The 13 Best Customer Feedback Software Solutions
A wealth of happy customers is the lifeblood of any business, but understanding what they like, what improvements they want to see, and how you solve their pain points better than any other competitor isn’t always obvious.
Unfortunately, talking to your customers one by one isn’t scalable, and most survey response rates hover around an abysmal 5-30%. Fortunately, there are tools that can effectively scale your customer engagement.
Therefore, we compiled a list of the best customer feedback software solutions that enable you to connect with customers at scale and understand key pain points (and value props) that drive your business.
We’ll first discuss our tool Qwary, an all inclusive customer feedback solution that enables personalized surveys (from video and SMS to dynamic forms and voice) as well as several other industry leading tools.
If you’d like to try Qwary for yourself, start a free trial today!
Customer Feedback Platform (All Inclusive)
Traditional survey tools are notorious for low response rates, and even when companies do receive responses, they may be disengaged (lack context due to hurried responses, yes/no answers, etc.) and fail to provide the insight the company needs.
So rather than just using a traditional survey form builder, you can use Qwary to build video, audio, voice, or dynamic form fill surveys.
By making our surveys more interactive, they typically increase response rates by approximately 40% and customer responses are more engaged and insightful for companies as video and even dynamic surveys provide more context for answers.
Below, we’ll dive into some key features that make Qwary the ultimate customer feedback platform:
- Dynamic and Customizable Survey Builder
- Video Survey (and Response!) Capabilities
- SMS, Messenger, Email, and Other Deliverability Channels
- Automatic Translations
- Analytics (Sentiment Analysis, net promoter score (NPS), Segment By Audience, Customer Loyalty, etc.)
Creating a Dynamic and Customizable Survey Builder
If you’re creating a form-fill survey, customize it with images or video, interactive questions (such as image multiple choice, multiple choice, fill in the blank, star rating, drop down, etc.), and your own colors and decorative images.
In addition, rather than just creating a single survey that everyone takes, use our survey branching feature so that each survey is customized to that individual’s experience and provides more context around their answers.
For example, if customers rated shipping with one star, you can direct them to a question about what caused the poor experience (damaged package, late arrival, etc.) while customers that rated it with five stars can move on to another topic.
This helps you pinpoint painful aspects of the customer experience and identify trends, such as customers that purchased specific products, ordered from specific regions, etc.
Create a Video Survey
Surveys typically feel impersonal and customers are therefore less likely to respond and provide limited context. To combat this, Qwary’s video survey feature makes it easy for you to record yourself asking the survey questions. By communicating with a human instead of a form, you have more context around the issue and the overall quality of communication increases.
However, perhaps even more valuable is that customers can respond with a video of themselves as well. This provides much more context as a 20 second video would usually equate to several paragraphs of text, and it’s easier to interpret their sentiment towards your brand with body language and tone of voice.
Deliver Surveys Through Messenger, SMS, Email, QR Codes, and More
Another reason most companies struggle to collect customer feedback is because their surveys exist solely on their website. and they don’t have a method to push it to channels with higher conversion rates. Email engagement rates are notoriously lower than SMS and Messenger, so we make it possible for you to send your Qwary survey to all of these channels.
Similarly, telling your customers in store to go online, find your survey on a specific page, and then take it is a lot of work. Instead, we allow you to also offer your survey through QR code to increase in-store customer responses.
Finally, you can also embed the survey on your website to capture traditional website visitors.
Automatic Translations
If only a portion of your audience speaks the same language, and your survey is only available in one language, you’re missing out on a lot of feedback. Therefore, all of our surveys translate automatically.
This not only gives you access to more customer feedback, but also enables you to better understand how customers from different geographies rate the experience.
Analytics
Qwary offers a host of analytics in the main dashboard including:
- Average time completion
- Average completion rate
- Device Type
- Geo Map
We also offer a NPS dashboard that provides data for:
- Your overall NPS score
- Responses by Score
- NPS Trend
- Response Volume Trend
The overall rating dashboard gives you a general overview of customer satisfaction and how your customers feel about your brand as a whole. You’ll be able to break down responses for individual questions, sort responses by score, and much more.
If you have hundreds of reviews, you don’t have time to watch every video or read through every written response. Therefore, Qwary uses natural language processing (NLP) to accurately interpret sentiment.
