Collecting customer feedback is crucial for any business looking to improve their products and services. By listening to your customers, you gain valuable insights into their pain points, needs, and preferences. This allows you to enhance your offerings to better meet customer demand.
In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the 9 best customer feedback tools to help you collect, analyze and act on user feedback.
What is a Customer Feedback Tool?
A customer feedback tool is a software that enables businesses to efficiently gather, measure, and make sense of input from their customers.
With an effective feedback tool, companies can:
- Identify areas for product or service improvement
- Assess customer satisfaction levels
- Build trust and loyalty among customers
- Proactively address customer issues
- Incorporate user feedback into product roadmaps
Ultimately, customer feedback tools empower businesses to make data-driven decisions that optimize the customer experience.
Why Customer Feedback Tools Are Important
Here are some key reasons why actively collecting and analyzing customer feedback is crucial for business success:
Spot Trends and Issues
Feedback tools provide insights into your customers‘ main challenges, desires, and pain points. You can use this intel to spot key trends and issues to address.
Identify Improvement Opportunities
User feedback highlights specific areas where your product falls short or could provide better value. You can then focus development efforts on enhancements that really matter.
Boost Customer Loyalty
Customers feel valued when you actively seek out and incorporate their input. This fosters greater trust, satisfaction and loyalty.
Inform Business Decisions
With concrete data directly from users, you can confidently determine which product tweaks or new features to prioritize based on customer demand.
Enhance User Experience
Armed with feedback around pain points and expectations, you can refine customer journeys to make interactions smooth, effective and enjoyable.
Now let‘s explore some top-rated feedback tools to help strengthen your customer insights.
1. Hotjar
Hotjar is an invaluable user feedback software delivering website analytics alongside tools to visually gather user feedback.
With over 3 million websites using Hotjar, it‘s a highly popular customer feedback solution.
Key Features
- Heatmaps showing where users click and scroll on pages
- Recordings of real user sessions on your site
- Feedback polls and surveys to capture user opinions
- User behavior analytics like visit time, clicks, etc.
- Integrations with top web analytics tools
Benefits
- Identify usability issues through visual data
- Pinpoint pain points in customer journey
- Quantify customer satisfaction with NPS surveys
- Access actionable insights to optimize web experience
Hotjar offers a forever-free plan along with premium plans starting at $29 per month.
2. UserVoice
UserVoice is a leading customer feedback management platform, offering multiple integrated tools to centralize feedback.
With customers like Amazon Web Services, Shopify and Netflix, UserVoice is a top-rated feedback solution.
Key Features
- Feedback forums and idea boards
- Help desk ticketing and support tools
- Customer satisfaction surveys
- Feedback analysis with custom reports
- Mobile SDK to capture in-app feedback
Benefits
- Consolidate multi-channel customer feedback
- Identify most requested features and fixes
- Analyze sentiment with NPS surveys
- Improve helpdesk issue resolution
- Smoothly integrate feedback across web, mobile and email
UserVoice starts with a free plan for up to 3 users. Premium plans are $65+ per month.
3. Canny
Canny takes customer feedback gathering to the next level with smart features to easily organize and learn from customer input.
It‘s an intuitive, visually beautiful platform that makes feedback management delightful.
Key Features
- Customer roadmaps based on feature requests
- Feedback portal highly customizable to your brand
- Segment users by account details or campaigns
- Private admin-only discussions around feedback
- Integration support for 1000+ business apps
Benefits
- Visually map most requested features
- Achieve consistent branding through customization options
- Gain context around feedback with user segmentation
- Enable productive internal feedback evaluation
- Connect seamlessly with your tech stack
Paid plans start at $50 per month. Canny offers a generous free trial to test it out.
4. Roadmunk
Roadmunk provides a uniquely visual strategic planning platform to take customer feedback and transform it into product roadmaps and action items.
From startups to leading brands like Vimeo and Jaguar Land Rover, over 6000 businesses use Roadmunk for product planning based on user research.
Key Features
- Build interactive product roadmaps
- Import ideas from Jira, Excel, etc
- Portfolio planning tools
- Progress bars to track development
- Real-time progress reporting
Benefits
- Visualize how suggestions fit into your product strategy
- Effortlessly import ideas from other systems
- Coordinate company-wide product and project initiatives
- Communicate release plans and progress to stakeholders
- Keep entire organization aligned on priorities
Plans start from $15 per user/month with a 14-day free trial available.
5. Usersnap
Usersnap brings the power of visual feedback with its intuitive screenshot and annotation capabilities for fast bug reporting.
With over 6000 global customers like Volkswagen, Usersnap is a highly-rated feedback solution.
