Is your business listening to the Voice of the Customer (VoC)? If not, you might want to start now – as it is becoming a top priority among most online businesses. This rise in popularity is owed to the fact that voice of the customer programs (and therefore Voice of the Customer tools) have recently become a critical element in customer experience initiatives.
According to Gartner Group, today nearly 89% of companies are competing primarily based on the level of customer experience they provide. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult for companies to stand out among their competitors, whether that is through the products they sell, services they provide or pricing they offer. This means that in order to stay on top, these companies must consistently provide good customer experiences. However, that is only possible if they choose to understand the experiences they are providing.
Managing the Voice of Customer (in practice)
Listening to the Voice of the Customer and obtaining a ‘360 degree view’ is a tactic that is widely used among both large enterprises as well as small-medium businesses. Even webshops and ecommerce websites have identified VoC as a superior component to their digital strategy – mostly as it can have a positive effect on customer churn. To give you an idea, take a look at the reverse effect and check out this article on how neglecting VoC can affect your business.
Before you start up a VoC programme, it’s also important to identify that a well-rounded VoC programme should include three different stages: Collection, Analysis and Taking Action. While many companies only collect feedback via voice of the customer surveys, there is so much more to the process if you want to really understand your customers and provide real value for them.
Collection: You’ll want to start out by collecting feedback from your customers in a relevant and timely manner. There are several things to consider in this phase such as where you want to ask for feedback (in a passive or active feedback form), how you want to ask (which questions, scores, etc.) and of course, which customers you want to ask. More information on this stage can be found here.
Analysis: As previously mentioned, there are many companies who focus solely on collecting feedback and don’t even get to this phase. But what’s important to realise here is that by taking the next step in analysing your data, you can potentially identify major breakthroughs for your business. For example, various trends can be discovered using good dashboarding, enabling you to make the appropriate changes to your website or mobile app. More information about this stage can be found here.
Taking Action: The last step is to actually turn these customer insights into action. Closing the loop is so important in VoC programmes as this shows your customers that you are there to make their experience a successful one. There are many things to think about in this stage including how processes will run internally (e.g. who will do what), timescales and follow-up points (when will feedback be followed up on) and keeping everyone informed (internally and externally). More information about this stage can be found here.
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VoC and the Customer Journey
Throughout the online customer journey, there are various Moments of Truth that define the impression your company makes on the visitor. These are the key moments in which your business must listen to the Voice of the Customer and the best way to do this is through VoC software.
However, these moments vary among businesses depending on which touchpoints they want to use or which touchpoints are most important to them. For eCommerce websites and digital-first companies, the focus here lies on websites and mobile apps. Meanwhile for businesses that also run physical stores or have a lot of face-to-face contact with customers (e.g. B2B companies with field sales and account management), this focus must be shared with non-digital touchpoints as well.
Note: the types of touchpoints you plan to focus on, whether that be digital or non-digital has a huge impact on the type of tool or VoC software you should look for. Things you might want to think about are: How are you going to collect feedback? How would you like to report on this data? And how do you intend on taking action and closing the loop both internally as well as with the customer?
So depending on what you want to improve and how you want use VoC data, we have created an extensive overview of VoC tools for you.
For this overview, we have defined four types of Voice of the Customer tools:
- Enterprise VoC software
- SMB VoC tools
- Website VoC tools
- Traditional research
Enterprise VoC software
Enterprise VoC software tools all deliver one promise and that is to provide a 360-degree view of the customer. These tools often support multi-channel feedback and enable the user to collect feedback across multiple channels such as email, SMS, web, in-store, social media, IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and third party data integrations.
Implementation of these types of tools is often more complex than your average 14-day SaaS trial, where you are able to set everything up yourself and test out the software a couple weeks prior to purchasing.
1. Medallia
Medallia’s Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) can collect a large amount of customer feedback from multiple survey sources, including web, email and phone. Once collected, you can have reports sent directly to your phone. What’s great about this tool is that it can also be integrated with most enterprise resource planning systems, which help users compare financials with customer experiences.
