As a kid, I loved to fill out customer surveys. I would drive my mother crazy by agonizing over the questions and whether to award a business 3 or 4 stars. The days of paper questionnaires may be long gone, but there are companies digitalizing the process so online businesses can receive feedback as well.

WebEngage is a Mumbai-based startup that enables companies to gather customer insight and promote user engagement. It has launched a completely redesigned site and announced raising over $500K in seed funding.

The technology powers the delivery of questionnaires to specific audiences. Using the software, companies can build their own feedback and support forms and embed them on their site. They can then filter which visitors they would like to target with these surveys, for example people coming from a Google search or someone who spent at least a minute on a page. All the collected data is turned into actionable analytic reports.

WebEngage clients can also create filters for push notifications. They dictate certain parameters, such as repeat visitors or users in the shopping cart drop-off phase, and these people will receive targeted messages. The service is implemented through a Javascript API.

Over the past year, the company has added 4200 customers from around the world. The investors include GTI Capital, Indian Angel Network, and Blume Ventures, Rajan Anandan and Jonathan Schulhof. WebEngage is currently a team of six.

SurveyMonkey gives websites and other companies a cheap way to create and distribute surveys online. There’s a free option for casual users — say a student looking to create a survey for a class — that has a cap on the number of people that can respond. The premium monthly subscription lets users brand their own surveys and lifts the cap on the number of respondents.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company’s main business is monthly subscription plans that allow for more responses and a deeper analytics suite for each survey. SurveyMonkey handles more than 25 million surveys each month, according to the company. It expanded from web surveys to phone polling in June this year after it acquired Precision Polling, and its customers include all of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 100 list.

The company will use the new funding to expand its business, including some M&A activity, and other corporate purposes like purchasing servers. This is a peculiar step for a web startup, since the lion’s share of startups typically stick to equity financing. That means they raise capital from firms by selling off certain portions of their company in the form of stock.

Debt financing, on the other hand, is a guarantee to pay back the debt with a certain interest rate. It’s equivalent to the sale of government bonds and treasuries that have a fixed interest rate. Secured debt like bonds are typically a safer investment than equity because there is a guarantee to be paid back in the event a company goes under.

These are some pretty heavy-hitting banks — so that could be a testament to the company’s performance. JP Morgan Chase Bank, Webster Bank and Royal Bank of Canada also participated in the round.

SurveyMonkey was founded in 1999.

[Photo: peretzpup]