Qualaroo: a reliable solution in a fast-changing market

Qualaroo's exit survey feature is probably better-suited to eCommerce sites (which we are not). The two questions I would ask in considering Qualaroo are:

1) How much control do you need over targeting specific "nudges" to specific pages and how complex are the URLs on your site? If you want tight controls, Qualaroo can give you that, but you need to be able to write (potentially) complex regular expressions to get the targeting you need. If you don't need tight controls, there are likely simpler and cheaper options out there.

2) Do you want a solution that integrates seamlessly into existing systems? If your site has a registration wall or a pay wall or you otherwise have access to identifying information about your users, Qualaroo's API makes it easy to know exactly who is responding to your surveys. Again, there are less expensive options out there if you don't need this.

The micro-survey landscape is evolving very quickly and it seems like there is a new entrant almost every month. I'm generally happy with Qualaroo (we got what we expected) and I like the folks on the Qualaroo team (support is fast and friendly and rarely needed), but there haven't been real improvements to the platform in the last eight months. We will be re-assessing Qualaroo's features and price versus other competitors when our current contract is up.

Have your technical team set up the "Identify" feature right out of the gate - this is a "fire and forget" feature. Once it's set up, your data is much more valuable. Also, if there are very specific kinds of page targeting you might imagine doing, have a technical person set up and test at least 2-3 examples of using Qualaroo's regular expression features to achieve this targeting. With a couple good examples in place to work from, it becomes much easier to create your own regular expressions for custom targeting.

Not available for the Pro edition.

Qualaroo doesn't offer full-blown online training, at least not that I've used or needed. The online help documentation is adequate and Qualaroo-sponsored webinars are informative.

Qualaroo support is prompt, but seems ad hoc. From my limited experience, I would say that Qualaroo doesn't have a very rigorous process in place for tracking cases yet. It's all email-based with no customer portal where you can see your cases (current and historical). On the positive side, I haven't had to submit a support case in over 10 months, so it's entirely possible that their processes have evolved in the interim.

Qualaroo's feature set is narrow, keeping the admin interface relatively simple to navigate.

Qualaroo recently improved the way users can write and test regular expressions, improving the usability of that feature significantly (this was likely motivated by a high volume of support inquiries to Qualaroo on this feature).

The one area where Qualaroo could significantly improve usability is on the ability to design nudges with multiple questions. Adding a drag-and-drop feature to organize questions (even if this doesn't actually affect the branch logic that sequences the questions themselves) would be a big improvement.

Qualaroo's simplicity has its down sides when it comes to scaling. Managing multiple nudges across multiple domains, at least in the Pro edition, is challenging. The active nudges all appear as a single list on the admin home page, automatically grouped by domains. Archived nudges are on a separate tab. It would be helpful to have a folder system to organize nudges.

Also, once you have multiple active nudges that are targeted to different sections of your site using regular expressions, it's difficult to keep track of what is appearing where. It's also difficult, if not impossible, to figure out where you may have competing nudges.

And there's no ability to assign reporting or configuration access to other members of your team. The Pro edition has a single login, which must be shared if you have multiple staff who want to use Qualaroo.

I've never experienced an outage where Qualaroo was unavailable. I don't think I've even gotten notices for scheduled down/maintenance time. The platform is always available.

Our developers complain that Qualaroo is just one of several similar site add-ons that slow down our site performance. I'm skeptical that Qualaroo has any measurable impact on our page load times, but don't have any hard evidence either way. The Qualaroo admin interface and reporting mechanisms are all quick and reliable.