2. ResponseTek
ResponseTek provides customer experience software and service to its customers. Users can access targeted surveys and randomly select customers depending on their actions. It collects data by sending out email invites, or the software collects it from your website and social media. ResponseTek creates detailed customer journey data reports such as the type of interaction, touchpoint, revenue, churn reduction, and more.
Website: www.responsetek.com
3. Clarabridge
Clarabridge is a centralised hub that takes data from various sources such as (multiple) survey types, contact center agent notes, social media, chat, voice, email, etc. These different types of feedback can all be easily filtered enabling users to optimise their website accordingly. Using its Natural Language Processing technology, that incorporates text analytics, sentiment analysis, linguistic categorisation, and emotion detection.
Website: www.clarabridge.com
4. InMoment
InMoment is a cloud-based customer experience optimisation platform. Through its Experience Hub, InMoment offers multiples solutions including Social Reviews & Advocacy, Employee Engagement solutions and its Voice of the Customer (VoC) platform. The VoC platform, in particular, provides online reports, real-time alerts and occurrence management. The way its works is it combines survey data with customer data from other sources such as CRM, social and financials.
Website: www.inmoment.com
5. Confirmit
Confirmit provides customer experience, employee engagement and market research solutions. With this tool, users can select multiple survey programmes and put metrics from these surveys together into one dashboard.
Website: www.confirmit.com
6. Wootric
Wootric is an enterprise feedback management software that makes use of single-question microsurveys. Most of these surveys include metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES). What’s especially great about this tool is that it can be installed quickly and easily. All feedback (once collected) is sent to your live dashboard for review. Wootric’s analytics platform is available to users, but then as a stand-alone product to companies that want to enhance their VoC program with text & sentiment analytics.
Website: www.wootric.com
7. NICE Satmetrix
Co-developer of Net Promoter Score (NPS), Satmetrix is a well-known, cloud-based VoC software. With a user-friendly interface and clear visuals, Satmetrix offers advanced surveys with abilities such as location, industry or product segmentation. Users can also publish positive feedback (provided by clients) on social media.
Website: www.satmetrix.com
8. Verint ForeSee
Verint ForeSee is a multi-channel customer experience analytics software that enables users to prioritise CX investments. The ForeSee CX Suite offers customer-initiated surveys, session replay and heat maps (available for websites and mobile devices), text analytics, issue tracking and alerts and product reviews. Reports can be exported and shared in formats such as Excel, CSV and PowerPoint.
Website: www.foresee.com
9. SurveySparrow
SurveySparrow’s voice of customer software helps users build and implement a great VoC program. The tool has multiple user interfaces such as chat-like surveys and conversational forms. Users can quickly make surveys, and are able to choose from different question models. Using different survey themes, you can easily design and customise the look of your Voice of Customer survey to reflect your brand’s personality.
Website: www.surveysparrow.com
SMB VoC tools
Small-Medium Business VoC tools, (or SMB VoC tools) are very much similar to enterprise VoC tools. The major difference here is that they are smaller scale and less complex. They also tend to focus more on the aspect of feedback collection. With these tools, feedback is often collected using an email invite to a web survey (this is known as ‘email to web’). Some tools provide simple integrations with CRM tools such as Salesforce in order to invite the customer directly from their CRM.
SMB VoC tools are typically self-service, which in turn makes them much more cost-efficient. However, it is more difficult to report on complex datasets and a large user base. An instance of this might be a large contact centre that works with feedback and must ‘close the loop’ with its customers.
10. Feedier
Feedier supports customers to improve their end-user experiences in real-time. To make operational teams addicted to the voice of their customers, Feedier provides the most intuitive solution to collect both direct and indirect feedback in one place, analyze them in real-time, and trigger personalized alerts at every level. The solution relies on automation, data management, machine learning insights, and gamification.
Website: www.feedier.com
11. Getfeedback
GetFeedback is a feedback tool that is very much focused on end user experience. This is a good tool for beginners as it is very easy to use. Users can add rich media (e.g. images and videos) to the survey and also customize the background image and fonts to make it their own. Analysis of the data is very simple as the tool puts all data into graphs for the user, however the user cannot follow up with customers which can be a bit of a drawback.
