Before You Invest in AI, Ask These 5 Customer Experience Questions
Taking advantage of artificial intelligence has quickly become a strategic goal for financial institutions. Vendors are making aggressive promises, competitors are announcing initiatives, and leadership teams are feeling pressure to define their AI strategy. But adopting AI because the market expects it might not be the best investment of time and money. Like any major […]
A Q&A with Spero Financial: Building a More Data-Driven Decision-Making Culture
What happens when research becomes more than a one-time project? For Spero Financial, what began as a need to better understand a changing membership evolved into a multi-year strategic discipline that helped shape major business decisions. In this Q&A, Bethani Williams, Vice President of Marketing at Spero Financial, shares how member and market research informed […]
Google Surveys vs SurveyMonkey: A Full Comparison for 2026
Summary: Google Forms and SurveyMonkey solve overlapping problems with very different trade-offs: Google Forms is free, simple, unlimited on responses, and integrated with Google Workspace, while SurveyMonkey is a paid platform (with a free tier) that adds advanced question types, real branching logic, built-in analysis dashboards, deeper integrations with Salesforce/HubSpot/Slack, and enterprise compliance options like […]
The ROI of Bank Branches: A Practical Framework for Measuring What Branches Are Worth
Summary: The conventional branch ROI calculation (revenue minus direct costs minus allocated overhead) is a useful comparison tool but a poor strategic one. It systematically undercredits branches by ignoring three things they do: initiate the majority of new deposit relationships (even ones discovered digitally), retain customers at meaningfully higher rates than digital-only banking, and produce […]
5 Starr Engagement vs Qualtrics: An Honest Comparison
Summary: Comparing 5 Starr Engagement and Qualtrics is really a choice between two business models, not two products: a boutique, industry-specialized research partner versus a horizontal enterprise experience-management platform. 5 Starr is built for small and mid-market hospitality, healthcare, and frontline-service organizations that want a done-for-you program, tailored survey design, 14-day actionable insight, an advisory […]
The Best SurveyMonkey Alternatives in 2026
Summary: SurveyMonkey built the survey-tool category and is still the right answer for many teams; the ones that outgrow it usually do so for one of five reasons, price, design and response rates, enterprise capability, panel access, or research-program maturity, and the right alternative depends on which. Google Forms and Jotform cover free or near-free […]