One of the most dangerous things that can happen in any business can be customer disconnect. With that said, here’s a shocker: According to a published survey, over half (51%) of customers worldwide believe businesses don’t listen to their feedback.
Some probable reasons:
- Your customers didn’t hear back from you
- You do acknowledge feedback, but then nothing seems to change
- You have limited channels for communication
To turn this around, have a direct channel for customers to voice out their experiences, opinions, and suggestions with you. In this era, that’s using the best customer feedback tools.
Don’t worry—you’re not alone in getting started. In this post, we’ve compiled the twelve customer feedback tools so you can narrow down your options.
The importance of customer feedback
The truth is that customer feedback is a lever to boost customer satisfaction. 61 percent said they stopped doing business with a brand due to bad customer service. But when you get to hear what your customers really think—-what they love (and not much)—it becomes super easy to adjust and improve.
And yet, there’s more. Let’s get into them:
Customer feedback reveals hidden pain points you weren’t aware of.
Admit it or not, you’re often biased toward your product. There’s an inherent bias that prevents you from seeing the friction points that only end users experience. And a staggering 62% will even share that bad experience.
You can use them to make informed decisions about product development.
Before investing more into a new product, you should first solicit customer input to validate your idea. That way, you can understand customer feedback and ensure the development is aligned with your target customer retention and market’s needs and interests.
Their feedback can improve your customer service.
If the feedback implies that customer response times are your service team’s bottleneck or unhelpful response frustrates customers (maybe due to lack of knowledge bases), you can improve them fast. Their help desk tickets are your free resource for customer feedback.
You can use their feedback as a guide for marketing strategies.
Marketers can better understand their target audience and decision-making factors by analyzing feedback. It’ll help them come up with more effective marketing strategies, messaging, and campaigns customers feel they will enjoy. Additionally, feedback can point up untapped market segments, new use cases, or opportunities for cross-selling or upselling.
And to harness these benefits, there are three ideas we suggest:
First is to gather feedback and make sure you analyze them. Don’t just collect feedback and let it sit there! Categorize and understand the common themes and concerns emerging from quantitative data from your customers.
Next, take action. Respond to feedback, address concerns, identify trends, and implement changes based on customer insights. Let your customers know what actions you’re taking to address issues and the impact their feedback is having.
Finally, close the loop. When you take action about their feedback, let your customers know. This transparency builds trust and shows them their voices truly matter.
Note: Collecting and analyzing customer feedback is different from social listening. Click here to read our article on 9 social listening tools for brand monitoring to learn more.
How can you get customer feedback?
Customer feedback aka “the voices of your customers” is a rich resource. So, how do you tap into them? Some common ways to analyze feedback are:
Through customer interviews
Customer interviews are the traditional means of gathering customer feedback. They involve identifying customers to interview and preparing open-ended questions that encourage them to share their experiences, pain points, and suggestions.
Through follow-up calls after transactions
Follow-up calls after transactions can be an effective way to obtain customer feedback. These calls involve proactively reaching out to customers shortly after they have purchased, used a service, or interacted with the company. By speaking directly with the customer while the experience is still fresh, businesses can gather valuable insights—both positive and negative.
Through real-time chat interactions
As customers engage with a business’s chat support is also expressing their thoughts in real-time. When chat agents are equipped in asking probing questions, they can better understand the customer’s perspective, pain points, or areas of satisfaction in real-time too. Customers often feel more comfortable providing candid feedback during these live interactions, as they can have their queries addressed immediately.
Through review platforms
Review platforms like G2, Capterra, and TrustPilot are spaces where customers share their experiences and opinions about a product or service. In here, customers can leave detailed reviews describing what they liked or disliked, highlighting specific aspects that pleased them or areas that need improvement.
Through customer feedback tools
These specialized platforms make it easy to collect insights. Some customer feedback tools for business are integrated into your website while some are directly from within apps and software (in-apps). Customers can share thoughts without leaving the application. And all that feedback flows into one central dashboard—allowing efficient analysis and prioritization. With a good idea of what customers are saying, you can focus on what matters most.
12 customer feedback tools for 2024
Collecting customer feedback varies from business to business. We listed twelve tools dedicated to this purpose categorized by their specialty.
Customer survey tools
1. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a survey software for gathering feedback from users. It has a lot of templates, question types, and design options to choose from and generate professional-looking surveys in minutes. The platform’s user-friendly interface makes creating, distributing, and collecting responses easy to complete without requiring significant training.
Pricing: Start free. Team plan starts at $25/user/month (3 users, billed annually)
2. Qualtrics CoreXM
Qualtrics CoreXM is another intuitive software tool for online and offline surveys. It’s a simple yet sophisticated platform to collect valuable customer data ( including customer feedback) that helps inform decisions across all business functions. So, frontline teams can use responses to serve clients better.
Pricing: Request pricing through demo
3. Zoho Survey
If you have a problem creating, sharing, and analyzing customer surveys, Zoho Survey has your back. It’s a full customer satisfaction survey and feedback collection tool effective for obtaining valuable user responses. With many customization options, producing surveys that match your brand couldn’t be easier. Also, the drag-and-drop interface makes it an incredibly easy-to-use customer survey software tool.
Pricing: Free getting started and the plan starts at US$25/month billed annually
Customer service software
4. HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot Service Hub is a service software that lets you see real-time feedback from your clients. Using it, you actually listen to customers so it’s a lot easier to give out the right content to the right people at the right time. You can send surveys via web link or email, share results easily, and keep customers happy.
