Why Customer Feedback Software Will Be Non-Negotiable in 2024
It‘s no secret that we‘ve entered the age of the customer. With more choice and higher expectations than ever, businesses must compete on experience to win lasting loyalty. Consider these telling statistics:
- 80% of customers say experience is as important as products/services (Source)
- 95% of customers will share a bad experience with others (Source)
- Increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits up to 95% (Source)
The takeaway is clear: to thrive in 2024 and beyond, brands must become obsessed with understanding and optimizing every facet of the customer journey. And that starts with continuously gathering feedback straight from the source.
Luckily, customer feedback software has evolved leaps and bounds in recent years. Advanced tools now make it possible to automatically collect insights at scale, analyze sentiment in real-time, and extract actionable intelligence to fuel every part of your CX engine.
The global customer feedback software market is expected to nearly double from $5.7 billion in 2022 to $10.1 billion by 2027. (Source) And for good reason – these tools aren‘t just nice-to-haves, they‘re now table stakes for companies serious about customer-centricity.
So which specific solutions should be on your radar heading into 2024? After extensive research and analysis, here are our top picks across four essential categories:
Online Survey Tools
Tried-and-true for a reason, online surveys remain one of the most versatile and cost-effective ways to gather direct customer feedback. Modern tools make the process easier than ever, with key features to look for including:
- Customizable templates
- Advanced logic flows and question types
- White-labeling to match your brand
- Mobile-friendly responsive design
- Integrations with your CRM & other systems
- Real-time reporting
Our Top 3 Picks
| Tool | Best For | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| SurveyMonkey | All-around value & flexibility | Free – $99/user/mo |
| Typeform | Sleek UX & advanced logic | $35-$70/user/mo |
| Qualtrics | Enterprise features & analytics | Custom |
Each of these tools makes building engaging surveys a breeze, even for non-technical users. SurveyMonkey is an excellent all-around choice, with an ever-expanding feature set across their plans – including AI-powered analysis on their top tiers.
Typeform‘s forte is its elegant, one-question-at-a-time format and unique interactive elements like videos, gifs, and animations. It‘s tailor-made for boosting completion rates on long surveys.
For the enterprise, Qualtrics (recently acquired by SAP) is a leader with an extremely robust system that can handle advanced use cases like conjoint analysis. Their dashboards are a cut above for drilling into insights.
Review Monitoring & Management
While surveys elicit direct feedback, online reviews provide a treasure trove of public-facing insights about your brand. Monitoring this unsolicited feedback is crucial for protecting your online reputation and identifying CX issues.
However, manually tracking the dozens of potential review sites your customers turn to is impossible. That‘s where review monitoring software comes in – enabling you to keep tabs on all your reviews from one central hub, automate responses, and analyze performance over time.
Our Top Picks
| Tool | Best For | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| ReviewTrackers | Multi-location businesses | Custom |
| BirdEye | Reputation management | $299-$499/mo |
| Mention | Social listening | $29-$450/mo |
For brick-and-mortar businesses and franchises juggling dozens or hundreds of online review profiles, ReviewTrackers is our top pick. Their location-based dashboards and competitor benchmarking are standouts.
BirdEye goes beyond just review tracking to offer an all-in-one online reputation management solution, complete with customer surveys, ticketing, and automated responses. Their "Interactions" feature even syncs your reviews with other comms like chat and text.
For monitoring broader web and social mentions, Mention is a powerful media monitoring tool starting at just $29/month. It tracks over 1 billion sources across 42 languages for extremely comprehensive listening.
User Behavior Analytics
The next frontier in customer feedback is to look beyond what customers say to what they actually do in your digital experience. A host of tools now provide in-depth behavior analytics to complete your CX insights:
| Tool | Best For | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Hotjar | Heatmaps & Session Recordings | Free – $99/mo |
| Crazy Egg | Snapshot Reports | $24-$249/mo |
| FullStory | Behavior-Based Segmentation | Custom |
Hotjar is our top pick in this category for its feature-rich free tier including heatmaps, recordings, conversion funnels, and on-site surveys. Their visual insights make it easy to spot at a glance where users are getting hung up. Over 900,000 organizations use Hotjar.
