In 2016, Cory Brown was looking at a number that should have made him happy. His team's customer satisfaction score, pulled straight out of Zendesk, read 99 percent. He didn't believe it. Nobody runs a service business where 99 out of 100 people are delighted. A score that clean isn't a signal - it's a survey nobody bothered to answer honestly. That small refusal to trust a flattering statistic is where Simplesat comes from.
Brown ran customer service and production at Pronto Marketing, the web-management agency he had started in 2008 with his father, Derek. Pronto served more than a thousand small businesses on a pay-as-you-go model, which meant every month was an election: keep the customer happy or watch them leave. Feedback wasn't a vanity metric there. It was the early-warning system. And the early-warning system was broken.
The ProblemGood scores that told you nothing
Two things were wrong. The satisfaction surveys were single-question and easy to ignore, so the only people answering were the ones who already loved you - hence the fictional 99 percent. And the net promoter surveys went out in email batches, which meant responses arrived in clumps that someone had to process by hand. The data was either misleading or a chore, and often both.
So the team built its own tool. They borrowed the multi-question structure from SERVQUAL, an academic framework for measuring service quality across several dimensions, so a response actually told you what was good or bad, not just a thumbs up. Then they made it pleasant to fill out - the survey design famously took a cue from Tinder's card swipe, on the theory that if answering felt like a game instead of homework, more people would do it.
A consistent 99% score sounds great until you realize it is hiding every real problem you have.The premise behind Simplesat
It worked internally. Response rates climbed and the feedback got specific. Then something unusual happened: Pronto's own customers, the small businesses being surveyed, started asking whether they could use the survey tool themselves. When the people on the receiving end of your software ask to buy it, the market research is basically done. In 2017 the Browns spun Simplesat out as its own company.
What It DoesFeedback, and then what to do with it
Simplesat collects customer feedback and, more importantly, moves it to the people who can act on it. The surveys - CSAT, NPS, CES, five-star, and custom - are built to be answered in a single click, embedded directly inside helpdesk tickets, email signatures, and chat tools. When a support ticket closes, the survey fires automatically. Follow-up questions branch with conditional logic, so a low score can immediately ask why.
The part that keeps customers around is what happens next. Responses get segmented by team, brand, region, and tier. An AI layer detects recurring topics in the free-text comments. And when a score drops, Simplesat routes an alert to the right person over Slack, email, or Microsoft Teams, and drops the feedback onto the ticket itself. A weekly digest keeps managers honest. The survey is the front door; the routing is the reason people pay.
Who Uses ItFrom MSP shops to the Associated Press
The early beachhead was managed service providers and IT firms, a crowd Simplesat won by integrating natively with the tools they already lived in - ConnectWise and Autotask, the professional-services platforms that run those businesses. From there it spread to any team that treats support as a product: SaaS companies, e-commerce and retail brands, marketing agencies, financial services, government agencies, and nonprofits.
The customer wall now includes names like Home Depot, Deel, SentinelOne, Athletic Greens, Agoda, Fujifilm, Zola, Wikimedia, and the Associated Press. Collectively, teams push more than 10,000 responses a month through the platform. It's a wide range for a company that started as one agency's internal fix.
The BusinessPriced by responses, not by seats
Most feedback software charges per agent, which quietly punishes you for growing your support team. Simplesat flipped that: pricing scales with monthly response volume, not headcount. Plans start around $109 to $119 a month billed annually, step up through Pro and Elite tiers, and top out in a custom enterprise plan. There's a 14-day full-access trial, no implementation fee, and no per-agent charge. Hire ten more support reps and your Simplesat bill doesn't move.
That pricing choice is a tell about the whole company. Simplesat has never raised a funding round. It grew out of an agency that was, in the founders' words, a revenue machine - which gave the new product a safety net to experiment under before it had to stand on its own.
It was ideal for them because they could explore and make sure they had something that would work.On incubating Simplesat inside Pronto
The MarketSmall player, sharp position
The customer-feedback category is crowded and includes far better-funded names - SurveyMonkey and Momentive, AskNicely, Delighted, Nicereply, Retently, GetFeedback. Simplesat doesn't try to be a general-purpose survey builder. It specializes in the moment a support interaction ends, and in getting that feedback into the workflow of the people who caused the score. Deep, native integrations with helpdesks and CRMs are the moat; ease of use is the reputation. Reviewers on G2 and Capterra return to the same two words over and over - simple, and responsive.
The ReadWhy the small one keeps winning
There's a clean logic to Simplesat that most feedback tools miss. Collecting scores is easy. Getting honest ones is harder, and acting on them before the customer leaves is the actual job. Simplesat was built by an operator who needed all three at once and didn't have the budget to be sloppy about any of them. A decade later, with no outside money, more than a thousand brands, and a 4.8-star average, the case for building a survey people will actually finish looks fairly settled.