we differ as a survey tool. So, first of all I would say we are extremely flexible. You can use SurveyGate to basically run any survey across customer journey, not only via email, but also embed surveys on on your website and collect feedback there, target different segments of your website visitors.

You can do the same thing deep within your product. So, collect customer or user feedback in the context of the situation while they are using your product. You can trigger those surveys based on different user properties, events, and so on and so forth. Yeah. You can do that within mobile applications if you have one.

So, that is one thing I would say flexibility. Then something that our users appreciate a lot and maybe people may take for granted but that is not always the case ease of use so that, that powerful flexibility doesn't come with a cost of user experience.

So, somehow we managed to build a really a powerful survey tool that is easy to use like an iPhone. Third I would mention our customer support team that is out of this world and that is. An actual quote.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Well, can I say you are in an industry that you probably should have pretty good customer support and I'm sure your surveys are on point to

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Yeah. And last but not least, since most of our viewers today are using HubSpot I, I would mention that we have by far the best integration with with HubSpot. This is a native integration. You don't need any third party to to set it up. It's just a few clicks.

And it's pretty flexible. I don't know how should I go into details here?

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: go into detail, actually, because I think a lot of our listeners want to understand, especially when they hear from these app developers is what can this tool do and more importantly, like what gaps HubSpot ecosystem? So you talk briefly about how you built this out of the box integration with HubSpot.

But why you, Hotspot has survey tools. Why would they use yours? And what gap are you filling in the ecosystem that the existing tools may not necessarily be be the right tool for them?

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Right. Okay, so, so whenever we approach integration we do like to integrate the hell out, out of it. So basically whatever API endpoint makes sense, we connect to that and this is what we've been doing with HubSpot. Luckily, HubSpot API is absolutely amazing. You can do everything with that.

So, that integration pretty much follows the whole process of running or creating and running a survey. So, starting from creating and distributing the survey, once you create it, with one click you can send that to HubSpot. To your email template. Second once you start collecting responses, we auto identify respondents, so you don't need to ask for email.

Then you can map questions to your contact properties. Super easy. We fetch all those properties that you have in your CRM and you can choose that from the list. Obviously you can create new properties as well if you want. We generate custom events on cost contact timeline.

You can create new contacts with survey responses. So we can also use that for lead generation. Something that I know is pretty important for HubSpot users is that we collect partial responses. So you, you don't need to, like your respondents don't need to submit the whole survey, even if they stop halfway through all the information gathered so far will be saved to their contact profiles.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: And that's huge. I don't know about you. I'm sure you know about yourself. Filling out surveys. I'm sure you have a critical eye every time a survey comes through, but I know sometimes you buy something like, Hey, here's a survey and you think it's one question Oh yeah, sure. I'll click this.

And you're like, wait a second. There's two more questions. I'll do this. And you're like, all right, listen, I'm done filling out this. You've asked me three questions. That's two more than I thought I was going to fill out here. And there's probably 20 more in the string and it's cool that yours collects that.

So I guess they can use it, not just at least get those responces but also understand. Maybe these aren't the best questions to be asking because people stop filling them out and you get that data as well.

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Yeah, and especially if you want to automate anything based on survey responses you can use the first or first two questions to to build automation rules and not rely on on customers filling out the whole survey.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Is there a particular size company that gets the most use out of your application? Is it, do they need to have a million contacts or can an organization with 5, 000 contacts or 5, 000 customers be able to take advantage of it? Do you, is there a recommended minimum and also is there a maximum?

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: So, is there a recommended minimum? Yeah, obviously, if you have, I don't know, 50 or 100 customers, it doesn't really make sense to to run a surveys because at that scale, it's far

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Pick up the phone and call them.

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Absolutely. Absolutely. Survey is a tool for collecting customer feedback at scale.

So I would say the scale would be starting somewhere around maybe 500 customers, users, whatever minimum so that you can end up with those 50 responses per survey or per month at least. There

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Is there a maximum or can you handle millions upon millions? It doesn't matter to you.

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: is no maximum. We have have customers that collect even a few hundred thousand responses per month. And we have customers that we've, that have been with us for years, collecting responses or running simply the same survey over those years. And as far as I recall, we have, handful, like maybe five or so customers with surveys of over 500, 000 responses and still you. You can analyze that, you can use filter and so on and so forth. There are no limitations.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Are there do's and don'ts? And I know there are when it comes to surveying. You have probably every best practice under the sun at this point, but is there a common mistake everyone makes running surveys that you just want to pull your hair out when you see them doing that? That you're like, if you get one thing across to this audience, do not do X. Or maybe do x.

