Customer feedback provides insight into what features of a product or service are effective and what changes should be made to enhance the user experience. Here are the tools to actively collect, analyze and respond to customers’ feedback.
Switching providers is practically free and just as simple as changing, for instance, your shampoo, or food oil. Think from a company’s perspective. Your customers have nothing to lose – they will jump to another vendor without a second thought. The minute you fall short of their expectations, you lose them.
Businesses risk losing up to 9.5% of their revenue owing to poor customer experiences.
Is there a way out?
Starbucks was able to move past the 2008 financial crisis with one simple trick – feedback.
Back in 2007-08, the then Starbucks CEO Howard D. Schultz rolled out “My Starbucks Idea” – a platform for customers to give feedback.
As a result, the brand received over 93,000 ideas from about 1.3 million social media users. The coffee-house giant implemented these ideas, changing store layouts to new items. The strategy helped the brand reignite the trust among customers, thereby helping to pull out of the financial meltdown.
Consumers are the ones who bring in revenue, and having a customer-centric approach is directly correlated with business success. Also, amid the IMF warning that the world could be in recession in 2023, companies must be ready to face the upcoming “recessionary waves”. This necessitates businesses to have customer feedback as it reveals consumer satisfaction levels and can help spot areas for product improvement.
Tools at our disposal
Businesses require the right set of tools and strategies to augment the same. For businesses, it’s still a guessing game, as consumer feedback tools offer a wide range of functions. They employ numerous data collection methods, gather consumer feedback, produce various types of reports, and offer diverse user insights.
Let’s simplify. To begin with,
SurveyMonkey is a good option to start with. It ensures smooth sharing of the survey with fine control over who can view and edit. The online survey software also allows free integrations with popular apps, including Slack, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, Hubspot, and more. Collecting live customer feedback across channels, including email, SMS, website, and mobile apps, and preparing a central dashboard to analyze CX, makes it even better.
Moreover, one can easily export files across different formats (PDF, CSV, PPT, XLS, or SPSS), and its encrypted survey platform reduces the concerns around data security.
Moving on, Hubspot’s customer feedback software is also a strong contender. It provides customized surveys that can be shared via a web link or mail. The platform helps brands choose from pre-built Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to gauge customer loyalty, thus helping to strategize better.
Additionally, the availability of a built-in feedback dashboard helps visualize insights and spot opportunities to improve specific points in the customer journey.
With a highly intuitive user interface, Typeform is possibly the next customer feedback tool to bet on. The platform helps companies create customized interactive surveys, forms, and even tests. It features a vast library of visually appealing forms, survey and quiz templates, a built-in media library, as well as high-level reports.
Also, the platform lets users plug in their existing customer database, data visualization, and easy-to-share reports across teams within an organization.
UserReport is a collection of customizable tools for gathering consumer feedback that reveals the identities and goals of a brand’s end users. The platform is based on simple tools – one is a survey, and the other is a feedback form. It runs as an integrated component of a company’s website or app, enabling them to directly engage with consumers and learn about who they are, what they are looking for, and how they (brands) can improve.
It collects data about visitors, such as gender, age and satisfaction, and presents the results from the survey as easy-to-read and understand reports.
InMoment is yet another tool that uses voice, text, video, and active listening to gather customer feedback and even encourage them to provide online reviews. The platform provides a variety of reports for an in-depth examination, although it can be challenging for new users to comprehend the reporting tools.
Help transform strategies for optimal CX
All the above-mentioned tools automate gathering feedback and converting it into simple data points to evaluate for a better customer experience.
With the help of rating-based questions, firms can quickly determine their customers’ satisfaction level. Customer loyalty and satisfaction are key determinants of a company’s financial performance. Numerous advantages, including increased market share, decreased costs, or greater revenue, are closely related. Hence, a detailed customer feedback analysis can help take corrective actions in advance.
For example, Apple uses Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey rate to know about the detractors and follow up with them to reverse the scenario. It helps the brand improve its in-store experience.
Further, with valuable feedback when making product feature choices and adding new features, companies do implement suggested improvements. Consider the “IdeaExchange” platform by Salesforce, which manages customer suggestions and handles user requests for new features. Customers can even cast votes for the features they thought the business should implement.
A brand knows its product well, and a lot of research goes in before implementing a new feature or rolling out a new service – hence it reduces the chance of spotting any imperfection. Customers being the end-user, can easily let brands know what is actually lacking, thus helping them improve experiences over time.
To conclude, there is no prize in guessing that “customer forgiveness” is no longer an option. Hence, listen to customers and be a proactive brand rather than a reactive one.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 represents a robust cloud-based CRM solution with features such as pipeline assessment, relationship analytics, and conversational intelligence. It utilises AI-powered insights to provide actionable intelligence via predictive analytics, lead scoring, sentiment analysis, etc. Currently, Microsoft operates in 190 countries and is made up of more than 220,000 employees worldwide.
HubSpot is an inbound marketing, sales, and customer service software provider, offering robust CRM and automation solutions. Some of its products include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Operations Hub, Content Hub, Commerce Hub, Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software. Guided by its inbound methodology, HubSpot enables companies to prioritise innovation and customer success.