This works for videos as well because Qwary automatically transcribes videos into text.
Therefore, rather than watching or reading every review, you can just skim through a few of the keywords and see the overall sentiment analysis score.
We offer a host of other analytics as well, so start a free trial today to see for yourself.
Social Sentiment Analysis Software
Your customers may be talking about your business without your knowledge and their feedback could be very powerful to your business. Therefore, here are a few social sentiment analysis software solutions that will alert you when your customers talk about your product online and will start collecting customer feedback on autopilot.
Brand24
Brand24 is one of the best customer feedback solutions to track customer conversations regarding your brand online.
The main dashboard shows you an overview of company mentions across the web and which channels they came from. To quickly filter customer feedback and draw key insights into customer pain points, you can mark each conversation as positive or negative.
You can also set up specific alerts for various mentions such as positive/negative mentions from websites with a specific amount of traffic.
What Customers Love:
Customer Support: Customers absolutely love the support team at Brand24! There were so many comments about people that had small issues (often with the UI), and a representative would be on it in no time.
It’s Reliable: For data-based tools, it’s difficult to trust that you are always getting accurate information. However, Brand24’s customers seem to be quite happy with it and on the whole, and it works well for most.
Newsletter and Podcast Monitoring: I believe that this is the only tool that offers newsletter and podcast monitoring.
What Customers Would Improve:
More Intuitive Interface: One issue that most people mentioned was that the interface isn’t particularly intuitive. However, with data-heavy tools that offer advanced filters and dashboards, this can be a challenge and they did say that the customer support was excellent.
Improve Facebook Alerts: Several people mentioned that the data from Facebook wasn’t always great. Though interestingly enough, the support team can help you find a “workaround,” so hopefully they are fixing it.
Pricing:
After the 14 day free trial, here is a look at their pricing:
Keyhole.co
Keyhole has a number of features that help you better track your brand across the web. Similar to Brand24, they offer sentiment analysis graphs and alerts whenever someone mentions your brand.
Keyhole also has a number of competitive analysis features. For example, you can compare the sentiment analysis of your brand to that of a competitor’s brand. They also have a very cool feature that identifies influencers talking about your brand and helps you reach out to them.
What Customers Love:
Competitive Data They capture sentiment analysis data for other brands and organize it into a concise comparison chart. You can then dive into individual comments to understand what customers like and dislike about the competition.
Dashboards and Reports: The dashboards and reports are very intuitive, clean and useful.
What Customers Would Improve:
Lack of Data: The biggest complaint from customers was that they only keep two weeks worth of data, which makes it difficult to track long term customer feedback trends.
More Depth For Facebook and Instagram: Several customers expressed concerns over the lack of Facebook and Instagram data, though they didn’t share much beyond their reasoning.
Pricing:
All of their pricing is on request, though some reports say that basic plans start at $49 per month.
Awario
Awario is another brand monitoring tool that will give you a report of customer feedback across the web. The analytics dashboards also cover sentiment analysis, and it identifies top influencers across the web (similar to Keyhole).
They also have an interesting feature that alerts you when someone complains about a competitor. For example, if you are Freshbooks, Awario can identify people complaining about Quickbooks, alert you to the complaint, and help you reach out and sell to them.
What Customers Love:
Affordability: Their plan starts at about half the price of the competitors, so if you need something for basic monitoring, it’s an excellent option. However, it is a steep pricing curve as the next plan up (which offers data export) is $74 per month.
Provides Essential Data: Awario is an excellent customer feedback tool for those that want to monitor their brand with up to 30,000 new mentions per month and only pay half of what competitors charge. It may not be as robust, though it’s an excellent alternative for the price.
What Customers Would Improve:
Steep Learning Curve: Some people mentioned that the software is difficult to get the hang of at first, so you may have to train your team to use it.
Access Older Data: Another common complaint is that it seems you can’t always access older data. For example, Twitter data is apparently only available for seven days.
Pricing:
Mention
Mention is one of the most popular brand monitoring solutions with over 400 reviews on G2. It includes all of the basics such as influencers using your product, sentiment analysis, and boolean alerts (customer displeased with competing products), and customizable email overviews.
