Customer Feedback Platform: Ultimate Guide to Select the Best in 2023

Every brand needs accurate insights about its product to make informed decisions about what works and what doesn’t. To acquire this information, they need a comprehensive platform that allows them to collect and manage customer feedback in a cohesive structure.

But with so many software solutions out there, it can be confusing to determine which one is best for your business. To make things easier, we've gathered all the information you’ll need, from features to pricing — ensuring you’ll pick a platform that not only fits your company's needs — but also your customers.

Plus, we’ve created a side-by-side comparison table of the top customer feedback platforms available in an easy-to-read format:

Let's dive in.

What is a customer feedback platform?

A customer feedback platform is a tool that gathers, analyzes, and manages customer feedback from various channels, like surveys, emails, social media, and more. It can be as simple as an online form or as sophisticated as an omnichannel and AI-powered system. The main goal of these platforms is to streamline the feedback collection and implementation process, allowing companies to quickly understand customer needs, preferences, and pain points.

But why is utilizing customer feedback software important? 

Here's the simple truth: your customers are the heartbeat of your brand and product. They use it and experience its pros and cons, giving them the ability to offer invaluable feedback on how you can deliver a better product and experience long-term success. Having a system in place that makes this process easy is more than a good practice — it's a necessity for any company to evolve. 

Factors to consider when picking a customer feedback platform

Selecting the right customer feedback platform can seem like a daunting task, given the variety of options available. Yet, by narrowing down important features, you can simplify the decision-making process. Let's delve deeper into these factors:

• Business size: Small businesses may prefer platforms that are cost-effective, simple to set up, and require minimal maintenance. While enterprises might lean towards platforms that have extensive features, integration capabilities, and scalability — but are more expensive.
• Objective: Do you want your customer feedback platform to only gather feedback? Or do you want an all-encompassing solution that offers analysis, reporting, and provides action-based insights? Knowing what you want out of the platform can save you from having to switch solutions down the road.
• Industry: Specific sectors have unique needs. A B2B tech company might require deep integrations, top-tier security, and insights into long sales cycles. B2C retail brands may need real-time feedback from social media, track seasonal trends, and make sure their one-off promotions hit the mark. Ultimately, you need to ensure the platform you choose aligns with your customers’ behaviors. 
• Budget: Platforms range from free (with limited capabilities) to premium enterprise-level systems. Determine a budget in advance and assess the value each platform brings relative to its cost to select the best platform for your brand.
• Feedback channels: Understand where your customers are voicing their opinions. Whether it's on social media, via email, or through direct website feedback, ensure your platform can capture insights from these sources.
• User-friendly interface: The platform should be intuitive and easy for both your team and your customers to navigate. This is because an overly complex system can become a deterrent to gathering feedback.
• Integration capabilities: A great customer feedback tool should easily integrate with your existing tech stack, be it CRM tools, sales platforms, or customer support systems to help you streamline processes.
• Data analysis and reporting capabilities: Raw data can be overwhelming. Opt for a platform that transforms your customer data into digestible, actionable insights through robust analytics and clear reporting.
• Real-time feedback: Real-time feedback is crucial. Platforms that offer instantaneous insights allow businesses to react and adapt swiftly.
• Automation: Platforms that automate data collection, analysis, and more can enhance your team’s efficiency throughout the entire process of utilizing customer feedback from start to finish.
• Scalability: As your business grows, the customer feedback platform you choose should handle increased data volumes and offer features that cater to a growing customer base.
• Privacy and security: Since breaches are all too common, you’ll need to prioritize a platform that upholds stringent privacy and security standards — ensuring customer data remains confidential and secure.

Top customer feedback tools in 2023

Let's explore the best customer feedback tools in 6 separate categories:

1. Collecting customer feedback in your online community

Here is how you can collect customer feedback in your online customer community:

Bettermode

Bettermode is a unified customer community platform with over 2,000 customers. It comes with a suite of tools that allows brands to build communities that serve their customers in multiple ways, like providing customer support and facilitating a place for peer-to-peer discussions. 

In addition, it encourages customers to leave feedback, provides robust analytics to analyze feedback, and gives brands the ability to close the feedback loop by announcing their planned product updates on a roadmap. 

Let’s take a look at four of its features in more detail.

Feature request space

Bettermode’s feature request space, also known as the “ideation template”, provides brands with the ability to empower its community members to contribute feedback in a variety of ways:

• Upvoting: Users can vote on feedback that has already been submitted
• Status updates: Help close the feedback loop by notifiying users who contributed to a piece of feedback about any status changes
• Commenting: Members can leave comments on pieces of feedback and also engage with one another 

Q&A template

Bettermode provides a pre-built Q&A template that allows you to offer a space for your community members to ask questions, provide answers, upvote, and also pin posts to the top of the page.

