Back to Parative
Customer feedback plays a crucial role in improving products, increasing growth through upsells and renewals, and serving up an all-around great user experience. But feedback isn’t worth much if you can’t surface the insights that make those improvements possible.
As I’m sure you know, feedback can come in a wide variety of formats–text, video, images, survey responses, NPS scores, and more–sourced from a wide range of platforms, resulting in large volumes of mostly irrelevant, highly-variable data sets.
As such, it’s important to have a customer feedback stack that not only creates a seamless process of collection, but also keep things organized in one place so that nothing slips through the cracks, all while keeping your customers in the loop and optimizing your products, services, and experience. Easy, right?
Let’s take a look at some of our favorite customer feedback tools, whether you’re looking to manage all your feedback more efficiently, capture real-time user insights, or launch surveys that people will actually want to complete.
All feedback is not created equal and neither are all customer feedback tools.
Some target specific industries like SaaS, e-commerce, or local businesses, while others focus on particular types of feedback like NPS scores or user-generated reviews.
Ultimately, the tools you select depend on what you’re trying to measure, what kind of business you run, and the products/services you offer.
We’ve rounded up a list of the best customer feedback tools on the market–each with their own unique benefits–to help you get a sense of what you might include in your customer feedback stack.
Best for: user relationship management.
Overview: Now, to be fair, we may be a bit biased, but Parative's Voice of the Customer (VoC) supports the entire user feedback loop in one system, giving software companies a single source of truth for all customer needs, feedback, and sentiment captured across every team and tool in the company.
Parlor syncs up with all of your business tools, including your live chat tools, ticketing systems, CRM, engineering task management (think Jira), analytics platforms, and more, allowing your team to measure the impact of your efforts across all channels, prioritize feature requests, and automatically close the loop with customers when you’re done making improvements.
Additionally, the platform allows you to perform contextual user research, surfacing critical insights in real-time by engaging users who are actively using your app. This allows you to learn more about your audiences’ intent, preferences, and behavior, as well as analyze and compare results across different segments, industries, and prior results.
Key features:
Best for: User surveys.
Overview: Typeform is a versatile data collection tool that makes it easy to create intuitive forms, surveys, and questionnaires that present questions one at a time–which according to the platform, allows you to get more thoughtful responses and higher completion rates.
The platform includes pre-built templates and an interactive editor, built-in photo & video libraries, and conditional logic that surfaces the right follow-up questions to create a more conversational experience for your end-users.
Key features:
Best for: Understanding customer behavior & preferences.
Overview: UserReport is a customer feedback tool based around two main widgets: a survey widget and a feedback widget. The platform runs as an integrated part of your website or mobile app and allows you to directly interact with users, capture insights from website visitors in real-time, and find out how your customers think you can improve.
Key features:
Best for: feature request management.
Overview: Canny is a customer feedback and feature request platform that helps businesses capture, analyze, prioritize, and track feedback to plan and prioritize product releases and features.
The platform allows you to collect feedback from multiple channels and automatically organizes those insights into a list that can be used to inform your roadmap. You can also allow customers to post feedback directly from your website or app and vote on the improvements they’d most like to see—making it easier for brands to prioritize the features and fixes that customers care about most.
While Canny is a great tool for the feedback collection process, the process for closing the loop with users is entirely manual, and the feedback in Canny is not connected to any customer data through a CRM, so you won’t have as much context to who’s requesting what and why.
Key features:
Best for: Reputation & customer experience management for local businesses.
Overview: Podium is a reputation management and messaging platform designed to centralize customer reviews from a wide range of online listing sites and leverages customer feedback to help drive growth and improve the customer experience.
This platform was built exclusively for local businesses–with up to 10,000 locations—and provides a centralized interface for interacting with customers, managing reviews, and tracking business analytics.
Podium also includes with a built-in messaging functionality, online chat, and the ability to collect payments from customer
Key features:
Best for: Super-specific, actionable feedback.
Overview: Overview: Qualaroo is a customer feedback tool that allows users to collect contextual, qualitative insights using pop-up surveys and questionnaires designed to capture 10x more insights (at least according to the official website) than your typical email survey.
