When Relay loses a deal, it's rarely to Culture Amp or Peakon. It's to a sentence: "we'll just use SurveyMonkey."
Fair enough. SurveyMonkey is a genuinely good general-purpose survey tool. Everyone knows it, someone in the business already has an account, and knocking together ten questions takes an afternoon. For customer research, event feedback and market questions, it's exactly the right tool.
For employee feedback, it's the right tool for the wrong job, and the difference shows up in three places.
Anonymity as a setting versus anonymity as architecture
In a general survey tool, anonymity is a checkbox. The person building the survey decides whether to collect names, emails, IP-linked metadata. Your team knows this. They've built surveys in the same tool. So when the invite lands, the first thought isn't "what do I want to say", it's "can they tell it's me?"
That doubt is fatal. It doesn't make people refuse to answer; it makes them answer carefully, and careful answers are the ones that tell you nothing.
Relay's anonymity isn't configured by an admin, it's built into the product. Responses are anonymised before they reach any dashboard, results only aggregate above a minimum threshold, and we cannot identify individual respondents even if asked to. Nobody in your organisation can quietly flip that off, which is precisely why people believe it.
A project versus a rhythm
The DIY survey is always a project. Someone drafts questions, someone chases responses, someone exports the spreadsheet, someone means to present the findings. Then the quarter gets busy. The next survey happens when the pain returns, usually months later, and each one starts from zero.
Employee sentiment doesn't move in projects. It moves weekly: a restructure lands, a client blows up, a good person starts quietly interviewing. Relay's fixed weekly cadence, 30 seconds over SMS, WhatsApp, email, Slack or Teams, turns feedback from an event into an operating rhythm. Fifty-two data points a year instead of two. Movement instead of snapshots. And movement is the insight: a team sliding from 85 to 60 across six weeks is a story a twice-yearly survey physically cannot tell.
A spreadsheet versus a loop
Here's the quiet killer of DIY surveys: the results genuinely go into a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet genuinely goes nowhere. Not from bad intent. Analysing free-text answers, spotting themes and drafting a response is real work with no owner.
Collecting feedback and not responding is worse than not asking, because it teaches people their voice changes nothing. The next survey's response rate pays the bill for the last one's silence.
Relay does the analysis work for you. Every Monday, leaders get a five-minute summary: themes, sentiment movement, response rates, and what's still unresolved from previous weeks. The unresolved list is the conscience of the product. It makes closing the loop, even with "we heard you, no fix yet", the path of least resistance.
Keep SurveyMonkey. Change the job.
Keep SurveyMonkey for what it's brilliant at: customers, events, one-off research. Just stop asking a general survey tool to carry the most trust-sensitive question in your business, because "just use SurveyMonkey" usually means "collect guarded answers twice a year and act on none of them".
The Relay Method is the case for doing it properly. The trial is the proof.
Try Relay free for 30 days, no credit card required, from $99 a month after that. It costs less than the meeting where someone volunteers to build the survey.