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Top tools you can use for your website or app that will take your customer feedback capturing funnel to the next level!
Customer feedback is virtual gold.
If you ask any founder at a leading tech company how to get insight to build your first viable product, they will all say the same thing: listen to your customers. But why is listening to your customers so important?
In short, Listening to your customers will provide you with potentially overlooked details that can turn a good product into an amazing product. Take Apple for example. When you submit a feedback request they have an entire team that organizes these requests and analyzes them to determine what features their customers really want.
If you want to learn more on why customer feedback is essential to success, check out my blog on achieving product-market fit: https://loopinput.com/achieving-product-market-fit/
Listening to your customers is a lot easier said than done.
Today, incoming feedback can come in a multitude of formats; live chats, surveys, discussion boards, support requests, and even sales demos. Gathering, organizing, and analyzing all this feedback can be a challenging task, especially when there is lots of it.
The good news is that there are a variety of software platforms on the market that will give you the tools you need to be successful in making sense of all of it.
In this article, I am going to break down the top tools you can use for your website or app that will take your feedback capturing funnel to the next level!
Personally one of my favorites. This crafty tool captures live traffic and records user activity in the form of heatmaps and cursor tracking. Drop-in a small piece of javascript in the header of your site and you’re all set! Hotjar pricing is based on your totally monthly visitors to your site, however they offer a free plan with limited views and business trial plan to see if the tool is right for you.
This live chat plug-in is a must! Users don’t want to wait when they need help. Intercom has advanced from more than just a live chat window into a full-fledged AI system that will assist you with support, sales, and general FAQ quests. Intercom can be a bit pricey for the full package upwards of $150/month; however, they offer a promotion plan for qualifying startups for $50/month!
Survey Monkey is a giant in the marketplace! Founded in 1999, it is one of the best-known survey tools used by millions of businesses to conduct market research. Survey monkey lets you send out surveys to your customers via email, mobile, chat software, websites, social media. Survey Monkey is excellent if you’re looking for an all in one survey tool. Pricing starts at $25 per user and $75 per user for their more advanced features.
ProProfs Survey Maker is a powerhouse of unique features. It helps you create a variety of surveys for your target audience, embed them on your website, or share them instantly via social media or emails. It’s a versatile tool that supports a wide array of surveys such as pop-up and in-app surveys, polls, NPS surveys, and many more. The software’s built-in reporting system gives you a peek into who took your survey, when the survey was taken, and the kind of answers provided. You can use this valuable information to review survey answers and gain a better understanding of your respondents.
If you are looking for a simple tool that gives excellent results, ProProfs Survey Maker is your best bet. Pricing starts at $0.05/response/month.
Canny is a product manager’s road map to success! Used by companies such as Lyft, MongoDB, and Ahref, it utilizes a powerful discussion board forum that lets you track internal and external feature requests using a voting system. Canny is great if connecting your internal teams to product features. Canny offers a 2-week trial and then offers plans starting at $50/month.
Loop is an all in one solution that combines a powerful screenshot tool that plugs directly into your website and an interactive forum. Designed by leading product managers and product marketers, it is built with your customer’s feedback in mind. In addition to the interactive forum, it provides a rating system for feature requests, allowing you to visualize what to build next quickly. Loop offers a free starter plan and then $39.99/month package for the full platform. One of the newest platforms in the marketplace and is quickly grabbing the attention of some of the tech giants as a better alternative to its bigger, more expensive, brother UserVoice.
Just founded this past year, Upvoty has developed a simple plug-in that models the UserVoice voting system and company white labeling. It’s simplistic and easy to use platform makes it a favorite on my list. Pricing starts at $15/month and then tops out at $99/month depending on your usage and company size.
Qualaroo’s platform offers a survey and feedback tool that is great for B2C companies. Big companies such as Starbucks, Burger King, Hertz, and Groupon have been using their products for years to gather feedback about a visitors experience. The software analyzes a user’s behavior on your site and will send targeted questions based on their behavior. Great for post-purchases and one-time experiences. Pricing starts at $99/month.
Podium is a powerful tool that uses live webchat to gather feedback from website visitors and customers. They offer a variety of products, including company reviews, online feedback, and internal team chat to unify stakeholders and allow for a true 360 degree of your company. Featured by Forbes as one of the top clouding computing companies, they offer a suite of software products that will give your company the insights it needs to make the right product decisions for your customers. Podium doesn’t provide its pricing, but sources have reported that it can range from $15/ month for basic plans and top out at $499/month for advanced enterprise plans.
Lastly, UserVoice. UserVoice is the industry standard for gathering in-app user feedback. Their platform is designed to plug into your web app or website and opens a white-labeled feedback discussion portal. The UserVoice uses a voting system that allows users to poll for the top feature requests. Although UserVoice is one of the best known and highly used platforms on the market, it doesn’t come cheaply. Pricing starts at $500/month for their product boards so they are quickly losing ground to younger, less pricey companies with a wider feature set like Loop.
All of these software platforms will provide your company with different tools to get that competitive edge. I purposely did not rank these companies in order from best to worst because each has its strengths and weaknesses and each can be better suited for different companies’ needs.
When choosing your ideal customer feedback tool, I would ask the following questions:
Is your customer a professional in another industry using a complex product or are they simply a consumer dining in your restaurant, visiting your ecommerce store, etc.?
B2B industry professionals are more likely to provide you with in-depth feedback so that you can better the products they use consistently. Providing an open discussion board with a rating system to write freely will better suit this type of customer’s incoming feedback. I suggest using a tool such as Loop, Upvoty, or Canny.
This type of customer isn’t likely to spend the time to write meaningful feedback. In this case, I would suggest setting up a simple customer satisfaction survey that can be done at the end of their experience. Survey Monkey and Qualaroo are great for this.
What if your typical customer doesn’t directly communicate with you, but success can be measured in how long and where they went on your website?
A tool like Hotjar is perfect for this type of customer. You can gather useful insights without your customers ever providing you with any input! I like to call this stealth feedback.
I like to address this question first by analyzing how your customers reach out for help. More often than not, when a support request comes in, it is not because something is broken, but rather the customer had a difficult experience while using your product and needs assistance with your product.
Whether you realize it or not, these support requests are a form of feedback. Depending on how your support channel is set up, you will want to pick a software that will assist in collecting and organizing these requests. For example, if your main support channel is a live chat, you likely want to use a platform such as Intercom or Podium for incoming feedback.
The companies I have mentioned are only a handful of the hundreds of different options in the marketplace. After thoroughly researching all the options, conduct an internal analysis of your company and pick out the top features that your organization requires and make a decision based on price and value. No matter what you choose, any of the options will guide you in the right direction to build amazing products your customers will love!
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