Canadian enterprises now have a secure option for hosting online surveys that meet government privacy regulations.
Surveypal, a San Francisco, Calif.-based online survey platform, has launched a business-level survey solution designed to be compliant with Canada’s Privacy Act and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which governs how organizations in the country collect, use and disclose personal information while doing business.
In order to be compliant with these privacy regulations, all data collected by both public and private organizations must be stored within Canadian borders. To meet this requirement, Surveypal spent six weeks physically setting up new data servers in Toronto to guarantee that Canadian government agencies and businesses can collect data safely and legally.
“The Canadian market is very promising, and we want to support our Canadian customers,” Chris Vargas, CRO of Surveypal, tells IT World Canada. “Few survey solution providers have done this that also comply with Canadian privacy regulations, so when we were approached by a Canadian government agency, CivicInfo BC, we knew we wanted to be the first.”
The online survey platform, now available to all Canadian customers, is designed to seamlessly integrate into any CRM system and empower customers. It also allows them to import existing data into the platform, as well as assign tasks to individual team members, automate workflows, analyze and share data.
In a Feb. 15 press release, Todd Pugh, executive director of CivicInfo BC, says that Surveypal was “invaluable” in providing a “’100% Canada’ survey software. They listened to our requirements and quickly responded with a solution that meets our needs.”
Vargas says that while it was expensive to set up new servers, the company is “willing to bet on the Canadian market” and are counting on being successful.
“There’s a fair amount of risk in undertaking such a project, but there are a lot of Canadian government institutions, banks and other organizations that are interested in this,” he explains. “We’ve even seen interest from American banks who have a lot of Canadian customers and think this would be a useful and innovative approach to serving their Canadian base.”