By Elizabeth Cloutman

Businesses and institutions require feedback from their clientele, but the process of selecting survey questions and collecting and tabulating data often can be lengthy and sometimes prohibitively expensive.

Los Altos resident Debbie Appler said her new business, TouchPoll Survey Solutions, offers a practical solution: an on-site computer touch-screen survey system with instantly tabulated results at a cost even smaller businesses or institutions can afford.

“A lot of people need public opinion research. With this, little shops can spend a couple of hundred dollars a week (to rent the touch-screen system) and get results,” Appler said. “It’s polling that intercepts customers at the point of experience. It allows businesses to get information as it’s occurring.”

Appler said TouchPoll Survey Solutions is an independent distributorship for TouchPoll Touchscreen Comment Card Systems’ products and services, based in Winter Park, Fla. She noted that the system is suitable for various types of surveys. Possible applications include customer satisfaction and product-testing for businesses, and opinion polling at trade shows or seminars. It would also be useful for institutions such as community organizations, public libraries, health-care clinics and hospitals. “You can even use them for employee surveys,” she added.

TouchPoll Survey Solutions offers software, hardware and personnel to attend the touch-screens and assist poll participants. Clients may purchase the software to design their own surveys and use on their own computers, or Appler will design a customized survey for them. The software allows clients to modify the wording, rearrange the order of questions, and add graphics to the Web page. It also contains “logic tree-branching,” which routes the poll participant to particular sets of questions depending on the response to a previous question.

Customers will find the touch-screen system an uncomplicated way to register their opinions 10 times faster than polling by clipboard or telephone. “You don’t even have to navigate with a mouse,” Appler said. Clients can also request surveys be programmed in other languages.

Gross survey results are instantly available to clients at the click of a touch-screen button, and include graphics and cross-tabulation, Appler said.

TouchPoll Survey Solutions is Appler’s first venture into owning her own business. MCI transferred the New York native to the Bay Area in 1986. She later worked for a Pleasanton dot-com. When that business failed, she decided to use the Internet to explore possibilities for owning a business.

Appler thought the TouchPoll Touchscreen Comment Card Systems would be a good choice for a home-based business built on her previous work experience.

However, she first decided to do some market research of her own. “I started calling hundreds of customers, some brand new, and I ended up getting a deal with the Wireless System Trade Show before I bought the business,” she said.

Appler’s business officially began in January. She has already signed up additional clients and is negotiating for several more. She will conduct surveys at the Pacific Expo Sale in Jack London Square in April; the Mountain View Public Library book sale May 4; and the American Cancer Research meeting in June.

She also appreciates being part of a distribution network. “(Independent distributors) have formed our own sales force,” Appler said. “… It makes you part of a company with the synergy that comes with it, but you have the independence of your own business.”

Appler’s teen-age sons got caught up in their mother’s enthusiasm for her new career and have contributed toward building the business. Justin, a ninth-grader at Mountain View High School, tested the software’s viability and upgrades it. He also created the TouchPoll Survey Solutions’ Web site and set up a local area network connecting their home computers. Ricky, a seventh-grader at Blach Intermediate School types in survey questions.

“I’ve never worked harder,” Appler said of building her new business, “but it’s so much fun.”

For more information on Touch Poll, call 968-0405 or logon to www.touchpollsurvey.com.