The Anonymous Employee Survey Tool Problem Every HR Consultant Has
Most survey tools assume one company polling itself. If you run surveys for clients, that assumption forces you into a shared login or an account per client. Here's the third option.
Every survey tool is built on the same assumption: one company, polling itself. Which is fine, until you are the person running the survey for somebody else.
Then you get two options, and both are bad.
Option one: one account, all your clients
You buy a workspace, you run every client's survey out of it, you keep the results in folders named after them.
This is the cheap one, and it is the one most firms end up on. It also means every client's employee feedback lives in an account they do not control, alongside their competitors' sometimes, and when the engagement ends you email them a PDF and keep the raw data forever because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Ask a client's general counsel what they think of that arrangement. The good ones ask, eventually.
Option two: an account per client, in their name
Cleaner on paper. The client buys their own subscription, adds you as a user, and owns their own data.
In practice you are now asking a company to buy software before they have seen a result, for a project that might last six weeks. You are doing procurement instead of consulting. And when they say no, you are back to option one.
What we built instead
One licence, on your workspace. A separate workspace per client, created by you in about a minute, with no card and no subscription of its own. One login across all of them and a switcher between them.
The client owns their workspace from the first day. Not as a policy we could change, but structurally: you cannot publish a survey in a client workspace until somebody at the client is an owner with their own key. We block it. Because a workspace only the consultant can open is a workspace the client loses when you leave, along with results they paid for.
At the end, they take over the subscription and nothing moves. Same workspace, same surveys, same results. It is a change of invoice.
The part that actually changes response rates
Here is the thing about running a survey as an outsider: your client's employees have to believe it.
An employee who gets a survey from a consultancy they have never heard of is doing risk assessment, not reflection. Who is this firm. Who is paying them. Does my manager get to see this. What most tools give you is a logo swap, which makes it worse, because now it looks like the employer is hiding who is collecting the data.
So the response page names both. Your firm, on behalf of the client, above the questions. You cannot turn our footer off either. Nobody has to guess who is involved.
Underneath that, the thing that makes the claim true rather than reassuring: every answer is encrypted in the respondent's browser before it is sent. We store ciphertext. Not "we have a policy against reading answers" - we cannot read them, and neither can you, and neither can their employer. You all see the aggregate.
That is a sentence you can put in a kickoff email and defend in a room.
What it costs
$3,588 a year, five live client workspaces included, $59 a month for each one beyond that. An engagement stops counting the day you hand it over or close it, so you pay for the clients you are actually running.
Compare that to a seat-priced tool multiplied by however many clients you have this quarter.
FAQ
Can I run surveys for several clients from one login? Yes. One licence, a separate workspace per client, and a switcher between them. You are never sharing an account or asking a client to add you to theirs.
Who owns the data when the engagement ends? The client. Their workspace, their key, their results. You cannot even publish a survey there until one of their people is an owner, which is what guarantees they can still get in after you have gone.
Can the consultant read individual answers? No, and neither can we. Answers are encrypted in the respondent's browser and stored as ciphertext. Everyone with access reads aggregates.
What happens if a client wants to keep using it? They take over the subscription from their own billing page. Nothing is exported or migrated, and your engagement slot frees up the same day.
Do my clients get a bill from you? No. A client workspace has no subscription, no card and no trial clock while it is running on your licence.
Start on the free trial and tell us you are a consultancy. See how an engagement runs.