Receive Email Updates from Constant Contact Surveys: Feature Request

Update: Constant Contact has implemented this feature.

Get notified when you receive new survey responses

I use the CC Survey feature to send out web design questionnaires to potential clients. As such, I keep a survey open and receive responses sporadically. Currently, there’s no way to be notified by Constant Contact when my survey receives a response.

A temporary work-around

What I’m doing to get updates is I share the survey results as a separate page, and then submit the url to a RSS-creation service, which will email me when the page changes. FeedWhip also provides an RSS option, so that I could subscribe to the changes. This option works fine, but not well enough!

My email to Constant Contact

After missing a couple of survey responses and feeling stupid about it, I finally let CC know that an email notifications feature is important to me.

I would like to have notification options for the surveys, so that I can choose to be notified when a person fills in a survey.

It would be good to have different delivery intervals (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, etc) and different delivery options, including email, file attachments (PDF, CSV, XML), RSS, SMS, etc.

Refer to Google Analytics export options and functionality. That’s what Survey should have.

Is scheduled reporting and better export options too much to ask?

Constant Contact charges $15.00/month for their online survey feature. It’s a fine tool, and integrates very well with their newsletter services (which is why I recommend it). The tool, while working well, leaves some features to be desired.

Constant Contact allows you to export only to CSV, and they aren’t too pleasant about it:

Below is a list of recent survey results (XLS that include text responses or any CSV) you’ve requested for exporting. Exporting these results may take up to two hours. Once the export process is complete, the files are available for only 7 days.

Other services can do it…Why can’t Constant Contact?

Google does reporting right

When it comes to creating custom reports, Google Analytics takes the cake. You can schedule reports at different intervals, sent them to multiple email addresses, and even choose between four handy formats (PDF, XML, CSV, TSV) that come attached to the email.

This feature makes Analytics about 300% more useful to me: I can set up my web design or SEO clients with automatic reports of the website’s progress. Very handy.

Zoho gets it right, too!

Relative newcomer on the web radar, Zoho has slowly been building momentum by offering nearly every service that Google does, but with their own style. I’ve been using Zoho Creator recently for lots of projects, and the functionality/price structure is great for setting up simple, in-depth, and (mostly) intuitive database applications.

Zoho allows you to write scripts that will automatically email you when changes are made to the database, and they also give you plenty of export options for your data.

I want more features…but until then, I’m happy

It may sound like I’m on a rant (which I am), but it would sure be nice to be given more features than needed, rather than less. Surveys are a new service for Constant Contact, so I hope they’ll improve in time.

What’s your experience with CC Surveys? What features would you like to see, or what other service do you use?