What gets measured, gets managed. In other words, if you’re not asking your customers how they’re getting on with your product and/or service, how can you improve your offering?

Collecting customer feedback is important for businesses in all industries, of all sizes. But it can be hard knowing where to start. Fortunately, there are a lot of customer feedback tools out there that promise to streamline the feedback gathering process, and in this blog we round up the best in class options.

What is a customer feedback tool?

A customer feedback tool is designed to help businesses collect, measure, analyze, and quantify customer feedback. It enables you to directly engage with your customers to gauge their satisfaction with your product and/or service.

Why use a customer feedback tool?

Customer feedback tools facilitate the gathering of customer feedback, which is crucial for many reasons:

• Better offering (and better ROI): By asking your customers what works and what doesn’t, you can cut to the chase and improve your offering – and, in turn, boost your sales.

• Increased retention: Measuring the pulse of customers is a great way to uncover and address any issues in your product offering or processes. This way, you can improve the overall customer experience and reduce customer churn.

• Increased customer satisfaction: Showing your customers that you value their feedback increases trust and respect. In turn, customers are more satisfied.

• Higher engagement: Asking customers to leave feedback – whether directly, via third-party review sites or on social media – demands higher engagement. Also, incentivizing customers to leave reviews can also boost engagement.

It’s important to collect customer feedback throughout the customer lifecycle – not just at the conversion stage once the customer has received their purchase, but also during the awareness and consideration stages.

Remember: all feedback is good feedback.

What type of feedback can you gather?

The type of feedback you gain from customers depends on your business and offering. For example, an ecommerce fashion retailer may ask their customers to provide feedback on the product they purchased, or on their customer support experience. A SaaS business, on the other hand, may ask users which product features they are loving, or whether they are experiencing any product issues.

Below are some common types of customer feedback to gather.

Lead source

You can find out where website visitors came from or how they heard about your brand. Perhaps you embed a popup widget that asks, “How did you find out about us?” with several options below: e.g. a) word of mouth; b) social media; c) referral; d) email, and so on. Knowing this can help you attribute revenue to your highest-converting traffic sources in cases where attribution may not have been caught through data sources.

Customer interests

You can also gauge your customers’ interests, and find out what types of products/services or content they want to see. For example, a SaaS business may ask their customers what product features they would love to see on the roadmap, or a media company may ask consumers what sorts of topics they want to see covered.

User testing/bug fixing

Some businesses – primarily SaaS businesses – may benefit from facilitating user testing via a feedback tool so that users can report any website/product issues or bugs that stop them from completing tasks. This means businesses can harness unbiased insights from real customers to make product improvements, rather than having to outsource user testers.

CSAT survey

A customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey is a popular way to learn how satisfied a customer is with the service they have just been given. Often, CSATs involve they five smiley faces: very sad face (very dissatisfied); sad face (dissatisfied); neutral face (neutral); smiley face (satisfied); very smiley face (very satisfied).

CSATs are easy to pop into all communication channels. In fact, if you look closely, you’ll see them everywhere – at the bottom of emails, on company intranets, in restaurants and stores, and so on.

NPS survey

Similar to the CSAT is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. Businesses can use the NPS survey to measure customer sentiment and identify areas needing improvement. The NPS is a popular customer feedback mechanism. It asks the question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company/product to a friend or colleague?” The scoring is split across three segments: promoters (scoring 9-10), passives (7-8), and detractors (0-6). It’s best to present NPS surveys to customers who have been with your business for at least 30 days, rather than leads or prospective customers.

Depending on the response, you can then reach out to the customer accordingly to boost their engagement (if they were a passive or detractor) or maintain their brand advocacy (if they were a promoter). Ortto users can create NPS journeys to tag promoters, passives and detractors and send them on relevant customer journeys based on their responses.

CES survey

Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys are used to measure the amount of effort a customer had to exert to use a product or service, find the information they needed, or get an issue resolved. This is an important metric for customer support teams.

