Loop co-founder and CEO Rajit Marwah argued that “surveys and reviews are everywhere” — but they’re often ignored or delayed. With his new startup, on the other hand, Marwah said he’s giving businesses a way to create and conduct those surveys easily and quickly.
When a business downloads the Loop iOS app, they can use one of the app’s survey templates (the templates are based on business type, such as restaurant or hotel) or create a survey from scratch, then share it via email, Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else you can post a link.
The most interesting use case, however, is the ability to open a survey from an iPad. So instead of hoping a customer will fill out a survey in a day or two, businesses can just hand them an iPad, and they can give their answers in just a few seconds. That means you get a much higher feedback rate, and that feedback is immediate, unlike “receipts surveys, 1-800 numbers, and clumsy email surveys,” Marwah said.
“After visiting a business, most customers move on and don’t bother to give feedback after the fact,” he added. “Feedback in the moment is something consumers actually respond to.”
Marwah also said that the Loop app was just built by two people — himself and his co-founder/CTO Mike Liu. He painted that as a plus, because it shows that Loop is a lean company. (It has raised seed funding from Archimedes Labs, an incubator whose chief product officer Keith Teare also co-founded TechCrunch.) He added that Loop is taking a mobile-first approach — it’s not just that the surveys are conducted on iPad, but businesses can also create and share surveys, as well as view results, directly from the mobile app.
I don’t conduct many surveys myself, but at Marwah’s urging, I tried out the app. With the templates, it took only a few taps to launch a new survey from my iPhone, which I could then open on an iPad. Once I turned on Guided View, I could lock the iPad onto the survey screen; you can imagine giving it to a customer to fill out without any distractions. And after I completed the survey, the results were immediately live in the iPhone app.
Loop was previously available as a limited beta test — during that period, Marwah said it saw response rates that were up to 30 times higher than traditional surveys. Today it’s launching globally, and it’s available in 34 languages and 155 countries.