The Pulse Alerts is also a unique feature that alerts users when certain keywords spike. Therefore, if you or a competitor goes viral, you’ll know about it quickly.
They are also the only brand on the list to offer a free version.
What Customers Love:
Rank Mentions by Relevancy: Rather than just listing all mentions, they show you the ones that they believe are most relevant to your business first.
Interface: The dashboards and interface offer a comprehensive overview of how your brand is performing.
Ease of Setup: Numerous customers raved about how easy it is to set up and get going.
What Customers Would Improve:
Filtering For Spam: One customer mentioned, “No matter how many times I mark certain mentions as spam, the system doesn't seem to be too good at learning what is and is not a legitimate brand mention.”
Pricing: I’m hesitant to include this as they are the only tool on the list that actually offers a free version (not just a free trial), though it was definitely the most common complaint. It seems that as you scale up, the higher pricing tiers may not include everything you need until you get to the top.
Pricing:
Customer Review Software
Customer reviews are essential to not only increasing conversions and bringing in new customers but also to understand what customers like and would improve about your product. Here are some excellent tools that will help you collect customer feedback on autopilot and help your draw actionable insights.
GatherUp
GatherUp made the list as one of the best customer feedback solutions as it is one of the most highly rated review generation tools designed for businesses with physical stores.
They allow you to send customer feedback surveys which you can personalize and customize with your own branding. To deliver them to customers, you can select either email or SMS.
The tool also monitors about 50 locations and you’ll receive daily email notifications of customer reviews and feedback.
Another cool feature set that they offer is review widgets, which you can put on your website to help lift conversions.
What Customers Love:
Customer Service: You can tell that some companies' support teams go above and beyond, and GatherUp appears to be one of them. In fact, one reviewer said, “I had one complaint, but the company took my suggestion and adapted the product. I can't beat that!”
Easy to Use and Reliable: This product isn’t particularly complex, and most people just praised it for how easy it is to use.
Filtering Reviews For Display: One customer mentioned, “I love being able to tag reviews so they can be segmented for display on our websites. Whether it's a service or an individual, I can filter them for display in addition to sharing them on social media for added value.”
What Customers Would Improve:
Pausing Campaigns: One reviewer mentioned that you cannot pause campaigns for reviews once you send out a list.
Modern Design For Review Widgets: A few reviewers mentioned that they wish there were more design options for displaying reviews on the website.
Pricing:
Birdeye
Birdeye is a little more robust than GatherUp with extensive analytics on presence, reviews, competitors and more.
Here’s an overview of all the tabs they offer:
Birdeye also offers robust survey options and allows you to customize your surveys with various questions and send them over SMS, Messenger, or email. At the end of the survey, you can ask customers to leave a review with one tap and send referral requests.
What Customers Love:
Personal Assistance: Birdeye provides you with an account representative and one customer shared, “When I found our company receiving a number of negative reviews that were not being answered with positive reviews, I contacted BirdEye directly to ask for assistance in crafting a reviews request that would make a difference. My account representative stayed on the line with me for more than an hour as we developed a far better, more inviting series of messages to our customers to share their positive experiences. Within 24 hours, I saw the tide turn as nearly 20 reviews came in with praise for our company's customer service.”
All-in-One Tool: You can truely have a “birdeye” view of how your brand is performing with access to all of your review sites in one simple dash.
What Customers Would Improve:
Add on Fees: Some features that are typically part of the main pricing package are add ons. For example, the referral request feature is excellent, though it’s not included in the plan. Similarly, tracking a customer experience is an additional cost.
Issues for Those With Multiple Locations: If you have multiple locations, some customers complained that it’s difficult to manage all of them in one place. Specifically, one customer said, “for each location, we have separate sentiment surveys since they all have separate websites.”
Pricing:
Podium
Podium offers a variety of different customer service features, among them a review monitoring tool, and a customer feedback (survey) tool.
The review monitoring feature includes automated review invites, overall review analytics, as well as competitive benchmarks. You also have a nice overview of all of your review sites in one platform.
Their tool allows you to survey customers at any point in the customer journey (not just post-purchase) and alerts you of negative reviews so that you can immediately interact with them and fix the issue before their review goes too far.
