AiC Episode 69

In this episode, Teri welcomes Stuart Crane, the Founder and CEO of Voice Metrics, a company that helps businesses get their key performance indicators by voice.

Welcome, Stuart Crane!

Stuart co-founded CPR+ in 1993, and it ultimately became the dominant enterprise system used by the Specialty Pharmacy market, an industry providing high-tech pharmaceuticals to patients in the home. After 20+ years of building software, growing the B2B business, making acquisitions, and learning a ton about metrics and measuring business performance, Stuart and his partner sold CPR+ to Mediware Information Systems in July, 2013.

In 2017, Stuart created Voice Metrics, an API-based service that allows any business to access their KPI’s, metrics, and important company information, just by asking. While dashboards, spreadsheets, and even email attachments will still have their place to help a business succeed, the ability to get key business metrics any time, any place, without logging in or even touching a device, has been Stuart’s vision since the advent of Siri, and now Alexa and Google Assistant.

VoiceMetrics also recently launched “SurveyLine” which allows businesses and individuals to create a survey and send it out through voice assistants

Developing an Interest in Voice

  • From way back in the 80s, Stuart always liked listening to things, and years later got into podcasts in a big way. He was always interested in voice recognition (how a computer can understand what a person is saying)
  • In Christmas 2014, he got an Amazon Echo and it fascinated him.
  • He was also deeply into smart homes and home automation since the 80s and 90s.

SurveyLine

  • This is a platform like SurveyMonkey where you just go in and create your survey and then it’s available to be taken by voice.
  • They launched SurveyLine at The 2019 Alexa Conference in Chattanooga, TN, and they got a very good reception.
  • It’s a way for anyone (a company, organization or individual) to create a survey, like people do with SurveyMonkey, with questions that can be multiple choice, free form, yes/no, ratings, and others.
  • Instead of sharing out the survey through a link, one makes it immediately available on Amazon Alexa or Google Home so that the participants/audience can take the survey using their voice assistants.
  • The SurveyLine skill is on the Alexa skill store and anyone can create a survey, and their audience can take the surveys instantly by saying “Open SurveyLine” and then saying the name of the survey.
  • A survey can also be white-labeled or branded so that a user can use a brand name to launch a particular survey, for example, “Open BestBuy survey”
  • They are focused on building the platform out so it can do all kinds of capabilities like branching, logic, conditional responses and all the things that traditional surveys need to be able to do.
  • They just added the capability to do real voices. Surveys can be conducted by recorded voice talents instead of just the typical voice of Alexa or Google Assistant.

Surveys by Voice with Stuart Crane

Creating a Voice Survey with SurveyLine

  • Every voice survey is available on the SurveyLine skill.
  • When one creates their survey they have to name it, for example, “Skyline Chilli Survey.” One has to give it a name that doesn’t conflict with another survey that’s already on the platform.
  • When one is done creating the survey, anyone can say, “Alexa, start SurveyLine” and then SurveyLine runs, and comes up and asks, “What survey would you like to take?” and the user will say, “Skyline Chilli Survey.”
  • If Skyline wants to brand their survey, SurveyLine can create a skill and push it into the Alexa skill store by getting it certified, and it would be called “Skyline Chilli Survey” so then the user will only need to say, “Start Skyline Chilli Survey”
  • SurveyLine has an announce function that when clicked creates a clipboard text that the user can put into Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, text, or email.
  • In the SurveyLine app, there is a button called “Results” which when clicked opens up a grid showing all of the results of all the people who have taken a particular survey. Right now the respondents are anonymous. Each row on the grid is a respondent and it shows every question and what the respondent answered. The user can then export the survey results to Excel or CSV.
  • Freeform surveys are converted to text.

SurveyLine Use Case Success Stories

  • They are testing it in a lot of different areas.
  • In healthcare, they are creating patient satisfaction surveys and drug usage surveys.
  • In retail, they are creating surveys for visits to stores and restaurants.
  • They are working with a very large global market research company that wants to use SurveyLine for all their clients.
  • They are also targeting digital agencies and market research companies rather than different brands directly.
  • Different people are using SurveyLine to create surveys and are pushing them out to their co-workers or families just to test it out.

The Future

  • Potentially, they will integrate with SurveyMonkey and other survey platforms where users can convert their surveys to voice.
  • They are working with the APL (Alexa Presentation Language) to develop SurveyLine for different Amazon Echo devices.
  • They will be attending the “Voice of the Car Summit” because in the near future people will be able to easily take surveys while in their cars. For example, when a person goes to a drive-through restaurant like Taco Bell, all their receipts read “take our survey” somewhere on the receipt, but nobody really takes them because they have to go to their computer and type in a long URL. A survey by voice will be easier for people to take in their cars.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

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