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Well, it really depends on what you want to achieve. Something that came to my mind, I don't know if that's the most important thing. Simply, it's for some reason on the top of my head. Would be maybe don't start with open text response. If you want to get people engaged, start with a single or multiple choice just to get them into the survey, then ask follow up questions so they can explain the reason behind the score or whatever.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Listeners, do not be that company that sends open text surveys. Okay, just don't be them. We will call you out if we ever see that. I'll be sure to send an email to Kamil and say, " huh, I found one". So what, yeah,

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: if I can make a comment and maybe I also coming back to those features related to HubSpot a good practice and something that is possible with Servicate as well. And with with HubSpot integration is to embed the very first question within the body of email. So it's not only a link, you can embed the very first question there.

It looks like if the survey would be filled out within within your inbox. Actually, it's not because you're going to be redirected to to a landing page to, to finish the survey, but still. That is way more engaging than simply putting a link.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: great advice. So I think you're already sharing some of the future roadmap of Servicate to the public and obviously to these listeners. But what does the future roadmap look like? And then how does AI Play a part in it.

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Yeah. So, maybe I'll start with AI because this is something that we are exploring our in a bit we implemented that already. So, I mentioned Insights Hub. It's powered by ai that, that whole categorization of of feedback happens with the help of of ai. But on top of of Insights Hub and survey software have something called a research assistant. Which basically, you could think of that as your research sidekick. 

So once you collect feedback either with surveys or from other sources or both, and you have that database of feedback, you can use research assistant which is basically a chatbot to help you with the research. You can ask any questions about anything related to the data. 

You have collected and he will, it will do the research for you or at least help you with the research big time.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: That is really cool. Okay, that's fair. And that also goes back to your whole thing of extrapolating all the data across the board from all the different sources. That is very cool. One of the questions I also have for you is I like to ask all my, my guests on the show is what advice do you have for other entrepreneurs?

You've been doing this for 11 years. You've seen it all so far. You've probably been through all the ups and downs one can imagine the entrepreneur rollercoaster story, entrepreneur sitting in front of you or business leader sitting in front of you and can I get some advice here?

What advice would you share with them? I

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: Well, an obvious advice but I am biased here would be listen to customer feedback, collect customer feedback. But something that I like to do. Often and it's not related to to survey, Survicate or whatever, is go for a walk. The best ideas come to my mind whenever I'm in the woods, simply having a long one hour walk.

Obviously, before that, you need to digest est data about different problems that are on your mind, but most often or most likely, you won't get the best solution while still being in front of your monitor, worrying about things. Go to go for a walk. Forget about that.

And suddenly you will get really good ideas. So what I do,

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: love, I love that. I love that. I love that. I have a gentleman on my team. He goes for a walk each day. During lunch for an hour, blocks the time off. And he says, that's his best thinking time. It's a time he's recharges best ideas. And I imagine in your case, you probably go for a walk before you have to either make it, have an important conversation or before to your point, digest an idea or ingest an idea.

I don't know which one it is or digesting or ingesting it as we're going through, but I love that. I don't think I've heard anything quite like that on this podcast, but I think if you're out there, by all means. Go for that walk. Maybe if it's not negative 100 degrees or whatever, how cold it would be, or, maybe it's not a storm outside, but other than that be fantastic time.

That's awesome. Kamil thank you so much for joining the show. This is fantastic. Your product sounds and is absolutely awesome. We have a customer who uses so I can attest to it from there. So don't go ahead and check it out. This company has been around. They're doing really cool things. And Kamil if people want to learn more about you or more about cervicate, great.

Transcribed how did they find out information about you? How did they get in touch with you and how they get more information about the company?

Kamil Rejent, Survicate: sure. So that's you can go to our website, that's cervicate. com, S U R V I C A T E dot com. You can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. And for all the HubSpot users out there. You can also find us in HubSpot ecosystem in customer service category.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Awesome. Well, again, thank you so much for joining us and listeners. Thank you so much for listening today. That wraps up our show again. UpYourStack is a weekly podcast featuring app partners and people have either built their apps on HubSpot or have integrated with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack again.

I'm Noah Berk. If you'd like to learn more about me, feel free to check me out on LinkedIn. Again, thank you so much for joining us today and hope you enjoyed.

Thanks. 

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