What Customers Love:
Immediate Alerting and Customer Connection: Customers love that they can immediately interact with a dissatisfied customer the instant that a negative review surfaces.
SMS Survey Capabilities: Users also love how easy it is to collect feedback from their customers through SMS and how automated the entire process is.
What Customers Would Improve:
May Be Too Robust: For some people that don’t want to integrate it with SMS and messenger, it can be too robust. There isn’t really a pricing tier that offers just the bare minimum. One customer said, “I don't like that a simple reputation management service has morphed into more than we need - and they charge for it too! We just want to gain more public reviews...but no...Podium now wants to handle all our chats and text messages.”
Various Add ons: A few customers complained about add ons that didn’t seem fair. For example, one customer said that if they started texting with a customer and that customer called, they would be directed to an unattended voicemail unless you paid an extra $20 per month for it to be redirected to your phone.
Pricing:
Swell
Swell is another robust customer engagement tool that enables local businesses to monitor reviews across the web in one single dashboard, prompt customers through SMS to leave reviews, and communicate with website visitors via live chat and SMS.
They also have a survey tool that allows you to ask basic questions via SMS, though it certainly isn’t a full-fledged survey tool.
On the whole, it’s an excellent tool to understand what customers are saying about your brand and take action on it in one dashboard.
Swell is also unique in that it doesn’t have different pricing tiers. Therefore, it may or may not be a good fit depending on how many features you plan to use.
What Customers Love:
Clean Design: Multiple people (including a designer!) have commented on the beautiful interface of the tool and love how all of the information is displayed.
Simple Automation: It’s just an easy tool that you can set and forget. So even if you forget to ask patients to leave a review, it will do so for you.
What Customers Would Improve:
Bugs: There weren’t many complaints, though the complaints that did arise were mostly centered around bugs. However, their customer service had excellent reviews, so if you run into problems, you won’t be alone. Here’s an example from a customer, “Sometimes sync isn't working and a week will go by until we notice review messages aren't being sent.”
Doesn’t Work For Landlines: If some of your customers can’t text and only use landlines, you won’t be able to communicate with them.
Pricing:
Customer Survey Software
A list of the best customer feedback tools simply wouldn't be complete without customer survey software. Therefore, here are a few that are excellent at capturing customer feedback and increasing satisfaction.
Typeform
Typeform is one of the mainstream customer survey software solutions and is known for its simple and easy to use interface.
Just create an account, select one of the templates, and then you can customize the question type (multiple choice, star ratings, etc.).
You can also select your own design and even upload your own picture or video to the question. Typeform also offers logic jumps to help you further customize your answers.
What Customers Love:
Ease of Use: Clearly the biggest USP of Typeform is its ease of use. Customers loved that they could easily create a free account, chose a template, add some questions and share in just four easy steps. No onboarding necessary.
Design Options: Customers love the design options typeform offers as excellent design can increase response rate.
What Customers Would Improve:
Price: Several people argued that it is really just a form builder and there are plenty of other cheaper form builders available. Their pricing model is based on the number of responses you receive monthly, so if you receive a lot of responses, you might want a different solution.
This was also a point of contention for people that only had a few responses but didn’t want the Typeform branding on their survey. Similarly, you can’t use logic jumps on the lower pricing tiers.
Integration: Several people also said it was a little difficult to integrate with Hubspot.
Pricing:
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is another survey builder, though unlike Survey Monkey and Qwary, they present all questions at once and offer fewer customization options.
Therefore, it’s usually used by researchers and other organizations where completion rate isn’t a major concern (participants are required to finish it).
They offer a host of templates you can choose from and are easy to create along with analytics from your net promoter score to your respondent’s geography.
One other major benefit of SurveyMonkey is that they integrate with a host of other business tools including Salesforce, HubSpot, and more. This helps you immediately inject the user feedback into tools you already use daily.
Responses can also be anonymized if you wish, which can help increase response rate
What Customers Love:
Ease of Use: Customers love that SurveyMonkey is very user friendly and it only takes a few moments to create a survey as you can select a template, pull relevant pre-written questions, and send it to your audience.
Integration Options: Customers also love how easy it is to integrate SurveyMonkey with your CRM, Slack, and other tools. This ensures that this newly found data doesn’t live in a vacuum and instead becomes actionable information.