Key Features
- Annotated screenshot tool to visually flag issues
- Developer access to customer environment details
- web widgets and mobile SDK for easy feedback capturing
- Issue tracking dashboard with filtering and assignment
- API and webhook support for seamless integration
Benefits
- Visually identify problems faster through annotated screenshots from customers
- Recreate customer issues with more environmental details
- Enable feedback capture across all devices
- Organize issue management with dashboard filtering and assignment features
- Connect Usersnap seamlessly with other platforms in your infrastructure
Plans start at $24 per month for 5 users after a 15-day free trial.
6. Upvoty
Upvoty is a handy plug-and-play customer feedback widget perfect for rapid product iteration based on user input.
It‘s incredibly quick and easy to set up on any site or app.
Key Features
- Lightweight feedback popup widget
- Real-time activity dashboard showing user feedback
- Upvote system for feature prioritization
- API support for extensive customization
Benefits
- Start gathering feedback in minutes with no coding
- View and respond to feedback in real-time
- Identify most popular feature requests
- Mold extensively to your needs with APIs
Upvoty has a free plan for startups. Paid packages start at $39 per month.
7. Fider
Fider is a neat open source feedback platform you can self-host on your own infrastructure to build fully customized solutions.
It‘s a great self-managed option if you have particular requirements or privacy needs around your user feedback data.
Key Features
- Open-source under MIT license
- Feedback widget highly configurable
- Email and multiple authentication options
- REST API for infinite integration capabilities
- Docker implementation for easy deployment
Benefits
- Full data ownership as you host everything on your servers
- Craft feedback widgets to match your branding
- Support secure access through enterprise SSO
- Build custom workflows and systems around feedback management
- Quickly implement with Docker for painless deployment
As Fider is open source, it‘s free to use. You just need to cover hosting costs.
8. Upvote
Upvote is a superbly intuitive idea management portal for enabling effective product decisions based on customer feedback.
With innovative smart features and top-notch analytics, Upvote gives invaluable insights into what users want most.
Key Features
- Feedback proposals and idea forum
- User voting to identify most wanted features
- Custom integrations with Jira, Slack etc
- Sentiment analysis identifying pain points
Benefits
- Let customers suggest and vote on product changes
- Quantify demand to guide roadmap priorities
- Connect feedback seamlessly with existing tools
- Detect recurring problems impacting NPS scores
Upvote offers a free trial with 10 users. Paid plans start from $7 per user/month.
9. Typeform
Typeform makes feedback collection a smooth, enjoyable process for customers with its visually engaging conversational surveys.
Over 300,000 businesses use Typeform to gain customer insights that inform strategic decisions.
Key Features
- Conversational surveys for high engagement
- Logical branching questions based on responses
- Survey personalization with variables
- Partial survey completion support
Benefits
- Boost survey completion rates through engaging designs
- Adapt questions based on user responses
- Deliver tailored questions to different users
- Let users continue surveys later
Typeform has a free basic plan for core features, with advanced functionality on paid plans starting at $35 per month.
Now that we‘ve explored some stellar options, how do you determine the best feedback tool for your specific business needs?
Choosing the Right Feedback Tool
With diverse solutions available catering to different needs, here are key factors to guide your choice:
Features – Evaluate must-have capabilities vs nice-to-have. Prioritize tools that have features solving your main pain points.
Ease of Use – The system should be simple enough for your customers to provide feedback with minimal effort. Likewise, your team should find it intuitive to manage and analyze the data.
Customization – If branding and integration with other tools is important, prioritize highly customizable platforms over rigid ones.
Budget – Shortlist tools aligning with your spending capacity, keeping long term costs in mind as your user base expands.
Company Size – Some tools are better suited for small, mid-size or large enterprise needs based on sophistication of capabilities required.
Turn Customer Feedback into Product Improvements
Armed with an effective feedback solution, here‘s how to take concrete actions around user input:
Categorize issues – Classify feedback by type (bug, feature request, complaint etc), product area, sentiment and other variables that matter.
Define action triggers – Set quantitative thresholds for when certain feedback qualifies to become a work ticket. For example, 50 upvotes on a feature request.
Craft policy changes – If multiple users identify an unsatisfactory policy or process, think how you can improve it.
Build feedback roadmaps – Map out which popular change requests you will tackle over upcoming releases based on viability and resources.
Close the loop – Let engaged customers know which suggestions you implement based on their valuable input.
Key Takeaways
Here are the major lessons around leveraging customer feedback tools for business success:
- Actively soliciting customer feedback provides invaluable insights to drive product and process improvements.
- Using the right tool hugely impacts how much quality feedback you can collect and integrate.
- Choose a solution that aligns smoothly with your workflow needs and constraints.
- Categorize, quantify and track feedback to inform strategic plans backed by user data.
- Closing the feedback loop builds immense goodwill and loyalty among engaged customers.
With these best practices, your business is primed to offer customers exactly what they want while staying efficiently aligned to user expectations.