How to gather customer feedback

Onto the big question: How exactly do you gather customer feedback? Below are a few ways to get started:

Capture widgets/pop-ups

Perhaps one of the easiest ways to gather customer feedback is by embedding widgets into your website. Ortto has many different types of capture widgets for different occasions, including notifications, banners, bars, pop-ups, forms, and spin the wheel.

For example, you may choose to embed survey pop-ups or bars to appear once the user has been browsing certain product pages for at least 10 seconds (as this would indicate they are likely interested in your brand), which ask them where they came from (source) or what products they are interested in.

Email

Email is another way to gather customer feedback. For example, an ecommerce brand may create an automated email that goes out to customers a few days after they receive their order that asks them how they found their shopping experience. You can also easily embed CSAT surveys into the bottom of emails.

SMS

You can also use SMS to ask customers to share their feedback on a recent purchase. Plus, because consumers prefer using SMS for quick communications, it’s worthwhile automating a feedback journey, which is easy in Ortto – find out more about this in our blog on SMS marketing.

What to look for in a customer feedback tool

When shopping for a customer feedback tool, you should look for platforms that complete the entire feedback loop. Some key features to look out for include:

• Survey templates

• Branding

• Personalized messaging

• Reporting & analytics

• Single dashboard

• Support

• Integrations and APIs

These features form the basis of a well-designed feedback tool – anything additional is a bonus.

19 best customer feedback tools

There are many customer feedback tools out there, so it can be hard to find the best-fit tool for your business. Luckily, we’ve done the hard work for you and have listed the best tools below. We’ve also categorized some more specialized feedback tools: user testing, review management, survey tools, and research tools.

1. Ortto

Ortto unifies your data sources to unlock a single view of the customer, and allows you to build custom activities that can be used to enter customers into journeys and target them with personalized, omnichannel marketing messages.

Building journeys across email, SMS and in-app messaging is incredibly simple and intuitive, and templates are available for common goals like generating feedback.

Ortto enables users to capture customer feedback in a number of ways: through the use of capture widgets (popups, banners, etc.) and via email, and SMS. By capturing and housing customer feedback in one place, different teams across your organization can view an individual’s profile to deliver relevant messaging and, in turn, better serve their needs.

Ortto offers a wide variety of other marketing automation and customer journey features. Here are just some of the features that will supercharge your marketing strategy:

• Create custom activities based on any combination of data

• Automate email, SMS, pop-ups and in-app messaging

• Simple email builder and brand book

• Templates for popular journeys and playbooks like requesting feedback from customers

• A/B testing on subject lines, SMS, and more

• Visualize customer journeys in an intuitive builder

• Version history with the ability to revert to previous edits

• Merge tags and dynamic content blogs to personalize content

• Reporting with attribution on every campaign

2. Typeform

Typeform is an online tool used to build no-code forms, surveys and quizzes to capture responses from customers and other users. It can help to increase site traffic, lead generation, conversion, and customer data, and also encourage audience engagement.

Typeform’s top features:

• Multi-page forms

• Survey builder

• Question types

• Templates

• Multi-language

• Multimedia support

• Reporting and analytics

• BI tools integration

3. Parlor

Parlor supports to entire user feedback loop by organizing all feedback into a single record. Parlor enables businesses to sync multiple business tools like a CRM, live chat tools, analytics platforms, and more to create a single source of truth for all customer feedback and needs.

Parlor’s top features:

• Aggregate feedback from any source

• Customizable in-moment surveys

• In-product feature requests and bug reports

• Live chat, Slack, and supporting ticket integrations

• User voting on requests

• Merge similar feedback to quantify impact

• Dynamically segmented user cohorts

• Salesforce and JIRA integrations

4. Hotjar

Hotjar offers product experience insights, which consists of visual behavioral tracking tools like heatmaps, scroll maps, clicks, and so on, to show businesses how users behave and what they feel strongly about. This way, product teams can understand the “why” behind customer behavior and make valuable improvements to deliver a better user experience.

