It doesn’t matter if you think you’re providing a great service—it matters that your customers think so. Still, it’s hard to gather authentic, customer feedback and equally difficult to interpret it objectively.
If you let customers come to you, you’ll only hear from your happiest and angriest clients, and you’ll be tempted to focus on the extremes, too—particularly the negative ones. As a result, you’ll have a poor grasp of the opinions of people who don’t accurately represent your customer base.
To solve this problem, you can use customer feedback tools to gather responses from a more representative sample of your customer base, organize them, and identify patterns in the data so you can accurately measure customer satisfaction and enact improvements. The best customer feedback platforms can also automate the feedback collection process, saving your team time.
How do customer feedback tools work?
Customer feedback tools help you collect customer feedback, analyze it, and use it to improve the customer experience. There are multiple ways to collect feedback, and different tools support different approaches. Here are five common methods:
1. Customer feedback surveys. Customer survey tools gather customer feedback about a specific interaction or your business as a whole. Online survey software integrates with your website, email systems, SMS messaging, and other survey distribution channels.
2. Polls. Customer feedback polls ask customers to enter numerical ratings or select simple multiple-choice answers. You can use them to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction by calculating metrics like customer effort score (CES), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer satisfaction score (CSAT).
3. User testing. User testing tools monitor interactions with a website or application and identify patterns in user behavior. Businesses use tools like user recording sessions to collect website feedback.
4. Sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis tools can analyze survey responses, reviews, or online content and automatically recognize and categorize positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. They include social listening and brand monitoring tools, which use multichannel feedback collection to monitor your company’s online reputation.
5. Customer reviews. User-generated content (UGC) and online review tools solicit content about your products and services, including ratings and written feedback. They can help you improve customer experiences and build social proof.
Benefits of using customer feedback tools
- Customer insights
- Increased efficiency
- Improved performance tracking
- Enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Continuous improvement
Customer feedback tools simplify the process of collecting customer feedback. They can also analyze and manage customer feedback, providing actionable insights into your target audiences and helping you use them to boost customer satisfaction and increase sales. Here’s an overview of the benefits:
Customer insights
Customer feedback collection tools help you understand what your customers need and how effectively your business is serving them. They can also help you identify market opportunities, save money by retiring unpopular initiatives, and boost brand engagement.
Increased efficiency
Customer feedback software saves time by automating the process of requesting feedback and sending reminders. It can also automatically analyze customer feedback data and generate reports.
Improved performance tracking
You can use customer feedback tools to determine customer satisfaction baselines and monitor improvement over time. Some tools can also automate the process of measuring customer satisfaction metrics, including CSAT, NPS, and CES.
Enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty
Understanding customer experiences helps businesses identify and address specific pain points in the customer journey, which can boost satisfaction and loyalty. Some tools also store customer data in customer profiles, which helps businesses increase satisfaction by personalizing customer experiences.
Continuous improvement
Business owners use customer feedback tools to gather information about the quality of their outputs, including products, services, and experiences. They then feed that information back into their systems and use it to improve future outputs, creating a cycle of ongoing improvement known as a feedback loop. As the business’s outputs get better and better, increasingly detail-oriented customer feedback helps it fine-tune offerings.
List of customer feedback tools
- Zigpoll
- Hotjar
- Grapevine Post-Purchase Surveys
- POWR Surveys and Polls
- Seguno
- Trust Reviews
- Asklayer
- Air
1. Zigpoll
Zigpoll is a no-code customer feedback platform that allows users to create visually appealing forms and custom surveys and deliver them to customers via email or text. Surveys support branching logic, and Zigpoll compiles all your survey data in a user-friendly dashboard. The platform also offers AI-powered analytics, NPS tools, and advanced targeting and distribution optimization features.
Key features
- Automated post-purchase surveys
- Reporting dashboard
- NPS score calculation
- Multiple languages
- Automated reporting
- AI-powered analytics
Cost
- Lite: $0/month
- Basic: $10/month
- Standard: $25/month
- Pro: $100/month
2. Hotjar
The Hotjar customer feedback and user-testing platform supports embedded feedback widgets and customizable survey feedback forms and offers advanced features like heat maps, session recordings, and access to a diverse interview candidate pool. Heat maps combine user scroll, click, and movement data to reveal website engagement patterns, and recordings provide real-time feedback about what individual website visitors see during a user session.
