Online survey business leverages A.I. to learn customers’ needs

By Ben Olson
Reader Stuff

When it comes to gathering data from customers, there are few easier options than running an online survey. Respondents can give anonymous feedback, providing business owners with important metrics to help better understand their customers’ needs.

To help accomplish this goal, local entrepreneur Mike Peck has introduced a new business called Survey Noodle, which utilizes A.I. to help business owners easily and quickly create and share surveys with their customer base.

Survey Noodle — named after his son’s cat, Noodle — is an intelligent new survey generation and management platform that Peck and his co-founder are hoping will replace online surveys like Survey Monkey or MailChimp.

Peck, who moved to North Idaho in seventh grade and graduated from Sandpoint High School in 1999, said he first became interested in surveys after leading a team of 20 people while working at Kochava.

“I was always interested in their feedback,” Peck told the Reader. “Developers are a wide spectrum. Sometimes they’ll say it right to your face, sometimes they prefer to give feedback anonymously. I wanted to build a platform to help other people give and receive feedback.”

Survey Noodle is simply set up, with an A.I. interface that helps get the user off the ground right away. Type in what you want the survey to accomplish and give it a few parameters, and the A.I. will return with questions that users can adjust to meet their needs.

The Reader gave Survey Noodle a test drive recently, prompting the platform to design a five-question survey that asks readers what they want more out of the newspaper and what they like the most. Thanks to a few dozen responses, we found that our readers are really interested in historical stories about the area, a note we’ve taken by adding more of this type of content in the near future.

“The whole goal is to make survey creation as easy as possible,” Peck said. “If you want to capture how employees are feeling or how customers are reacting to a certain product, just give it a sentence or two and the A.I. will come up with questions, then you can edit those questions manually.”

Not only does the A.I. help generate the survey easily, but Peck said users can tap into the A.I. to regularly “chat” with the survey responses and find trends and patterns.

“It’s just like ChatGPT in that it has a full context of responses, it has your data, and it can then provide action items or suggestions,” Peck said. “It can even summarize all of this and put it  together in a PowerPoint presentation.”

Peck said while many online survey companies rely on their name recognition, none have features like this.

“It just doesn’t exist in any other survey platform,” he said. “They’re just doing survey creation, but they don’t have analysis or the chatting side yet like we do at Survey Noodle.”

Another feature is the ability for a local business to use Survey Noodle to gather feedback and reviews, then prompt the survey-takers to take their review a step further.

“One case we’re looking at is when survey customers give positive feedback, Survey Noodle will ask them to leave a public review,” Peck said, which can help spread the word to more potential customers.

Peck said anyone interested in giving Survey Noodle a spin can visit surveynoodle.com and start a free trial. Then, if it’s a good fit, users can pay a small monthly fee to use Survey Noodle to their advantage.

“It’s important for a business to be curious and want to improve,” Peck said. “They need to tap into all of the ideas from their customers, team or employees. Surveys are the quickest and easiest way to gain that insight.”

Learn more at surveynoodle.com.