Questions to ask a engagement and surveys vendor

What happens after the survey

Almost every organisation can run a survey. The failure is what comes next, and that is what to spend the demo on. Their sandbox already has results in it.

1. One of your demo managers has a low score on one question. Show me exactly what they see and what they are asked to do next.

   This is the whole product. A dashboard that hands a manager fourteen charts and no next step produces nothing, and the survey becomes an annual event people stop answering honestly.

   Worry ifA heatmap with no action attached to it.

2. Show me how you tell us whether anything changed after the last round.

   Ask for the loop being closed rather than the score going up. Without it you are paying for a thermometer.

3. What does a team of four get, when the numbers cannot be shown?

   Most organisations are mostly small teams, so this is not an edge case. Find out whether a quarter of your company gets nothing out of the exercise.

4. Change a question in front of me, and tell me what that does to the benchmark.

   The trade is between asking what you need and keeping the comparison. Make them explain exactly what breaks, because you will want to change something.

5. What is the minimum group size before a manager sees results, can it be overridden, and by whom?

   Get the number, then ask who can change it. A threshold an administrator can quietly lower is not a threshold, and once people stop believing it is confidential every number afterwards is wrong.

   Worry ifA configurable minimum with no restriction on who configures it.

6. Show me the free text. How is it summarised, and can I read the raw comments behind the summary?

   The comments are where the useful material is, and a summary you cannot check is a summary you cannot act on. If a model wrote it, ask whether that is stated on the page.

The two questions that get honest answers

Ask these at the end, when the demo is over and the room has relaxed. They are worth more than the previous hour.

1. Which of the things you showed me today are live for every customer, and which are on the roadmap?

   The most common complaint from buyers in this market is feeling misled afterwards, with promised features never arriving. Ask in the room, write the answer down, and put anything you are depending on into the contract with a date against it.

   Worry ifAnything demonstrated in an environment no customer is on yet.

2. What are the three things your customers complain about most?

   A good salesperson answers honestly, because they know you will find out in month two. "Nothing really" means either they do not talk to their customers or they will not tell you.

   Worry ifA strength dressed up as a weakness.

Drive it yourself

1. Run a real short survey to five of us, and let us see the results come through.

   You experience what your employees will: the invitation, the reminder, how long it takes, whether it works on a phone. Five people is enough and none of it is sensitive.

2. Upload a made-up org structure and check the reporting lines come out right.

   Who sees which results depends entirely on the hierarchy. Getting it wrong is how a manager sees a team that is not theirs, which is the failure that ends the programme.

Getting a sandbox at all

1. Can we have a sandbox for two weeks with our own test data, without a sales process attached?

   Everything you learn in a demo is about their product being used the way they use it. A fortnight with your own made-up data tells you whether your team can use it. A vendor confident in the product hands one over.

   Worry ifA trial only available after a commercial conversation, or a guided tour rather than an account.

2. Set up one thing we would need on day one, ourselves, while you watch.

   Pick something ordinary: a workflow step, an approval, a template. If it needs the vendor, then every change for the next three years needs the vendor, and nobody put that in the quote.

   Worry ifConfiguration that turns out to be a professional services ticket.

Ask a customer

1. What is your response rate now, compared with your first round?

   The first survey always does well. The third is the real number, and the drop tells you whether people believed anything happened. Only a customer has this.

2. How many of your managers actually did something with their results?

   The honest answer is usually a fraction, and what made the difference for that fraction is the most useful thing in the whole process.

3. How often do you survey, and when did people start complaining?

   A vendor will say as often as you like. A customer knows where the fatigue set in.

4. Did anything you found in here actually change a decision?

   The point of the whole exercise. If the answer is a pause, you are looking at a well-run reporting exercise rather than something that moved anything.

Worth asking any customer, in any category

Ask the vendor for two customers your size, then ask each for a screen share. These four are for that call, with the vendor not on the line.

1. How long did implementation actually take, against what you were told?

   The most useful number in the whole process, and the vendor will quote you their fastest. A customer will tell you what it cost in their own team's time, which never appears in any quote.

2. What did you assume it did that it turned out not to do?

   Everybody has one. It is usually a reporting gap or an integration that needed building, and it is the thing you would otherwise find in month three.

3. What happened the last time you raised something serious with support?

   Support quality tends to drop once a contract is signed, and a reference customer is a year past that point. Ask for a specific incident rather than an opinion.