Hotjar’s top features:

• Data quantification

• Side-by-side analysis

• Mobile device analysis

• Heat maps

• Data segmentation

• Session replays

• Survey

• Analytics

• Click tracking

• Mouse movement

5. UserReport

UserReport is based on two simple widgets – a survey and a feedback widget. These widgets are used to find out who your customers are, what they want to achieve, their satisfaction with your product and/or service, and whether they are experiencing any website bugs. By collecting this information, you can uncover the most popular features, and determine how best to serve your customers to guide them to conversion.

UserReport’s top features:

• Survey/poll management

• Customizable questions

• Complaint monitoring

• Customizable branding

• Data import/export

• Feedback management

• Multi-language

• Reporting, statistics & analytics

• Trend analysis

6. Sprinklr

Sprinklr offers businesses a unified view of everything their customers are saying about them, which they can turn into actionable insights using the AI functionality. This means businesses can measure and analyze customer engagement across multiple channels using automated workflows and moderation, and enable cross-team collaboration on engagement dashboards.

Sprinklr’s top features:

• Customer surveys

• Sentiment analysis

• Social analytics

• Social measurement

• Social publishing

• Campaign optimization

• Competitor analysis

• Reporting

• Influencer identification

7. Intercom

Intercom is a communication solution that facilitates better feedback dialogue between a business and their customers. Its main feature is a chat bot that encourages website visitors to engage and convert. Intercom unifies data to provide rich insights that help to improve customer engagement scores.

Intercom’s top features:

• Ticket creation/response user experience

• Automated response

• Live chat support

• Pop-up chat

• In-app messaging

• Targeted emails

• Customization

• Customer profiles

• Team inbox

8. Retently

Retently is a customer feedback platform that focuses on using NPS surveys to measure and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. This enables customer experience and product teams to better understand their customers and take steps to improve retention.

Retently’s top features:

• Customizable surveys

• Campaign management

• Campaign analytics

• Chat/messaging

• Collaboration tools

• Customer profiles

• Customizable branding

• Reporting & analytics

• Multi-language

9. Canny

Canny is a feedback platform for B2B/SaaS businesses that captures and organizes all feedback in one place so that businesses have all the information needed to prioritize and roadmap product development. Canny integrates with project management tools like Jira.

Canny’s top features:

• Collaboration tools

• Feedback management

• Idea ranking

• Polls/voting

• Product lifecycle management

• Product roadmapping

• Third-party integrations

• Widgets

10. CustomerSure

CustomerSure is a customer feedback software that enables businesses to gather, manage, and respond to customer feedback to improve satisfaction and boost sales. With CustomerSure, businesses can send NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys.

CustomerSure’s top features:

• Customizable templates

• Data analysis tools

• Data import/export

• Mobile survey

• Multi-channel distribution

• Question library

• Reporting & analytics

• Survey builder

• URL customization

Customer survey tools

If you’re in the market for a tool to distribute customer surveys, the below tools might be up your alley.

11. Survicate

Survicate is a survey tool that streamlines the collection of customer feedback (e.g. NPS and CSAT), marketing feedback, and product experience. With Survicate, you can send surveys via four channels: email and link surveys, website surveys, product surveys, mobile app surveys. Integrate Survicate with Ortto via Zapier here.

Surviate’s top features:

• Survey builder

• Survey distribution

• Templates

• Branding

• Multimedia support

• Reporting & analytics

• BI tools integration

12. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkeys is one of the most well-known online survey tools in the world, enabling businesses to capture the opinions and sentiment of their customers to drive business growth. Integrate Ortto with SurveyMonkey using Zapier – learn more here.

