SurveyMonkey's most recent product is a benchmarking service for four lucrative areas: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, Net Promoter scores and website feedback. Invented by Bain & Company along with the software company Satmetrix, the Net Promoter Score is derived from a single question: Would you recommend this product or service to someone else?

Rob Markey, a Bain partner who leads the firm's global Customer Strategy & Marketing practice, says that Net Promoter studies have to be done right to be useful. "When a company tells me that based on surveys of their own customers only they have a higher score than someone else, it's meaningless," he says. Proper comparisons, says Markey, are based on questions asked by third-party researchers across companies and categories.