Confidentiality and cost

1. Can anyone here, or anyone at your end, connect a free text comment to a person? Describe the mechanism that stops it.

   Free text is where people say the thing that matters, and it is the easiest data to identify from. Ask for the mechanism in writing, not the policy.

2. Does any of this text get used to train or improve a model?

   Comments about a named manager ending up in training data is a different order of problem from most data questions. Ask it specifically here, even if you asked it generally.

3. Is this priced per employee surveyed or per employee employed, and what is the minimum term?

   The two diverge sharply if you survey part of the company, or run one round a year.

4. Where does the org structure come from, and what happens when somebody changes manager mid-cycle?

   Reporting lines drive who sees what. If the hierarchy is a spreadsheet somebody uploads, it will be wrong by the time results come out.

5. What happens to three years of history when we leave?

   Trend data is the only part of this that gets more valuable with time, which makes it the part most worth checking you can take with you.

What it costs, all in

Implementation, migration, integrations and support tiers are where the quoted price stops being the price. Ask for the total before the demo ends.

1. What does year one cost in total, in writing, including implementation, migration and integration fees?

   The licence figure is rarely the bill. Implementation, data migration, API charges, premium support and mid-term true-ups are all common and all appear after signature. A vendor who will put the year-one total in an email can be held to it.

   Worry ifA licence price now and implementation "scoped later".

2. Is implementation a fixed fee or time and materials?

   Fixed fee puts the risk of a slow implementation on the people running it. Time and materials puts it on you, and HR data is always messier than anyone expects.

   Worry ifDay rates with no cap.

3. What is the renewal price, and is the increase capped in the contract?

   Year-one discounts often disappear at renewal, which turns a good deal into an expensive one two years in. A cap written into the contract is a normal thing to ask for.

   Worry ifUplift "in line with the market".

4. What notice do we give to leave, and does it renew automatically?

   Thirty to sixty days is reasonable. Ninety or more with auto-renewal means one missed diary entry costs another full year. Ask for the clause and read it in the room.

   Worry ifNinety days or more, auto-renewing, multi-year.

5. On the day we leave, what do we get, in what format, and at what cost? Is that in the contract?

   You want every record you put in, plus anything the system generated about your people, in CSV or JSON, at no charge. A feature can change in a release note. A clause cannot, and this one costs nothing to ask for at the point of buying.

   Worry ifA PDF export, a fee, or access cut off before the export arrives.

Data protection and security

1. For each thing this system does, are you controller or processor, and is the data processing agreement attached to the contract?

   The roles have to be settled activity by activity rather than once for the whole product, and the ICO expects a contract that says so. If they are a processor you have to give explicit written instructions, so ask what those will say.

   Worry ifHesitation, or "we are the processor" as a blanket answer.

   ICO, six questions to ask when procuring AI recruitment tools, November 2024

2. Where is the data hosted, which sub-processors touch it, and how do we hear when that list changes?

   Employee data includes salaries, health information and grievances. You need to know who holds it and to have a route to object when a new sub-processor appears.

3. Do you train any model on our data? Is it off by default, and is that in the contract?

   Ask plainly and get it in writing. "We do not sell your data" is a different sentence and is often the one that comes back.

   Worry ifAn answer about anonymisation that never says no.

4. Send us your most recent penetration test summary and your ISO 27001 certificate or SOC 2 report.

   A certificate number is easy to claim and easy to check. The pen test summary tells you whether anything serious was found and how fast it closed.

   Worry if"Available under NDA once we have progressed further."

5. When an employee makes a subject access request touching your system, what do we get from you and how quickly?

   You have a statutory deadline and the vendor does not. Ask for their internal service level in days and check it leaves you time to review before you answer.

If you survey employees in the EU

1. Has this been through a works council agreement anywhere, and can we see what was agreed?

   An engagement platform can usually be characterised as capable of monitoring behaviour, which brings co-determination rights into play in several member states. Somebody has already negotiated this, and their agreement is a good starting point for yours.

2. If sentiment analysis or emotion detection is anywhere in this product, tell us now.

   The AI Act prohibits inferring emotions in the workplace, and that ban was not among the obligations deferred by the Digital Omnibus. Ask specifically, because the feature is often described as tone, mood or wellbeing rather than emotion.

   Worry ifAnything that scores how a person feels from what they wrote.

   Morgan Lewis, changes to EU AI Act deadlines for employers and HR technology providers, 2026