SurveyMonkey’s top features:

• Survey builder

• Survey distribution

• Question types

• Templates

• Customizable branding

• Multi-language

• Multimedia support

• Reporting and analytics

• BI tools integration

Customer review management tools

If you’re looking for a tool to gather, track, monitor, and manage customer sentiment across social media and third-party sites, these tools might suit you.

13. TrustPilot

Trustpilot is a well-known customer review management tool that helps businesses establish trust with customers and leads. By automating the review collection process, businesses can gather more reviews to improve SEO and conversion rate.

Trustpilot’s top features:

• Customer feedback

• Competitve intelligence

• Sentiment analysis

• Dashboard

• Corporate reporting

• Social network monitoring

• Social media management

14. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a scalable research tool for building, launching, and analyzing survey research. Businesses can use Qualtrics for several projects, including brand/customer insights, product research, and employee experience.

Qualtrics’s top features:

• Templates

• Drag-and-drop survey builder

• Customizable survey themes

• Collaboration tools

• AI analysis

• Multi-language

• Reporting & analytics

• SMS distribution

• Email and chat support

• BI tools integration

15. Podium

Podium is a customer communication and messaging tool that specializes in reputation management. It centralizes customer reviews from multiple sources. It combines live chat, online review generation, SMS marketing, and payment processing to improve the customer experience and drive growth.

Podium’s top features:

• Batch communications

• Billing & invoicing

• Campaign management

• Live chat

• Customer experience management

• Customizable reports

• Email management

• Feedback management

• SMS messages

• Reporting & analytics

• Multi-channel communication

16. Bazaarvoice

Bazaarvoice is designed for ecommerce retailers to collect and manage customer reviews, feedback, and testimonials to maximize social proof and enhanance brand loyalty. With Bazaarvoice, businesses can also ask and answer customer questions through the in-built portal.

Bazaarvoice’s top features:

• Negative feedback management

• Reporting & analytics

• Review generation

• Review monitoring

• Social media monitoring

• Social sharing

User testing tools

Customer feedback tools aren’t just for gathering sentiment – they can also be useful for identifying bugs and website issues. SaaS businesses may find the following tools useful.

17. Userbrain

Userbrain helps businesses identify and fix any problems users have while browsing their site, e.g. issues with navigating pages or making a purchase. By facilitating better user testing, businesses can gain unbiased insights into ways users behave and make fixes to improve the website experience.

Userbrain’s top features:

• Task monitoring

• Benchmarking

• Collaboration tools

• Customer experience optimization

• Customizable forms, fields, questions & reports

• Issue tracking

• Multi-language

• Performance metrics

• Question library

• Reporting & analytics

• Survey/poll management

18. Usersnap

Usersnap is a customer feedback platform designed to help ecommerce and SaaS businesses improve customer experience. Its issue-tracking dashboard streamlines request management, meaning product teams can prioritze bug fixes.

Usersnap’s top features:

• User reports and feedback

• Tester reports and feedback

• Team reports and comments

• Anonymous feedback

• Bug tracking

• Bug/issue capture

• Collaboration tools

• Communication management

• Continuous feedback

• Customizable forms and branding

• Customizable branding

• Pulse surveys

Customer research tools

Looking to undertake some customer research to gain valuable insights? These tools may be worth considering.

19. Qualaroo

Qualaroo is an automated research platform that enables users to collect qualitative insights using pop-up surveys and questionnaires (aka ‘nudges’) to gather customer sentiment and valuable insights.

Qualaroo’s top features:

• Anonymous feedback

• Survey/pulse survey builder

• Collaboration tools

• Communication management

• Content creation

• Customizable branding

• Question library

• Data analysis tools

• Data visualization

• Engagement tracking

• Multi-channel distribution

Final word

If you have customers, collecting their feedback should be at the top of your agenda. By adopting a best-fit customer feedback tool, you can gain actionable insights and improve your offering tenfold.

Signup to Ortto for free today and get your feedback gathering practices underway.