Its out-of-the-box template is ready to use with the elements already configured that provide your brand with the opportunity to:

• Gather real-time feedback collection: Allow community members to quickly post their question or suggestion. This removes the need for your brand to rely on sending regular surveys or other forms of more traditional feedback collection methods.
• Facilitate peer-to-peer conversation: Encourage users to discuss topics about your brand amongst themselves. These type of organic interactions will help your brand gather insights that allow you to better understand your customers’ needs.

You can also fully customize the template so it better aligns with your customer base if needed.

Create polls

Polls are a great way to collect feedback. This is because they provide customers with a limited number of choices and a certain amount of time to place their vote. 

Bettermode allows brands to set up polls within their communities using the "LinkedIn method". As seen in the image above, you can create a post that asks your members to react in specific ways in order to provide their feedback. It’s simple and easy for your members to contribute.

Product update space

Bettermode provides a space for companies to post updates about their products in their community. This space allows community members to comment on these posts — providing a place for you to quickly and easily collect fresh feedback about your updates.

2. Feature request tools

Let's now explore a dedicated tool used for collecting product ideas and feature requests:

Canny

Canny is yet another tool collect feedback from your users. Think of it as your digital assistant that neatly gathers all the suggestions, ideas, and comments from your users.

It can also help product teams prioritize key features and act on them. If you're on a tight budget, they've got a free version to get you started.

Plus, it offers features like instant notifications, chat options, and collaboration tools. So, if you're looking to give your product a little boost based on what your users really want.

3. Surveys and Questionnaires

Let's take a look at the best customer feedback platforms that are specifically designed for creating and sending surveys and questionnaires to customers.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a survey and feedback management platform that has over 17 million users worldwide. It allows brands to quickly and easily create their own surveys with over 250 customizable templates. 

These templates include environmental issue surveys, software evaluation survey, customer comments survey, and more — ensuring brands can gather customer feedback no matter how unique their industry is. 

The platform also allows brands to create multilingual surveys, including Chinese and Dutch. In addition, you’ll have the ability to send reminder emails to customers to take your surveys if you choose SurveyMonkey.

Typeform

Typeform is a form builder that has over 600+ reviews on G2.com and is rated 4.5. It allows brands to collect customer feedback by creating quizzes, polls, surveys, and forms. These are beautifully designed with a sleek look — making them visually pleasing and ultimately effective.

The platform enables brands to embed Typeform into their website, share a link to it on their social media profile, or send it in their emails.

On top of that, Typeform comes with over 3,000+ ready-made templates for its customers and a comprehensive analytics dashboard that delivers real-time results. 

If integrating your current tech stack is important, the platform will stand out with its 120-plus integration capabilities, including Zapier and HubSpot.

JotForm

With over 20 million users, JotForm is a suite of no-code tools that allow brands to build surveys and questionnaires. The platform comes with over 10,000 templates — including website feedback templates that can help you collect customer feedback directly on your website by using a feedback widget.

JotForm also allows you to collect, manage, and analyze the data from your surveys and questionnaires all in one place. At the same time, the platform lets brands build reports and presentations that they can share with their team.

Pulse Insights

Made for digital marketers and product teams, Pulse Insights is an easy-to-use voice of the customer platform. 

It offers many features that enable brands to collect and use customer data in a powerful way. These features include building and sending surveys that help them gain a deep understanding of their customers — by contextually asking questions across all digital channels.

Additionally, the platform allows you to configure surveys so they only display on certain pages on your website or app. And you can set up a survey so it only appears when a user takes a specific action, like clicking a button or using a search filter.

4. Reviews and Ratings

These platforms are used to collect feedback in the form of ratings or reviews. They are frequently used in ecommerce, SaaS, and service-related industries.

Bazaarvoice

Over 12,000 of the world's leading brands use Bazaarvoice, like Rimmel and The Body Shop. Built with retailers in mind, its robust set of features connects them to the voices of their customers. 

This is done with the platform's ability to let brands intelligently collect, display, and distribute customer feedback. For example, with Bazaarvoice you can collect user-generated content and publish it onto your product detail page. 

The platform also allows shoppers to submit ratings and reviews in the form of photos, videos, and more. It has features that enable brands to manage the customer feedback they collect at scale — particularly helpful for brands that have a lot of customers. 

