I think for surveys PollDaddy still has a couple of features to catch up on, but I expect those should be done within a month or so.

Can you tell me some pros/coms of Polldaddy vs. Survey Monkey?

I would like to sincerely apologize for the frustration you have experienced in the past few weeks with Polldaddy support. We have been extremely busy moving our servers into our new home @automattic and I fully accept that we have been poor at times communicating this move. We did not expect there to be any downtime of any of our products but we were wrong. All of this moving will make for a much more stable Polldaddy platform in the future which will benefit all of our users. If you contact me directly at lenny [@] polldaddy.com I will be happy to jump on the phone with you and sort out any issues you are having.

Lenny
PollDaddy.com

We have been using PollDaddy Professional for approx 8 months. I’m hoping acquisition by Automatic bodes only good things. We are a large US-based media company and despite my original enthusiasm for the product and great 3rd party reviews, reception here has soured.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a lovely, simple interface and we’ve got no less than 20 polls going at a time. The trouble is customer service and communication. When I originally inquired about this, I was told that they proactively communicate with clients regarding service outages, regularly scheduled maintenance and ehancement roll outs.
Unfortunately, this has not proven to be the case. If and when this very talented team does communicate about issues, it is thru their blog and not with nearly enough specificity. Here are two recent examples that occured in the past two weeks.

1) On the morning of 10/8 none of our widgets published. We run anywhere from 10 plus polls a day so this was fairly noticeable. We logged onto the site and looked at the blog. No communication regarding any apparent issues just a notice that there was maintentance time scheduled for October 5th. We sent a note regarding the problem and heard back mid-day on the 9th. Here is the message we got: “Can you save your widget again and copy the new code to where you need it. We have made a change to where the polls are been hosted, which means the old code for the widget is no longer valid.” We had this code which we were relying on in over a dozen places on our site. The maintenance notice made no mention that things like widgets would have to be replaced post move. Had we known we could have easily prepared for this but instead we came into work with half a dozen complaints from folks at our company regarding the tool “once again” being broken.

2) Here’s another example – also regarding the widget. Up until earlier this week, if you updated via the widget, the change was instantaneous. One day ago this was suddenly no longer the case. Our content producer went in as he normally did to do his update and there was no change. He looked in the blog area to see if perhaps there was a message saying the service was down. No message. Eventually 10 minutes later his update finally appeared on the site. I wrote the polldaddy guys and heard back a day later with the following response from Eon – “We are having issues with our encoding for widgets. It has since been fixed.
It will now take 10 minutes from the time you edit a poll for changes to be obvious on a site. This is has to do with a cache infrastructure we have recently moved to. We are going to provide a preview of the poll on the PollDaddy site so you can see what changes you make in real time and we hope the delay will not inconvenience our users.”

While this was certainly less of an issue than example 1, once again, this falls into the example of something she should specifically and proactively tell the customer. I have half a dozen other examples I’d be happy to share with you.

Paying power users like ourselves need better communication. It should also be proactively delivered via email and the admin interface where we log in. It should also contain practical details regarding potential impact.

I really believed in the product and am getting increasing criticism here at work for going with what is being perceived as an unreliable and unprofessional company.

Thanks.