Monday.com is a project management software company, offering a cloud-based platform that enables businesses 
Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks is a global AI-powered business software provider. Its tech stack includes a scalable and comprehensive suite for IT, customer support, sales, and marketing teams, ensuring value for immediate business impact. Its product portfolio includes Customer Service Suite, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshcaller, Freshsuccess, and Freshservice. Freshservice for Business Teams has helped several global organisations to enhance their operational efficiency.
Talkdesk offers an innovative AI-powered customer-centric tech stack to its global partners. The company provides generative AI integrations, delivering industry-specific solutions to its customers. Talkdesk CX Cloud and Industry Experience Clouds utilise modern machine learning and language models to enhance contact centre efficiency and client satisfaction.
The company offers comprehensive cloud-based solutions, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Gaming Consoles, Microsoft Advertising, Copilot, among other things, to help organisations offer enhanced CX and ROI. Its generative-AI-powered speech and voice recognition solutions,such as Cortana and Azure Speech Services empowers developers to build intelligent applications.
IBM is a global hybrid cloud and AI-powered 
Uniphore is an enterprise-class, AI-native company that was incubated in 2008. Its enterprise-class multimodal AI and data platform unifies all elements of voice, video, text and data by leveraging Generative AI, Knowledge AI, Emotion AI and workflow automation. Some of its products include U-Self Serve, U-Assist, U-Capture, and U-Analyze. Its Q for Sale is a conversational intelligence software that guides revenue teams with AI-powered insights, offering clarity on how to effectively keep prospects engaged.
Google Cloud accelerates every organisation’s ability to digitally transform its business. Its enterprise-grade solutions leverage modern technology to solve the most criticial business problems 
8×8 offers out-of-the-box contact centre solutions, assisting all-size businesses to efficiently meet customer needs and preferences. It offers custom CRM integrations support and integrates effortlessly with third-party CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, and more. Offering global support in all time zones & development teams in 5 continents, its patented geo-routing solution ensures consistent voice quality.
Sprinklr is a comprehensive enterprise software company for all customer-focused functions. With advanced AI, Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform lets organisations offer human experiences to every customer, every time, across any modern channel.
Upland offers a comprehensive suite of contact centre and customer service solutions with products including InGenius, Panviva, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers. InGenius enables organisations to connect their existing phone system with CRM, further enhancing agent productivity. Panviva provides compliant and omnichannel capabilities for highly regulated industries. Whereas, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers are its AI-powered solutions, 
Zoho Social, a part of Zoho’s suite of 50+ products, is a comprehensive social media management platform for businesses and agencies. The Zoho Social dashboard includes a robust set of features, such as Publishing Calendar, Bulk Scheduler, and Approval Management to offer businesses all the essential social media publishing tools. Its monitoring tools help enterprises track and respond to relevant social conversations.
Hootsuite, headquartered in Vancouver, is a social media management platform that streamlines the process of managing multiple social media accounts. Some of its core offerings include social media content planning and publishing, audience engagement tools, analytics and social advertising. Its easy-to-integrate capabilities help marketing teams to schedule and publish social media posts efficiently.
Brandwatch enables businesses to build and scale the optimal strategy for their clients with intuitive, use-case-focused tools that are easy and quick to master. Bringing together consumer intelligence and social media management, the company helps its users react to the trends that matter, collaborate on data-driven content, shield the brand from threats and manage all the social media channels at scale.
Zoho Corporation offers innovative and tailored software to help leaders grow their business. Zoho’s 55+ products aid sales and marketing, support and collaboration, finance, and recruitment requirements. Its customer analytics capabilities come with a conversational feature, Ask Zia. It enables users to ask questions and get insights in the form of reports and widgets in real-time.
Salesforce-owned Tableau is an AI-powered analytics and business intelligence platform, offering the breadth and depth of capabilities that serve the requirements of global enterprises in a seamless, integrated experience. Marketers can utilise generative AI models, AI-powered predictions, natural language querying, and recommendationsons.
Fullstory is a behavioural data platform, helping C-suite leaders make informed decisions by injecting digital behavioural data into its analytics stack. Its patented technology uncovers the power of quality behavioural data at scale, transforming every digital visit into actionable insights. Enterprises can increase funnel conversion and identify their highest-value customers effortlessly.
Contentsquare is a cloud-based digital experience analytics platform, helping brands track billions of digital interactions, and turn those digital 
Amplitude is a product analytics platform, enabling businesses to track visitors with the help of collaborative analytics. The platform leverages the capabilities of 
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirement for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its platform helps play an essential role in managing different digital content or assets to improve customer happiness. Its easy-to-optimise content gives users appropriate marketing streams, ensuring product awareness.
Started in 2005 in a Sweden-based small town, Norrköping, Voyado offers a customer experience cloud platform that includes a customer loyalty management system. This platform helps businesses design and implement customer loyalty programs, track customer 
TapMango provides a comprehensive, customisable, flexible and feature-rich customer loyalty program. The loyalty tools include an integrated suite of customised consumer-facing technology, easy-to-use merchant tools, and automation algorithms, all aimed at enhancing customer experience. Adaptable to any industry, TapMango’s platform helps merchants compete with larger chains, converting customer one-time purchases into profitable spending habits.
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirements for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its innovative platform has played an essential role in managing different digital content or assets, to improve customer happiness or satisfaction. Some of its products include Adobe Gen Studio, Experience Manager Sites, Real-time CDP, and Marketo Engage.