In addition, Bazaarvoice provides customers with the option to separate reviews into pros and cons — allowing them to quickly find the type of review they are looking for.

Yotpo

Yotpo is an ecommerce retention marketing platform used by brands like Gymshark, Steve Madden, and Princess Polly. It comes with a variety of features like sending SMS messages, collecting reviews, creating loyalty and referral programs, and more.

The platform stands out with its ability to allow brands to collect customer reviews by sending both email and SMS requests. 

It also provides review prompts — making it easier for customers to leave feedback. In addition, customers have the option to submit videos and photos of them using your products along with their reviews and ratings.

5. Website and app analytics

Here are the most popular website and analytic tools that can help you collect, manage, and analyze customer feedback.

HotJar

HotJar is a product experience insights tool that provides companies with feedback data and behavior analytics. It comes with tools like heatmaps that allow you to see how your visitors interact with your website. For example, how far they scroll down a page and where they click.

The platform also offers a recording tool that allows brands to watch recordings of visitors using their website in real-time — allowing them to see how users interact with various elements across multiple pages. You can also slow up or speed down the rate at which you watch the video.

MixPanel

MixPanel is a product analysis tool that allows brands to track user behavior within their products in real-time. For example, every time a customer makes a purchase, it’ll be tracked in MixPanel as an event. 

The platform also tracks the different users who complete events. This can help provide feedback like the type of products your customers value, how many and what type of videos are being watched, and more.

In addition, MixPanel also allows you to analyze your customer feedback metrics by separating them into categories like account type, behavior, and demographics.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service that’s offered by Google. 

The easy-to-use platform provides brands with the ability to understand how users interact with their apps and websites — ultimately showing how customers feel by gathering data about their actions. This is done with features that allow you to track bounce rates, average session length, what pages people enter and leave your website on, and more. 

It also comes with the ability to create custom reports and dashboards, including mobile reporting and segmentation.

6. Social listening

Here’s a list of the top social listening tools that you can use as your customer feedback platform.

Meltwater

With over 27,000 customers, Meltwater is a media, social, and consumer intelligence platform. It offers a suite of tools that ensure you’ll never miss a time when your brand is mentioned on a social media platform. In addition, it also monitors traditional broadcasts, online news, podcasts, and print.

For podcasts, Meltwater uses AI algorithms to analyze 1000s of podcasts to find out if a brand is talked about during them. It also comes with report-building features that offer a 360-degree view of your brand’s mentions on social media.

On top of that, the platform also lets you search an unlimited amount of keywords, hashtags, and brand names.

Dash Hudson

Dash Hudson is an easy-to-use social media management platform. It offers an AI-powered social listening suite that comes with plenty of features that help brands stay on top of their customer feedback on social media. It also provides insights into the feedback your competitors receive on social media. 

In addition, the platform lets brands see what’s currently trending on social media and what relevant users are commenting on.

Another one of Dash Hudson’s features is that it allows brands to put a selection of images through a campaign analysis — predicting which ones will receive the greatest feedback and engagement from their customers on social media.

7. Conversation intelligence

Here are the best conversation intelligence tools that’ll analyze the content of your customer’s conversations with your brand to gather the most useful feedback.

Qualtrics

Qualtrics is an experience management software with over 18,000 customers, including Spotify, Samsung, and, Coca-Cola. It provides brands with the ability to analyze customer calls, transcripts from chatbots, and the customer service delivered on social media.

In its analysis, the platform can pinpoint common keywords and topics that your customers talk about while interacting with your team. On top of that, the software will also provide suggestions about the best way you can implement your customer’s feedback.

Invoca

Invoca is an AI-powered conversation intelligence software that focuses on providing features for ecommerce and marketing teams. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms that collect, extract, and organize data by analyzing the speech in the conversations that occur between your customers and call centers. 

The platform allows teams to review this data in reports, searchable transcripts, and your account’s dashboard. 

Conclusion: The best customer feedback tool for your business

Customer feedback gives you valuable insight into how customers feel about your business — making customer feedback platforms critical to the success of any company. 

During the process of selecting the right customer feedback tool you should consider budget, data security requirements, feedback forums, industry, feedback channels, and other important factors that are relevant to your business and customers.

With our list of top tools for surveys and questionnaires, reviews and ratings, website analytics, social listening, and conversational intelligence in hand, you should have no trouble finding the perfect fit. 

We recommend building an online community with Bettermode and using its many features to collect and use customer feedback to ultimately improve customer satisfaction. Click here to get started.