What Customers Would Improve:
Lacks Customization: Unlike Qwary and Typeform, you don’t have a lot of customization or design options. For example, you can’t add an image to the background or make any adjustments to the background for that matter. This is a poor brand experience and may cause bored responders to bounce.
In addition, the list format of questions makes it more overwhelming and reduces your response rate.
Pricing:
Pricing was another major concern with SurveyMonkey as users complained that not only are the individual plans quite high, but you also have to upgrade to see full analytics of the survey you sent.
Pricing
SurveyMonkey has two different pricing tiers – one for personal users and one for businesses. You can see more information regarding pricing on their pricing page.
Survey Sparrow
Survey Sparrow is another form builder similar to Typeform and SurveyMonkey. They offer a number of different templates that you can choose from and customize your own. In the design department, they are more like Typeform than SurveyMonkey as they prioritize few questions with elegant design.
Here’s an example of what one of their surveys looks like:
They offer basic analytics for all of their surveys, including your net promoter score, as well as plenty of integration options.
One thing I like about SurveySparrow is that they are the only ones that offer a chatbot across their website and, as one of the smaller companies mentioned here, it’s easy to see that they probably have the most responsive support.
What Customer Love:
Chatbot Survey Option: A feature unique to Survey Sparrow is their chatbot survey. You can just embed it into your website and collect instant feedback from browsers.
Customer Support: The customer support for Survey Sparrow is unmatched. Many customers rave about it with one saying, “ The support team has offered to have a Zoom call with me to sort out any issues.”
Pricing: Survey Sparrow has the cheapest basic plans, though it isn’t necessarily all inclusive.
What Customers Would Improve:
More Features: Some customers wish that they had more options such as the ability to make a single page for like a Google form.
Lacks Certain Question Types: One customer stated, “For me - not enough questions types. That was a deal breaker. For example, there is no card sorting question type.”
Pricing: Among all of these survey tools, price was a complaint, though it seems to be a complaint for different needs. For example, with Survey Sparrow, you have to pay extra for NPS questions. Therefore, even though Survey Sparrow starts at the lowest price than the other two, it may be more expensive depending on the use case.
Pricing:
They have NPS, Personal, and Business pricing plans which you can see here. Below is their personal pricing plan:
Alchemer (Formerly SurveyGizmo)
Formerly known as SurveyGizmo, Alchemer changed its name as it became more of a customer feedback platform, though it still appears that surveys are their main offering.
With Alchemer’s surveys, you have access to various question types (they even have pre-written questions you can modify!) and you have access to survey logic if you want to send customers to different questions depending on their responses.
However, one feature they have that is quite interesting is their survey testing tool. They essentially help you craft your survey to increase responses:
Their user interface and design options seem to be a bit behind Typeform and SurveySparrow, though with the new rebranding, it’s interesting to see what other products they will offer in the future to complement it.
You’ll also have access to some straightforward analytics to make your survey data actionable.
What Customers Love:
It’s HIPAA Compliant: If you work in healthcare, you can rest assured that Alchemer surveys are HIPAA compliant so that you can survey your patients worry-free.
Unlimited Surveys: Even on the basic plan, you have access to unlimited surveys, which is excellent for small businesses.
What Customers Would Improve:
Buggy: Multiple users said that they had issues with bugs and random glitches. Here are a few examples:
- “The routing rules often have glitches and one or more results won't be sent via email.”
- “It also gives you the option to add appointments onto the schedule on the app, but it literally does not work. You cannot add anything to the schedule on the app.”
- “I have been unable at times to delete a library item (global question) from my survey. It looks like I'm deleting it, but it never goes away.”
Customer Support: There isn’t a chat feature for customer support, so it can be a little difficult to get in touch with them.
Pricing:
Try a Customer Feedback Tool Today
As each business has different needs, there is no single perfect customer feedback tool.
However, if your business needs a survey platform that is designed to increase response rates, consider trying Qwary.
Qwary offers video, audio, and customizable form fill surveys that can be distributed through email, SMS, QR Codes, and more. Our analytics dashboard also offers unparalleled data on sentiment analysis, NPS, audience geography, customer loyalty, and so much more.
Start a free trial with Qwary today!