Features
- Heat mapping
- Session recording
- User-friendly interface
- On-site feedback widgets
- AI-powered customer surveys
Cost
- Free: $0/month
- Plus: $32/month
- Business: $80/month
- Scale: $171/month
3. Grapevine Post-Purchase Surveys
Grapevine is a post-purchase survey application built for the Shopify App Store, meaning you can use it directly in Shopify admin. It allows unlimited surveys and multiple question types, including fixed-response, open-ended, and NPS. Store owners can also design targeted surveys for new or returning customer groups and distribute them based on user information.
Features
- Targeted surveys
- Built for Shopify
- Supports multiple languages
- NPS score calculation
Cost
- Free trial available
- $25/month
4. POWR
POWR customer surveys and polls is a multi-response post-purchase feedback tool. Users can create forms using a drag-and-drop editor and choose from multiple field options like dropdown, multiple choice, image, and star ratings. POWR also offers customizable templates and automatically saves response data in a centralized dashboard.
Features
- Response dashboard
- Template library
- Email response notifications
- Syncs data with Google sheets
Cost
- Free: $0/month
- Starter: $9.99/month
- Pro: $17.49/month
- Business: $89.99/month
5. Seguno
Seguno is a built-for-Shopify application that helps online merchants collect reviews and use them as social proof. You can connect review widgets to your storefront or send review requests through Seguno’s email marketing system. The app collects star ratings and qualitative feedback and verifies reviews by comparing reviewer information to your store’s order data. It can also auto-publish reviews to your site and include verified purchase tags.
Features
- Auto-publish feature
- Quantitative and qualitative data
- Automatic review verification
Cost
- Free: $0/month
- Standard: $10/month
6. Trust Reviews
Trust Reviews helps merchants collect multimedia customer reviews and publish photo, video, and textual content to online channels. It offers customizable site widgets, email reminders, merchant response options, and advanced analytics. It also includes an AI-powered sentiment analysis feature and allows store owners to customize the online review display.
Features
- Built for Shopify
- Auto-publish feature
- Sentiment analysis
- Email and SMS requests
- On-site widgets
- Multiple media types supported
- Flexible display
- Free plan available
Cost
- Free: $0/month
- Basic: $9.99/month
- Premium: $24.99/month
- Unlimited: $99.99/month
7. Asklayer
Asklayer is a free customer feedback tool specifically designed for Shopify merchants. It offers email, exit, post-purchase, NPS, and CSAT surveys and supports branching logic and more than 15 question types. On-site surveys include advanced survey targeting based on user information or page or product views. Asklayer can also tag users based on their responses, allowing merchants to use data to personalize customer experiences.
Features
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Multiple survey types
- Multiple distribution methods
- Targeted surveys
- Supports English and Japanese
- User tags
Cost
- Free
8. Air
Air is a built-for-Shopify user-generated content and review platform. It automatically sends review requests, supports discount-based review incentives, and includes review management features like verification and moderation. Air also helps merchants use reviews to improve search engine optimization performance and build brand trust: Its eye-catching site widgets support photos and customizations, and it uses review snippets to boost search engine rankings.
Features
- Automated review requests
- Review verification and moderation
- Customizable social proof widgets
- SEO snippets
- Review incentives
Pricing
- Free: $0/month
- Pro: $12.90/month
- Advanced: $29.90/month
- Enterprise: $199/month
Customer feedback tools FAQ
What is a customer feedback tool?
Customer feedback tools are applications that help you gather, manage, and analyze information provided by your customers. They use surveys, polls, and user-testing to capture customer feedback and quantitative and qualitative analysis to extract data and identify trends.
How do you keep track of customer feedback?
Many great customer feedback tools help users manage and organize customer feedback. They can notify you when users complete customer feedback requests, store data in customer profiles, and integrate with critical business systems like customer relationship management tools, customer support tools, and project management tools.
How can customer feedback tools help me grow my business?
Customer feedback tools provide insight into your customers’ experiences, helping you identify your strengths and areas for improvement. They can also help you build social proof and use it to increase trust in your brand.