The platform features a proprietary insight capture tool, called Nudges, that helps you ask the right questions at the right time and comes with a collection of pre-made “Nudge templates” so that you don’t have to create in-app, link, or web surveys from scratch each time you’d like to collect feedback from your customers. Qualaroo also includes an AI-enabled sentiment analysis feature powered by IBM Watson that detects emotion and intent in open-ended survey responses.
Key features:
Best for: Scaling your UGC strategy.
Overview: Bazaarvoice is a customer feedback platform designed for online retailers that allows you to capture ratings and reviews from your customers, as well as ask & answer questions through the platform’s built-in portal, Bazaarvoice Connections.
Key features:
Best for: Gathering private, real-time user feedback.
Overview: Feedbackify is a platform that allows users to design custom feedback forms using a built-in drag-and-drop editor. What makes Feedbackify unique is that users can collect instant feedback from anonymous site visitors, which can help you increase response rates and protect consumer privacy.
Key features:
Best for: Reputation & review management.
Overview: Overview: While TrustPilot is better known as a review site, it also provides a paid review management service that helps organizations leverage consumer feedback to increase conversions, improve brand reputation, and learn more about their audience.
The platform offers widgets you can install on your site to capture and publish reviews and feed customer responses to search engines to help boost your visibility in both paid and organic search.
Key features:
Best for: Visualizing consumer behavior
Overview: Hotjar is perhaps best known for its visual behavior tracking tools–heatmaps, scroll maps, clicks, scrolls, and so on, which are incredibly useful in helping organizations fill in the gaps between what customers say and what they do.
It’s great for understanding the “why” behind certain comments or pinpointing areas where it might be worth deploying a survey or questionnaire to uncover the source of friction.
Key features:
Best for: Capturing customer feedback for web-based products & services.
Overview: Usersnap is a bug-tracking and customer feedback platform that aims to help CX, tech support, and product teams solve customers’ critical pain points.
The platform is best suited for SaaS and e-commerce, and includes a comprehensive issue-tracking solution that allows you to manage and prioritize requests in a single dashboard view.
Key features:
Best for: Community management.
Overview: Get Satisfaction is a customer engagement platform designed to capture ideas, create sales opportunities, and scale customer support by making it easier to engage with consumers wherever they are–be it Facebook, your website, mobile, app, or Google search.
Get Satisfaction also allows you to request input from customers and have them vote on their favorite ideas, and provides a widget you can add to any page so that you never miss an opportunity to capture insights from your audience. Users that click the widget are presented with four options: ask a question, report a problem, give praise, or share an idea.
Key features:
Best for: NPS surveys.
Overview: Rentently is a customer feedback platform that focuses primarily on measuring and improving customer satisfaction and loyalty through Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.
While Retently doesn’t offer the robust feature suite you’ll find with some of the other options on this list, the platform goes deep into NPS insights, offering advanced analytics & reporting tools, as well as audience segmentation that allows users to split customers into different groups to learn more about how customer satisfaction breaks down by demographic.
Users can survey customers through social media platforms, email, on their website, or inside their app, and have the option to create custom workflows that trigger surveys based on visitor actions or responses.
Additionally, Retently integrates with a wide range of third-party apps including your CRM, marketing automation platform, email, help desk software, and whatever else you use on the job.
Key features:
Best for: Discovering bugs, improving UX & quality testing.
Overview: Saber is an online feedback tool that helps online brands build better products. The platform includes a visual feedback tool called the “BugMuncher” which allows users to “draw” on your website to point out specific problem areas, which you’ll then receive in the form of a screenshot you can use as a reference point for performing the fix.
Key features:
Best for: Finding and reporting bugs.
Overview: Instabug is a visual feedback tool that provides bug reports, crash reports, app performance monitoring, as well as in-app surveys and chats for users.
The tool allows screenshot annotations and also screen recording and integrates with a range of popular business tools including Zendesk, Slack, Jira, and Trello.
Key features:
While it’s critical to capture customer feedback from as many relevant channels as possible to improve the products, services, and experiences you deliver to your customers, it’s just as important to consolidate that feedback into a single source of truth.
By bringing all customer feedback into one place, you’ll be better equipped to respond to consumer needs, accurately prioritize requests, and close the loop once you’ve deployed the latest update.
Parlor helps teams make sense of their customer feedback and provide actionable insights by aggregating everything into a single system of record, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re looking to foster lifelong user loyalty and get all your internal teams rallied around the needs of your users, reach out to us and let’s see how we can help.
