Top 7 customer feedback tools to improve CX

This is your guide to the best customer feedback tools to collect and analyze feedback and better understand your customers. We walk you through each tool and explain how you can use it to make customer-led improvements to your website or product.

7 powerful customer feedback tools to use in 2023

Great customer feedback tools let you create a positive feedback loop of incoming feedback and product discovery and development—so you can delight customers with relevant solutions. 

They help you collect and analyze different types of customer feedback—like reviews, surveys, and activity on social media, so you can make informed decisions that elevate the product and customer experience. 

Use the tool list below to inspire your customer feedback strategy and spot any gaps in your tech stack, so you can continuously meet customer needs and improve their experience. Skip to the tools you need:

1. Podium to centralize and manage reviews from online listings

2. Hotjar to get granular product experience (PX) insights 

3. Parlor.io to gather and prioritize feedback across tools and teams

4. Zonka Feedback to collect and measure feedback across multiple channels

5. Sprinklr to create customer communities and feedback forums 

6. Qualtrics to capture customer feedback across social media 

7. Intercom for instant messaging and live chat 

1. Podium 

Podium is a customer feedback management tool that organizes incoming feedback from multiple channels into a centralized inbox. It lets you collect unsolicited customer feedback across popular review sites—and respond to customers on their preferred channels. 

Podium also helps you create and administer SMS survey campaigns and respond faster to customers to increase user engagement. 

How Podium helps you collect and analyze customer feedback

Use Podium to unify your feedback and better reach your customers. For example, after a new product rollout, you can track reviews and customer sentiments from multiple sources to see if your update successfully meets customer and market needs.  Podium's key features include:

• Analytics dashboard to track your feedback and goals 

• Centralized inbox to record customer interactions and manage communications from one place 

• Alerts for new survey submissions

• SMS survey campaigns 

• Pulse surveys for customer feedback across touchpoints 

• Sentiment analysis to gauge the customer experience 

2. Hotjar 

Hotjar is a product experience (PX) tool that gives you an in-depth understanding of your customers through qualitative and quantitative insights. Its user-friendly Dashboard makes it easy to visualize feedback—including overall customer satisfaction and sentiment—so you can quickly spot incoming negative feedback and resolve any issues in the customer experience. 

Use Hotjar to create and administer unobtrusive, customizable feedback widgets and surveys that you can personalize for any occasion to better gauge customer delight. 

For example, your SaaS product team might administer product-market fit surveys to help determine product success and adoption long-term—and better tailor your product to customer and market needs. 

How to use Hotjar to collect holistic customer feedback and insights

Hotjar's tools and features help you:

• Gather feedback in the wild: place Feedback widgets throughout the customer journey for insights into the customer experience at different touchpoints. Ask customers to rate their experience, highlight parts of your web page or product they like or dislike, and provide a reason for their score. 

• Gauge customer opinions and feelings with Hotjar Surveys: use customer satisfaction surveys to measure satisfaction; B2B usability surveys to gauge your B2B product’s usability and success; NPS® surveys to determine how likely customers are to recommend your product to others; or exit-intent surveys to ask customers why they’re leaving your website. 

• Snip, sort, and save essential feedback in one place with Hotjar Highlights: extract crucial feedback—and create collections of relevant insights—for easy access to urgent customer opinions and product opportunities

• Easily share feedback across teams by integrating Hotjar with Slack: get updated on incoming feedback to make better, customer-backed decisions. For example, after receiving feedback about a buggy sign-in button, your user experience (UX) developers can act quickly to fix the problem without waiting for a support ticket or bug report.

3. Parlor.io 

Parlor.io helps you collect and analyze customer feedback across internal business tools—like ticketing systems, live chat, analytics platforms, CRM, and engineering task management—and measures your performance across channels. 

It also helps prioritize key feedback—like feature requests and support tickets—while automatically following up with customers to maintain the feedback loop. For example, after receiving requests from different customer segments about your SaaS product’s features, use Parlor.io to analyze which request will yield the biggest impact on the customer experience (compared to your other requests) and create customer delight.  