Pricing: Available for free and premium plans starting at $90/mo/seat
5. Hotjar
Hotjar is a free customer feedback tool to understand your website better and thus serve better. Its popular features include heat maps, recordings, and feedback, all of which are aimed at reducing friction and increasing conversion. With its function for getting real-time user feedback, you uncover issues, collect suggestions, and make data-driven business decisions, to optimize your website.
Pricing: Get started for free or upgrade to paid plans based on the chosen tool’s prices
6. UserVoice
UserVoice is the tool to listen to your customers more effectively. It’s a single tool for understanding what your customers really want and gathering feedback even from stakeholders. Private and public feedback forums let businesses track the most popular suggestions and prioritize their product roadmap based on customer feedback.
Pricing: Free trial for 14 days, then subscribe for $699/mo (annual billing).
Video survey software
7. UserTesting
UserTesting is the platform for getting a video of a real person reviewing your website. It’s a quick solution to capture customer feedback and learn more about the “why” behind the behavior. With UserTesting’s network, you can access contributors from over 30 countries or just leverage your existing network of your own users and employees.
Pricing: Contact their sales team to learn more about how the solution can help you.
8. VideoPeel
VideoPeel is a customer feedback survey tool that uses videos to capture the voice of the customers. With it, your customers can submit support tickets in video formats so they visually show issues they’re facing instead of just describing them in text.
Pricing: Start free for 7 days or subscribe with a basic plan at $4.99/ month, billed annually.
9. Userfeel
Gathering real user feedback? Userfeel simplifies making improvements in your product fast through its easy-to-use video survey software. The pay-as-you-go model is perfect for small businesses that value getting user feedback without the upfront subscription costs.
Pricing: No subscription—credits per session only (60 US$ per credit)
Feedback management software
10. Qualaroo
Qualaroo is the customer feedback analysis tool for collecting deep insights from customers. It has a huge library of survey questions and editable templates with which you can create surveys so you get contextual and qualitative feedback, on different touchpoints in our customer journey real quickly.
Pricing: Forever free plan includes 50 responses, 500 emails sent & 10k pageviews.
11. Verint Voice of the Customer
Verint Voice of the Customer makes it easy to gather consumer insights that help inform product development. It’s an all-in-one customer feedback tool for across web and mobile, enterprise-wide, and location-based customer experience. Also, it has powerful analytical tools to analyze customer feedback more deeply.
Pricing: Contact Verint Voice of the Customer to get pricing information.
12. Canny
Canny is a complete customer feedback management tool for spotting valuable product insights. It also integrates with many third-party tools such as Hubspot, Salesforce, and Zendesk, making tracking feedback easier—without leaving the app. You can let customers vote on a public or private features board. And assign importance levels based on their votes to track the most desired features.
Pricing: Get started with Canny for free
Which customer feedback tool should you go for?
Now, the choice of which customer feedback analysis tool to use depends heavily on each business’ requirements. Here are some questions to ask:
What is my objective for collecting customer feedback?
Different customer feedback tools fit different goals. So understanding your core objective is crucial. Is it to gather product improvement suggestions, measure customer satisfaction, identify pain points, or a combination of these?
Different tools cater better to specific goals. For example, if your main aim is measuring overall customer satisfaction levels, then a simple survey tool that lets you send out CSAT (customer satisfaction) surveys could be sufficient.
How much can we spend on it?
Customer feedback tools can range from free basic versions to enterprise-level solutions with advanced features and higher price tags. The smartest move is to make a realistic estimate of your feedback needs. That’ll help avoid either overpaying or having to switch tools again due to outgrowing it.
Check if it has the core functionality you require before defaulting to the cheapest option. But also, no need to pay top dollar if a mid-range, reasonably-priced tool checks all your boxes.
Who are my identified customers?
Consider the demographics, tech-savviness, and feedback preferences of the target customer base. The easier it is for your particular customers actually to submit feedback through the platform, the better data you’ll collect.
So identify the key characteristics of your core customer segments. That insight will help you to choose a feedback solution capable of interfacing with your customers effectively to collect customer feedback on their terms. Also, depending on their tech-saviness you identify the preferred channels for collecting feedback, such as in-app, website, email, social media, or a combination. Choose the best customer feedback tools that support the desired channels.
Can it work together with my other tools?
When evaluating customer feedback tools, it’s super important to consider how well they can integrate and work together with the other tools and systems you already use. When everything runs smoothly, it makes a world of difference.
All the valuable and feedback data lives centrally alongside other customer intelligence. This makes it more actionable and impactful.
Does it have analytics and reporting features?
Without solid reporting, all that customer feedback basically just becomes a black box. You need digestible charts, graphs, and analysis to quickly identify areas of delight and pain.
At the end of the day, you’re collecting all this voice-of-customer intel to actually get actionable insight to further improve customer that. But it’s the analytics that truly surfaces those actionable insights in a clear, understandable way.
Can it scale as my business grows?
As your business expands and gains more customers over time, you’ll want a customer feedback tool that can scale along with that business growth. The goal is to avoid replacing the customer sentiment tool just because it can’t keep up with your growing business needs around feedback.
Perfect your product offering using customer feedback tools
Gathering customer feedback should be a top priority for every business striving to continuously improve products and deliver exceptional customer experiences. When selecting the best customer feedback tool, it’s crucial to consider factors like your specific goals, budget constraints, target customer profiles, and analytical requirements.
However, don’t overlook the unfiltered feedback that your customer support team receives daily. So it’s vital to empower them with feedback tools that seamlessly integrate into their existing workflows for maximum effectiveness. If assembling an in-house customer service operation seems daunting, you can opt to outsource to seasoned experts like LTVplus.
Schedule a free call with us today to explore our first-class outsourced support services. This simple step could be the solution to delighting your customers.
