Your customers are everything to your business. It goes without saying that their perceptions of your products and your brand are of vital importance—but how can you measure those perceptions, and what can you do about it?
Thanks to the abundance of customer feedback tools, there are dozens of high-tech ways you can learn more about your customers and gather feedback directly from them.
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The Value of Customer Feedback
Using customer feedback software tools can help you with:
- Product and service improvements. For starters, you can use customer feedback to improve your products and services. You’ll be able to identify missing features, elements that should be improved, and common customer complaints and concerns. From there, you can develop new products and services or improve what you already have.
- Customer sentiment and business predictions. Getting a gauge of customer sentiment can help you make more accurate predictions. For example, if 20 percent of your customers leave bad reviews, or complain about your products, you might be able to predict a 20 percent customer turnover rate.
- Information for other customers. If you make customer feedback public in some way, you’ll be able to provide information to your other customers and prospects; people new to your brand can read what other people think of your products and services before they make a decision.
- High-level strategy and planning. Finally, customer feedback is an important asset for gathering information relevant to your high-level business strategy. Which demographics will you target in the future? How will your business grow?
With the help of customer feedback software tools, your business will be able to gather all the customer feedback you ever wanted, and in many forms.
In this guide, I’ll list the best tools for collecting customer feedback available today, split into the following categories: survey creation, real-time feedback, online reviews and community feedback, and user testing.
Customer Feedback Survey Tools
Survey-based customer feedback software tools are mostly focused on gathering customer information via surveys; you’ll use these platforms to design and distribute surveys, prompting customers and prospects to share their thoughts and opinions.
You’ll also use these platforms to measure and analyze the results.
1. Qualaroo.
First up, there’s Qualaroo, which allows you to survey users while they’re looking at your products or services. You’ll be able to make use of professionally designed questions and templates, or customize your own from scratch, tailored perfectly to capture the information you need. And with the use of “nudges,” you’ll be able to gently ask users for feedback based on their interactions—like asking for pricing feedback when they’re on the pricing page.
2. ProProfs Survey Maker.
ProProfs Survey Maker is a professional survey making tool, which has been used to create more than 50,000 surveys with more than 4 million respondents. With it, you can create surveys, polls, quizzes, and assessments for your customers, and distribute them via email, website popups, in-app displays, and more. It’s highly intuitive, and you can build surveys based on existing templates to save time and improve efficiency simultaneously.
3. Typeform.
Next up, there’s Typeform, which is designed to create “people-friendly” forms and surveys. Instead of asking your customers a list of bland questions, you can turn the survey into a more robust conversation. There are many templates to choose from, and the customization tools are ridiculously easy to learn.
4. Zonka Feedback.
Zonka Feedback is a comprehensive customer feedback and survey tool that allows you to collect feedback from any channel and measure CX Metrics using NPS Surveys, CES Surveys, and CSAT Surveys. It is simple to use for both small and large businesses.
Zonka Feedback provides real-time responses, in-depth analysis, and a collaborative response inbox for teams to take, manage, and improve customer feedback. With one-touch integrations and APIs, it can integrate the platform with many other tools.
5. Survey Sparrow.
Another animal-named survey tool, Survey Sparrow is an “omni-channel experience management platform.” With it, you’ll be able to design, distribute, and analyze surveys, but you’ll also be able to automate workflows, set up offline kiosks, and collect data via many different channels.
6. Survicate.
Survicate is another survey creation tool for gathering customer feedback. The tool currently boasts an 83 percent survey completion rate, and has more than 125 templates to choose from. You can host surveys on your website, on your app, or distribute them via channels like email.
7. Crowdsignal.
Crowdsignal states: “There are signals in the noise. Find them. Start asking, start listening, start learning.” To this end, Crowdsignal attempts to make the creation of surveys and polls as simple and as fast as possible. With it, you’ll find a variety of templates and other features meant to simplify and hasten the survey development process.
Real-Time Customer Feedback Tools
The following customer feedback tools are designed to help you gather customer feedback in real-time, or “in the moment” of the customer experience.
8. Qualtrics.
Qualtrics is an “experience management platform” that allows you to collect data from customers in real-time, via your website, mobile device, or even email and social media. You can also collect customer complaints and concerns with a dynamic closed loop ticketing system.