Crazy Egg offers similar click tracking and scroll mapping reports (called "snapshots"), with a few bonus features like A/B testing and a unique "confetti" report showing all clicks segmented by referral source and other dimensions.
FullStory is an advanced DXI (digital experience intelligence) platform with robust capabilities for aggregating user behavior into actionable segments e.g. "Rage Clicks" or "Dead Clicks". Segment-level session replay is another key differentiator.
VoC Platforms
Finally, for enterprises seeking a comprehensive solution, Voice of Customer (VoC) platforms provide a one-stop-shop for aggregating and analyzing feedback data from all channels. These tools connect the dots between solicited feedback (surveys) and unsolicited (reviews, social, CRM) while layering in behavioral and operational data for a 360-view.
| Tool | Best For | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Medallia | Industry-Specific Solutions | Custom |
| Qualtrics | Predictive Intelligence | Custom |
| InMoment | Employee & Customer Feedback | Custom |
Medallia and Qualtrics are the 800-pound gorillas in this space. Both provide extremely sophisticated (and pricey) end-to-end solutions for CX management trusted by major global brands. What sets them apart:
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Medallia has been honing industry-specific solutions for 20+ years across verticals like hospitality, automotive, financial services, etc. This deep domain expertise means their platform comes pre-configured with best practices for your industry.
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Qualtrics is now part of the SAP suite, meaning deep integrations with your operational data for connecting CX to business outcomes. Their "predictive intelligence" engine also stands out for AI-powered analytics that forecast things like NPS, churn, and lifetime value.
For combining customer and employee experience insights, InMoment is an intriguing choice. Their platform centers on the intersection of CX and EX (employee experience), with the thesis that more engaged employees naturally lead to better customer outcomes.
Building Your Ultimate Customer Feedback Stack
So with all these wonderful tools to choose from, how do you decide what‘s right for your business? Here‘s a step-by-step playbook for building your ideal customer feedback tech stack:
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Start with a versatile survey tool as your foundation – you can‘t go wrong with either SurveyMonkey or Typeform depending on your needs/budget. As you scale, consider graduating to an advanced tool like Qualtrics.
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Layer on real-time feedback widgets like those offered by Qualaroo, Usabilla, or Wootric to capture contextual insights and customer sentiment in key moments.
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Add review monitoring to keep tabs on unsolicited feedback across the web. Mention is an affordable starting point, while ReviewTrackers or BirdEye can provide more comprehensive coverage across review sites.
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Complement with user behavior tools to understand the why behind the feedback. Start with a combo of heatmaps (Hotjar) and session recordings (Hotjar, FullStory).
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Bring it all together with a VoC platform to connect the dots across all your feedback & behavioral data. This is likely a "grow into it" investment for more mature CX orgs.
Regardless of where you start, the most important thing is to start. Adopting even one or two of these tools can make a world of difference in surfacing hidden opportunities to optimize your CX.
Of course, tools are just one piece of the puzzle. To extract maximum value from your customer feedback software, you need a clear strategy and processes for collecting, analyzing and activating the insights. A few parting tips:
- Make customer feedback a cross-functional initiative. CX is a team sport! Engage stakeholders across product, marketing, sales, support, etc. to contribute questions and KPIs that feedback can inform.
- Measure what matters. Don‘t just ask for feedback because you can – carefully design your listening posts (surveys, review monitoring, etc.) around specific business goals and decisions you need to make.
- Close the loop. Let customers know you‘re listening and acting on their input. An astounding 97% of customers are somewhat likely to become more loyal to a company that implements their feedback (Source).
- Democratize insights. Customer feedback should be accessible to everyone, not siloed in a CX black box. Consider building dashboards and newsletters to regularly socialize findings and celebrate customer-led wins.
By marrying the right tools with the right customer-centric mindset, you‘ll be well on your way to CX success in 2024 and beyond. Because at the end of the day, fighting for your customers‘ attention is hard – but keeping it is infinitely harder. As Jeff Bezos famously said:
"We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It‘s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better."
I couldn‘t agree more. Now go forth and gather that feedback!