How Parlor.io helps you collect and prioritize customer feedback

Use Parlor.io to improve your internal communication and feedback management, and track customer success. Parlor.io's key features include:

• Analytics to prioritize feedback, requests, and product improvements 

• Ability to share product roadmap items across teams 

• Sends product updates to relevant customer segments 

• Sentiment and friction analysis to understand the customer experience

• Integrations with popular tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk 

• A 'Unified User Record' feature for real-time insights about every user  

4. Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback is an omnichannel customer feedback management software that helps businesses measure and improve customer experience through feedback-driven actionable insights. This customer feedback software enables businesses to distribute surveys and capture customer sentiments across various touchpoints through channels like email, SMS, in-app SDKs, and more. As a full-suite feedback and experience management software, Zonka Feedback facilitates the collection and measurement of CX metrics, including CSAT, NPS, and CES, with automated data processing.

How does Zonka Feedback help you gather customer feedback and enhance the overall customer experience?

Zonka Feedback offers an easy-to-use survey builder that lets you create and distribute surveys in minutes. Its powerful reporting and analytics software offers real-time alerts and in-depth insight into customer feedback to help you improve the experience. Here are some other ways Zonka Feedback helps you enhance customer experience:

• 100+ survey templates with 30+ questions

• Multi-channel survey distribution

• Advanced reporting and analytics

• Seamless integration with popular CRMs

• Voice of Customer (VoC) analytics through customer comments, sentiments, and suggestions

• Automatic routing of customer feedback to the appropriate teams or departments through workflow automation

5. Sprinklr 

Sprinklr helps you collect valuable customer feedback across social media channels and websites. Not only does Sprinklr gather feedback, but it also helps you create and optimize meaningful experiences on social media to better connect with customers.

For example, your marketing team might use Sprinklr to create an online community based on power users (and reviewers) of your product to increase customer engagement and loyalty. 

Sprinklr gives you access to unsolicited customer reviews, opinions, and ratings about your product or customer experience within a single platform, and helps you create customer-backed strategies to improve customer satisfaction. 

How Sprinklr helps you collect customer feedback and create meaningful experiences

Use Sprinklr to unify customer feedback across social media and brand websites and quickly respond to customer requests on all channels. Sprinklr's key features include:

• Surveys that you can automate and trigger based on customer actions

• Tools to collect, interpret, and act on customer feedback across channels

• Voice-of-the-customer (VoC) feedback to research and understand your target audience

• 30+ channels to improve engagement

• AI bots to automate routine interactions

• The ability to create customer communities and feedback forums 

6. Qualtrics 

Qualtrics collects and tracks customer feedback from a variety of sources and automatically recommends actions to key decision-makers or relevant stakeholders—so they can prioritize important product and customer experiences. 

It also gives you real-time survey design recommendations and lets you deploy surveys across channels, so you can collect feedback at pivotal moments in the customer journey. 

How Qualtrics helps inform your customer feedback strategy

Use Qualtrics for powerful feedback analytics and reporting, and to better prioritize your product roadmap. Its key features include:

• Automatically routing customer feedback to relevant departments and team leads

• Data visualization graphs 

• Report-sharing across teams 

• Real-time survey design and multi-channel survey distribution  

• Analytics for product backlog management and roadmap prioritization  

7. Intercom

Intercom is a messaging platform that helps you gather customer feedback through live chat and chatbots. You can use it to interact with users throughout their customer experience, for example, with personalized onboarding and product activation messages—and increase adoption rates. 

It also lets you connect with customers across internal teams, forging a direct connection between customers and relevant departments for more accurate and actionable feedback and improvements. 

How Intercom helps you collect feedback to support customers

Use Intercom to reach and respond to your customers wherever they are, and improve cross-functional collaboration and transparency. Its key features include:

• Automated chatbots and live chat on your website, product, or app

• Direct channels of communication across customers and teams

• One-on-one customer support 

• Ability to spot and respond to customer feedback and frustrations 

• Unified inbox to keep communications in one place 

• Personalized responses and messages 

Pick the right feedback software to fuel customer satisfaction 

The right customer feedback software lets you set up a feedback loop of continuous user insights and product development, so you can create an experience that aligns perfectly with your customers' goals.

When you make customer-led updates and improvements to your product, you not only show your customers you care about their opinions—you know that you’re basing decisions that affect the success of your business on genuine insights rather than guesswork.