Voxco Online Reviews

Lots of built-in features that allows programmers to create questions with the best practices of survey methodologists

Voxco’s help documentation is a joke. The company doesn’t seem to want to fix the quirky flaw that requires users to use two different sets of logical operators for programing skip or display logic. It is NOT user friendly where they have to remember to switch to a different grammar when they need to use advanced mode.

The description of all help documentation is only for tech savvy users, not written in layman’s terms. Even when I suggested this to the sales rep at conference booth, they just said this is due to a different development mindset. OMG, it’s customers’s responsibility to learn Voxco’s logic!!!

Also, Qualtrics has developed so many built-in options for validation, like recapcha. Voxco doesn’t seem to do more to appeal to the users that love Voxco for the rigor.

I think the best feature of this software is the user friendliness of the programming system. It is very intuitive and does not take advanced programming knowledge to use, but it still has the options to do a lot more complex programming and manipulation than you would get out of other systems at the same lavel of user friendliness.

I think it would be helpful if Voxco had more support available around the area of accessability and someone that could work with us specially on proramming surveys that are more accesabile.

Voxco offers very powerful tools and automations when programming surveys and personalizing respondent experience. No other platform offers such capabilities.

There is quite the learning curve using Voxco online, especially when it comes to its most advanced features.

It's great that we can use our own servers to house this program and keep everything secure. We have a mandate that all data must remain in Canada so using some of the other programs is not a possibility for us. Voxco has a lot of great features that we use.

There is a learning curve to program in this software. People who are not survey-design savvy will need to step up their game.

If you use it to it's maximum potential, it's one of the more powerful platforms out there.

It can be very slightly buggy sometimes. Not the most intuitive menus.

It's nice and easy, the all web interface (except for cati) means I can even do stuff on my phone if something is needed urgently, and the survey builder and other things are all well designed and make using voxco quick and easy.

The one weird bug that keeps coming up for me is whenever a respondent in a multi mode survey gets a call and sets up an appointment, but then before the next call they click into the web survey, their timezone sets itself to the UK for some reason.

The complex logic possibilities.

Alot of features not working and never worked for 2 plus years we had it.
Simulations
Panel overview/health
Auditing logs
Clunky text input and formatting
Panel provider portal (should save time but only makes it take longer)
Sampling is overly complicated
Speed and usability of UI could be improved

I am not involved in survey development, but the graduate student who are seem to be able to use it easily enough.

I have a serious issue with it's data retention. Everything is stored unencrypted in the database, so personally identifiable information is natively protected. So the second part comes from a recent experience of ours where one of our researchers discovered that some of our imported data was going missing. I tracked down the specific cases, and opened a Voxco support ticket. They are very responsive, but their immediate answer was that they couldn't be causing it. More digging, more logs, and I presented the exact URLs that were being used to access the surveys, showing them where the data was being lost. Again, this couldn't possibly be them and it had to be due to the University's network or something because all the cases were from the same IPs (since students were testing it in our offices). So I log into the Voxco web server and get the IIS logs showing them the data showing up and that it was indeed their software losing the data. They denied their own server logs. After getting the sales rep added on to the ticket, I got an apology email about 30 minutes later stating that it was indeed Voxco losing our imported data, and that we needed an update. So digging into the updates, we were on version 28 (simplified number) and the current version was 71. There had been 30 updates since they had last touched our system. After inquiring about this, they only do these minor update versions to your system if you report an issue that one of these fixes. Nice job...

The updated interface is easy to use, and the new look has greatly improved the overall experience. It makes it much easier to navigate, and it encourages the use of tools in a more cohesive manner. Tech support is frequently available to video chat to navigate issues in a very timely manner.

The "help" section only provides very basic answers regarding the functionality and purpose of certain tools. Examples would help new and experienced users optimize their usage of all available features. Additionally, sometimes the tech support services do not meet expectations. For example, the toll free help line is understaffed, as representatives are not always available during work hours to answer quick questions. Furthermore, on occasion I am encouraged to open a support ticket via email when I believe that my question could be answered quickly with a phone call. Lastly, when I clarify in a support ticket that X is not an issue, help representatives periodically suggest that X may indeed be what is causing my issue, though I have eliminated that possibility before opening my support ticket.

