Research identifies four distinct maturity stages in how companies handle customer feedback, with clear performance differences at each level.
BackEngine has announced the release of its business insights research report, “The Customer Feedback Benchmark: How Leading B2B SaaS Companies Drive Growth Through Systematic Customer Feedback.“
The study of over 150 SaaS businesses reveals a dramatic correlation between how systematic a company is in collecting customer feedback and business performance, with companies employing advanced feedback systems significantly outperforming competitors across all key metrics.
The report’s release coincides with BackEngine’s emergence from stealth, offering an AI-powered platform that helps organisations create a customer feedback loop by analysing all customer communications.
“Our research definitively shows that how companies collect and act on customer feedback isn’t just an operational concern – it’s a critical strategic advantage in today’s competitive SaaS landscape,” said Eli Portnoy, CEO and Founder of BackEngine.
“Companies with mature feedback systems are 6.5 times more likely to significantly outperform competitors, yet most organisations still rely on fragmented, ad-hoc approaches that leave them blind to crucial customer insights.”
ALSO READ: UK Consumers Call on AI to Save “Broken” Customer Service
Key Findings From the Benchmark Report
The research identified four distinct maturity stages (Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert) in how companies handle customer feedback, with clear performance differences at each level. Here are the key findings;
- Competitive Positioning: Organisations with ‘Expert’ feedback systems are 6.5x more likely to significantly outperform competitors than those with “Basic” approaches.
- Customer Satisfaction: 66.7% of ‘Expert’ companies report improved satisfaction scores versus just 28.1% of Basic companies.
- Product Success: 74% of companies with ‘Expert’ feedback maturity report improved product launch success rates compared to just 40% of those at the Basic level.
- Revenue Expansion: 83.3% of ‘Expert’ companies report increased upsells, with zero reporting decreases.
The study also revealed a connection between CEO engagement with customers and business performance. Companies where CEOs interact with customers weekly are twice as likely to outperform competitors compared to those where CEOs rarely engage with customers.
Organisational Challenges & Opportunities
Despite the clear business case for advanced feedback systems, the report identified concerning gaps in current practices:
- In 23.5% of companies surveyed, no one clearly owns customer feedback.
- Only 11.1% of companies use AI to analyse customer communications.
- Just 33% of executives review customer feedback monthly or more frequently.
ALSO READ: Phonexa Increases Consumer Conversions Through SMS
“We invested in the BackEngine team and technology because today’s SaaS companies face increased competition, economic pressures, and higher customer expectations,” said Micah Rosenbloom, General Partner at Founder Collective.
“BackEngine’s platform directly addresses these challenges by giving every team – not just CS, product, or sales/revenue teams – direct access to the customer voice through AI-powered analysis of calls, emails, and messages. The result is faster decisions, better products, and stronger customer relationships.”
BackEngine addresses the fundamental challenges B2B SaaS companies face as they grow: maintaining deep customer connections across the entire organisation without requiring additional headcount or complex processes.
Its democratised approach to customer intelligence has already delivered proven results in improved retention, increased expansion revenue, and enhanced cross-functional collaboration at companies such as HopSkipDrive, UserEvidence, Crayon, and Fossa.
“Since implementing BackEngine, we’ve significantly improved how quickly our entire company can react to our customers. What used to take weeks, now happens in real-time across every department,” said CEO of HopSkipDrive, Joanna McFarland.
“Our product team catches emerging needs before they become support tickets, our marketing team better understands customer language, and our execs have unprecedented visibility into what customers truly value.”
“This level of real-time customer intelligence has transformed not just our response time but the quality of our decision-making at all levels, directly contributing to improved customer satisfaction, retention and expansion metrics.”
ALSO READ: Paysafe and Alchemy Pay Expand Customers’ Payment Options
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.