12. Qualtrics
Qualtrics Experience Management Platform offers a number of different data collection methods including website/mobile feedback, email surveys and social feedback. It also includes a closed loop ticketing feature that keeps users up-to-date on customer interactions as well as role-based dashboards.
13. AskNicely
AskNicely is an NPS software that collects feedback on a daily basis using one-off surveys blasts. The ‘leaderboards’ allow users to segment and categorise different channels, employees and products to assess performance. It can be integrated with your CRM or homegrown support software, from which you can respond directly.
Website: www.asknicely.com
14. Honestly
Honestly is a SaaS platform that enables service-oriented companies to collect, analyse and manager customer feedback using questionnaires. The software offers two options: Feedback Terminals and Web Integration. For web integration surveys, the channel is chosen by the user (e.g. your own device, email or other chat services). They also offer employee engagement surveys.
Website: www.honestlyapp.com
14. Feedier
Feedier supports customers to improve their end-user experiences in real-time. To make operational teams addicted to the voice of their customers, Feedier provides the most intuitive solution to collect both direct and indirect feedback in one place, analyze them in real-time, and trigger personalized alerts at every level. The solution relies on automation, data management, machine learning insights, and gamification.
Website: www.feedier.com
Website VoC tools
Another popular category in the VoC space are VoC tools that focus on one of the most important touchpoints with customers: the website. Again there are a lot of similarities between website VoC tools and SMB VoC tools. However there is one major difference and that is that these tools focus primarily on collecting WEBSITE feedback, which is far different than sending out a CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) or NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey invite by email.
Website feedback is often collected based on website behaviour, such as click paths or mouse movement. Rather than a general satisfaction score, they focus on collecting feedback that will contribute to optimising funnels and pages on the website and improve user experience rather than the overall customer experience. These tools provide insight into visitor behaviour: why is a visitor leaving or why aren’t they achieving their online goal?
15. Feedbackify
Feedbackify is a tool that allows users to create a feedback form using a drag-and-drop editor. It is very easy to install – all you need to do is copy and paste the Javascript tag into the html of the webpage you want to do add it to and its up and running. Visitors can provide a rating as well as submit comments, including compliments and suggestions. Feedback is received in your inbox.
Website: www.feedbackify.com
16. Qualaroo
Qualaroo is good for creating short and easily accessible surveys. These appear at the bottom of the screen as a widget and enable the user to poll visitors using simple questions. There is also a feature within this tool that allows users to create rules as to where surveys are triggered and with which questions – in which case a feedback form will pop up in a subtle manner at the bottom of the screen.
17. Survicate
This tool is very similar to Qualaroo when it comes to structure and design. With this tool, users can prompt targeted website surveys at different locations on the website. The tool also includes a library of predefined surveys. To analyse feedback, Survicate offers both a dashboard and the ability to export answers as CSV or receive reports in your inbox.
Website: www.survicate.com
18. Pulse Insights
Pulse Insights is very similar to Qualaroo and Survicate. They provide micro surveys that ask 1-2 in-context questions to obtain feedback from customers. It is very easy-to-use.
Website: www.pulseinsights.com
19. WebEngage
WebEngage is a tool that offers a feedback form and survey builder. Based on visitor click behaviour, feedback forms can be triggered using this tool. The interesting thing about WebEngage is that it not only offers survey widgets, but also the ability to send out notifications regarding items other than feedback requests, such as to highlight a promotion.
Website: www.webengage.com
20. Hotjar
Hotjar is seen as a swiss army knife of user experience tools, with software that combines multiple UX tools in one. This focus however means that it lacks a solid CX solution. Feedback analysis and reporting are not available. The way in which this tool collects feedback is practically identical to that of Qualaroo and Survicate. Hotjar enables its users to create heatmaps and user recordings (tracking sessions on the page) as well as surveys.
21. Opinionlab
Opinionlab is a well-known VoC platform. Initially Opinionlab was focused on website feedback but has since broadened its service offerings to gathering feedback from more channels including contact centres and shops. Additionally, page-specific feedback can be collected using this tool.