Not much.

Extremely simple surveys can be done quickly.

Importing a second language into an existing survey can be fast.

It is time-consuming to program anything beyond the most simple of surveys in it.

It lacks many basic features.

Their documentation is terrible, poorly written, completely lacks examples, and is poorly indexed. It seems that a search of the online documentation will either yield so many results it's impossible to find what you are looking for or no results at all.

Many of the "features" do not work.

You can't search past projects effectively. If you know you have similar questions in past studies it is difficult to copy them. You need to manually find the survey, find the section, find the question then drag it into your new survey. At which point Voxco only copies the question itself and not any logic (unless all question numbers and variables match). Voxco makes it impossible to "pin" a second survey in the development environment.

Validation is very time-consuming. You need to create separate questions with your error messages, then set that error message question, pipe in the value of the error message question into your original question, then redirect back to the original is the error message condition is true. Ridiculous.

It is difficult to re-use answer lists unless they are 100% identical.

There is no inline filtering or masking. You need to make separate masking questions all the time. Again adding programming time.

I had more cons but ran out of space but you get the idea.

I honestly can't think of a single redeeming feature.

The interface is one of the worst I've used, doing anything is a chore, everything is buried under a myriad of clicks and menus to find what you want. Options are counterintuitive and some plain don't work. Worst of all is the system is unreliable, we have missing data with no explanation as to why. The very basic, number one feature a data collection platform needs is confidence your data is correct, we do not have that with Voxco.

To qualify this response, I've worked nearly two decades in the industry and think I've used pretty much every major and most minor data collection platform there is out there. None are perfect, but most are better than Voxco. I'd even put WSC above it, for all the pain it is to program in WSC, I at least know my data will be recorded accurately (and their support guys are absolutely wonderful).

Support is slow as everything has to be escalated to Canada (probably due to the high volume of requests you're going to have to make using it) and rude, on occasion they've been flat out wrong, someone using the software for two months shouldn't be telling an escalated support staff how to do their job. But here we are.

Every time I come to do something, I find a new frustration or fault.

I don't have final decision on which platform we use, but, I will be making multiple, loud, comments to those who do.

The drag-and-drop interface for editing questionnaires is extremely easy to use. The Look and Feel editor affords a very wide breadth of options. Distributions are very easy to manage. What I like most is the ability to augment the native features of voxco using html, css, sql, etc., as well as the ability to create entire custom questions and integrate them into your survey.

It would be extremely useful if Voxco projects could communicate with each other. For example, being able to implement a skip pattern in one survey based on a respondent's answer to a question in a different survey (obviously contingent upon the presence of a common user-defined unique identifier in both surveys). As it stands I've been able to get around this with the use of an external table and SQL commands in both surveys, but it would be much more convenient (and I imagine less error-prone) if it were a native voxco feature.

Another shortcoming is the lack of a "clear" (CLR) function in voxco online, where it is present in the Design software. Again, there are ways around this, but since the function already exists elsewhere in voxco, it would be nice to see it in voxco online as well.

It is a fairly straight forward platform and the service team is easy to work with. No platform is perfect but you learn do some work arounds and make it work how you need it to. It is an easy interface that can work without a lot of coding experience.

Easier masking options. Would like to see the question numbers when you are viewing a respondents answers since a lot of the times we don't have them in the question themselves. Progressive grids.

It's easy to pull data and make custom sample and data pulls

It's clunky and has bad programming compatibilities.

- Easy to use in term of scripting the online survey

- Don't have Conjoint/Maxdiff functions
- Taking long time for support team to feedback
- Reports/Analysis tools is limited

Majority is easy to program and support when you get stuck is great.

Writing script! It is not my strong point, so I need help with this occasionally.
The new look and feel is not very easy - needs way way way more work.

Good overall software that requires work on some feature (speed of servers, support on Sendgrid [domain authentication], possibility to send an email to two seperate adresses for each participant, etc.).

We can't add a second email for our participants. We want to be able to send our invitation emails to a primary and secondary email address, but right now we have to update the $email variable than create a second distribution to do so. This complicates thing a lot and creates a lot of extra work.

Ease of retrieving survey results. Ability to customize the reports.

Would like to be able to EDIT responses from the VIEW RESPONSES page.