Have you ever wanted your own toll-free phone number for customer feedback? Or a local area phone number to use as the caller-id when conducting an outbound political survey?

We’re delighted to now let you pick your own local or toll-free phone number. The process couldn’t be easier: you describe the number you want to purchase by area code (or toll-free), click to see a list of what’s available, and buy the one you like. You may use this number immediately for inbound or outbound calling.

And it’s affordable; local and toll-free phone numbers cost only $3 per month. Use a phone number for just one month, or keep it for years.

But that’s not all! We’re also lowering the cost of inbound phone surveys to 10 cents per each 5 minutes of connection time (before, it was 25 cents per 5 minutes). Toll-free inbound calls will cost 20 cents per 5 minutes of connection time.

Now, you can afford to create a myriad of inbound surveys, each with its own phone number. Are you a small business owner interested in customer feedback? Print a phone number on the bottom of your receipts and signs, so people can call into your phone survey. Does your organization include members who don’t have access to a computer? Now they can participate by simply dialing your hotline. Teachers can use inbound surveys to collect information and ideas from parents… the list goes on and on. We’d love to hear your ideas, too, in the comments area.

But enough talk! Here’s a real-life example of a dial-in customer feedback hotline for Precision Polling.

Call (877) 775-5835

Click here to see the results. The survey is:

SECTION #1:
Hi, thanks for calling Precision Polling's customer feedback survey.

SECTION #2:
How did you hear about Precision Polling? Google search, Google ad, Friend
told you, Read an article, or Other? Press 1 for Google search. Press 2 for
Google ad. Press 3 for Friend told you. Press 4 for Read an article. Press 5
for Other.

SECTION #3:
Are you likely to use Precision Polling in the future? Yes, No, or Maybe? Press
1 for Yes. Press 2 for No. Press 3 for Maybe.

   BRANCH: If the respondent picks 2 then go to #5: Thank you for your feedback!
           Goodbye.

SECTION #4:
Great! What kinds of surveys might you do?  Customer satisfaction, Employee
surveys, Political research, Education, Engage to members of your organization,
or Other? Press 1 for Customer satisfaction. Press 2 for Employee surveys.
Press 3 for Political research. Press 4 for Education. Press 5 for Engage to
members of your organization. Press 6 for Other.

SECTION #5:
Thank you for your feedback! Goodbye.

We have big news: SurveyMonkey, the world leader in web surveys, has acquired Precision Polling! The deal was completed yesterday, and Precision Polling is now wholly owned and operated by SurveyMonkey LLC.

We are thrilled to be joining forces with SurveyMonkey. Not only are they pioneers in the research space, but they also share our vision: make it easy, fast, and affordable for people in every industry and across the world to gather the data they need to make better decisions. More importantly, this change means an even better Precision Polling experience for you. We’re bringing on a dedicated support team to give you world class support, and adding more members to our team so you get powerful new features faster than ever before. We will also be working on tying the two services together, so that you can go to one place for all your phone and web survey needs.

Of course, this is very exciting for us personally too. As a small team of two founders, we’ve worked very hard over the past year to build a product that people love to use. In a year, we’ve won two politics awards (Pollie and Rising Star) and served large national and local organizations. We will be joining the SurveyMonkey team, and continuing to build and grow Precision Polling.

You can continue to use the service as you did before, with the same great features, at the same affordable prices (except now, those of you in Washington state are no longer charged sales tax). We have updated our terms of use and privacy policy as part of the transition.

Thank you for your business, support, and feedback; we wouldn’t have gotten here without you.

When folks are getting started with Precision Polling - or polling in general - the same questions keep coming up come up. How much will it cost? What is the best way to phrase my questions? How do retries work?

We’ve distilled our answers into a friendly FAQ that should guide you as you start using our system. Please let us know if you think of anything else that should be there, and we’ll be sure to add it.

Check out our brand new FAQ now!

Last weekend we had the honor of being invited to speak about polling fundamentals to a room full of Seattle’s next generation of political and civic leaders at their campaigns and elections training weekend.

To also share his expertise, we invited one of our friends (and a Precision Polling customer), a senior researcher at the The Washington Poll, to join us in presenting to the group.

The audience had lots of great questions, and all of us learned a good deal about polling and the role it plays in winning campaigns. We realized that there’s lots of useful information in the slides we put together, and so wanted to share them with you. If you’re interested in learning about: polling methodology, practical tips on polling, typical costs of polling, polling trends in campaigns, and more, please click on the images below to download the slide decks.

We released a slew of changes today; some big, and many small. Here are some of the changes you’ll notice:

Detect Answering Machines?

When running outbound calls, you can now pick whether or not to perform answering machine detection. Answering machine detection helps to improve accuracy in results about whether it was a person or machine who picked up, but it typically adds a 2-5 second pause at the start of your survey. If you don’t need to do this, you can now turn it off.

Faster Poll Editing

We made a lot of improvements on the poll editing page to make it much snappier and more responsive. You’ll love how much faster it is to get started and make changes!

Delete Past Polls

You can now delete any past poll. This is especially useful for getting rid of test surveys and uncluttering your dashboard. Don’t worry; we archived polls for several days before deleting them from our database, so you won’t accidentally lose valuable data.

Delete Phone Lists

Likewise, you can delete phone lists that you’re no longer using.

In the guts of our system, there is a single, big, red knob labeled “Call Volume.” (Metaphorically speaking, of course). When we started, we set it at a bit over 10,000 calls per hour, and that worked fine. But since more folks are using the system and want to run ever-larger campaigns, we decided to twist the knob to 30,000 - thus tripling our capacity. To do this, we had to add a bit more hardware first, but fortunately our system is built so we can just add more computers as we grow. Need to make even more calls? Just let us know, and we’ll crank the knob up even higher.

We’re delighted to announce that the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC) awarded us a Pollie for the Most Innovative Use of Automated Phone Technology!

The AAPC is one of the most important professional organizations in politics, and for them to recognize us with a Pollie is an honor. Our prize was based on the fact that we make sophisticated polling accessible to even the smallest of campaigns, a revolutionary change to the current landscape that even Mark Blumenthal remarked on in his column in the National Journal.

When we started Precision Polling, our hope was to make it possible for anyone to gather data quickly and affordably using the telephone. As a young technology startup, founded by a team that’s new to the world of politics, we couldn’t be more happy to know that our work is making an impact in this space. Our thanks go to our customers for helping us build a great product that delights consultants, pollsters, and campaign managers alike, and helps win races.