Website: www.opinionlab.com
Traditional research
The last option is to head over to your local research agency. These agencies know how to serve you and most likely have a software in place for your business to use. Below are some popular traditional survey tools that will enable you to collect VoC data. Many of these tools have the option to invite your customers by email.
22. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a very popular survey tool that is used by millions of businesses worldwide. Great for one-off surveys, this tool is very flexible in that it provides nearly 15 different options in terms of types of questions (including multiple choice, open comments and Likert scales). However, because it gathers feedback for one-off events only, it is not suitable for measuring satisfaction overall or for surveying customers again over a certain period of time.
23. Alchemer
Alchemer is a great tool for quickly and easily creating a survey. You can invite respondents to the survey as well as personalise the design. They offer survey options for data-driven teams as well as individuals.
Website: www.alchemer.com
24. Crowdsignal
Source: Crowdsignal
Crowdsignal, previously PollDaddy is an online survey software that allows users to conduct surveys in two different ways: by embedding surveys on their website or inviting respondents via email. Once the data is collected, you can create filters to analyse the data and share it in reports. This is done using raw data export with programmes such as Excel, PDF, CSV, Google Docs and XML. The results of these surveys can all be viewed in real-time.
Website: www.crowdsignal.com
25. JotForm
Jotform is an easy-to-use online form builder. The JotForm Feedback Button enables you to ask for feedback on your website by a personalised button. You can also create your own forms and once you start using this tool, the feedback button will be visible on every page of your website automatically. Jotform also offers a free WordPress plugin. You can use this plugin for free up and to 100 form submissions per month. If you expect more form submissions you should upgrade to the premium version.
Website: www.jotform.com
26. Typeform
Typeform is a very user-friendly survey tool that enables you to create personalised and branded surveys. Using the free version, you can expect to have features such as: unlimited questions & answers, data export, custom themes as well as templates and basic reporting.
Website: www.typeform.com
27. Formsite
Formsite is another form-building and survey tool that can be integrated with many different tools, including SalesForce, Mailchimp, DropBox and much more. Users can create over 100 customisable templates using 40 different question types.
Website: www.formsite.com
28. Google Forms
With Google Forms, users can create surveys to collect feedback from customers. Surveys can be created quickly using a drag & drop interface. Surveys can also be shared with members of your team so you can work on them together. Results are delivered in real-time and can be analysed in charts. This tool can, of course, also be integrated with other Google products such as Google Sheets.
Website: www.google.com
Last but not least: Mopinion
So where does Mopinion’s feedback analytics software fit in?
Mopinion is specialised in collecting and analysing feedback data in real-time. We mainly focus on the digital channels: websites, mobile apps, and email campaigns, but we also capture feedback on the more traditional touchpoints such as call centres and physical stores. In terms of collection however, data is always collected digitally. For example, via email invites or in-store surveys on tablets.
Mopinion serves both SMB and Enterprise businesses that have a digital-first attitude, meaning most of their products and services are offered online. In terms of the industries we serve, many of our customers fall under the following: Finance/Insurance, Utilities, Telecom, Automotive, Travel & Leisure, eCommerce and Consumer Electronics.
Website: www.mopinion.com
Choosing a fit-for-purpose VoC tool
Depending on what you would like to achieve and how far along your company is in terms of VoC maturity, there are a lot of great tools out there to choose from. There are also a lot of things to keep in mind when choosing your tool(s), including your objectives in listening to the VoC, the size of your company (are you an enterprise or SMB), and don’t forget technical limitations (e.g. IT restrictions and limitations when it comes to subjects like privacy, customer data, CRM integrations, data storage/hosting, etc).
For additional information regarding Voice of the Customer, be sure to check out the following articles: What is the online Voice of the Customer and An inside look at how digital is paving its way into traditional VoC programmes.
We hope this overview gives you some inspiration during your search for a VoC tool. Please feel free to add any suggestions or comments in the comment section below!
Ready to see Mopinion in action?
Want to learn more about Mopinion’s all-in-1 user feedback platform? Don’t be shy and take our software for a spin! Do you prefer it a bit more personal? Just book a demo. One of our feedback pro’s will guide you through the software and answer any questions you may have.