9. Feedbackify.
Feedbackify attempts to make customer data collection easy, with the help of drag-and-drop editors. When you have a new survey, you can copy and paste the HTML into the backend of your website, and immediately begin collecting customer data in real-time.
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Online Review and Community Feedback Software Tools
These tools collect customer feedback in the form of online reviews, or else are optimized to provide feedback to the community.
10. Trustpilot.
Trustpilot is one of the best-known online review collection platforms, and is used by businesses in a variety of industries. With it, you can upload a mailing list and instantly send a request for your customers to review your business. You can also feed customer reviews directly into search engines, which can immediately start to influence your seller rating.
11. Feefo.
Feefo is a similar tool that allows you to send emails to customers, prompting them to leave reviews for your business. You can also display the results of these new reviews on your website, showcasing the average rating of customers, text from top reviews, and more.
12. UserEcho.
UserEcho is a customer feedback software tool that gives you access to a wide range of different features, including a built-in knowledge base, a community forum, and live chat for your customers. You can collect customer reviews and feedback, or even handle individual customer issues with a private ticketing system.
13. UserReport.
With UserReport, you’ll be able to create online surveys from scratch (or make use of templates), then gather customer feedback on customer forums. You can also generate ongoing reports to track metrics like response rates and overall customer satisfaction, and you can study demographic data, location data, and more.
14. Frill.
Frill is an all-in-one user feedback software for all your digital channels. This tool collects and analyzes feedback from websites, mobile apps and email campaigns in real-time. It helps businesses build customer relationships and develop a positive online image.
User Testing Software Tools
If you’re designing software or online applications, you’ll need to let users test and evaluate the product before you commit final changes. These user testing tools will help you do it—and gather all the customer feedback you need to improve the product.
15. HotJar.
Hotjar is a website analytics tool designed to help you analyze both traffic data and user behavior. It’s also equipped with ample features to help you collect customer feedback and learn more about your average visitor’s experience. You can also use it to build and display surveys and polls, so you can collect data straight from your web visitors.
16. Freshmarketer.
Freshmarketer, by Freshworks, is a customer feedback collection tool that helps you optimize for conversion. It includes a variety of features and tools, including AB testing, funnel analysis, user surveys, heat maps, session replays, and more. You can also set up alerts to notify you whenever a customer completes a survey or completes an important event on the website.
17. Mouseflow.
With Mouseflow, you’ll gain access to a similar suite of tools, including heat maps and recordings of website visitor sessions. You’ll also be able to analyze visitors who leave your website or abandon forms. With it, you’ll get a much better understanding of how users interact with your site, and more importantly, why they interact that way.
18. Saber.
Saber allows users to flag issues they experience on your website immediately. They can highlight specific pain point, and take notes to tell you exactly what should change, and why. You’ll get an email with a detailed screenshot whenever a customer completes one of these events.
19. CrazyEgg.
CrazyEgg is a robust conversion optimization and user testing tool, with a variety of features designed to help you improve your website. With it, you can analyze user behavior directly, track click patterns, and more. You should be able to analyze what your customers are looking at, and determine why they’re leaving or converting.
20. Helio.
Finally, there’s Helio (previously known as Verify). It’s a user testing tool and survey creation platform that helps you collect information on your website visitors. With it, you’ll get a much better understanding of your customers’ perceptions.
Learning More About Your Customer Service
Now that you have this list of amazing customer service software tools to try, do you want to learn more about how you conduct customer service, and what your customers really think about your brand? First, check out this list of customer service tools. And don’t miss our big post covering the best small business apps!
Next, consider trying EmailAnalytics. EmailAnalytics is a data visualization and analysis tool that enables you to visualize your email activity. It enables you to gather an impressive array of data on your email habits, including your average response time, your number of emails sent and received, and more. Sign up for a free trial today, and get a better handle on your customer service email strategy.
Jayson is a long-time columnist for Forbes, Entrepreneur, BusinessInsider, Inc.com, and various other major media publications, where he has authored over 1,000 articles since 2012, covering technology, marketing, and entrepreneurship. He keynoted the 2013 MarketingProfs University, and won the “Entrepreneur Blogger of the Year” award in 2015 from the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. In 2010, he founded a marketing agency that appeared on the Inc. 5000 before selling it in January of 2019, and he is now the CEO of EmailAnalytics.
