Top 7 product feedback tools to use in 2023

Our list of the seven best product feedback tools will help you create better experiences and validate your decisions to drive growth. Learn the functions of each tool and weigh out your options, so you can find the perfect fit for your business and customer needs.

7 best product feedback tools to understand what your customers need the most

Product feedback tools give you a deeper understanding of what your users love about your product—and what they’d like you to improve. Tapping into quality insights will help you feel closer to customers and empathize with their frustrations and needs. 

Product feedback tools also help you:

• Measure customer satisfaction

• Make better marketing and sales decisions

• Target the needs of specific customers

• Know where your product stands in the marketplace

• Catch bugs and glitches before they drive customers away

• Get insights about product prototypes

• Gather feedback about product onboarding

• Improve user engagement and the customer experience (CX)

Keep in mind that there’s no one-size-fits-all product feedback tool. When it comes to choosing the right software, you need to pick one (or more) tailored to your specific business and customer goals. 

Consider these two key factors when choosing a product feedback tool:

1. The quality and kinds of product feedback you want to collect: for example, some tools work well to launch on-site user surveys but are not the best for collecting other forms of feedback, like social media mentions. Consider your goals when choosing a tool to collect product feedback.

2. How you’ll compare quantitative and qualitative data: some tools help you collect data but have no way of displaying it in an AI-based analytics dashboard. Find a tool that allows you to collect both qualitative and quantitative data to fully understand your customers' needs. This way, you not only gather feedback from your users and paying customers, but you get a more detailed understanding of your experience to shape strategic product decisions. 

Now that we’ve talked about why product feedback is important and what to consider when choosing the right software to collect and analyze it, it’s time to take a look at the seven best product feedback tools and why they stand out:

1. Typeform’s user-friendly forms and surveys

Typeform’s feedback tool helps you create surveys, polls, and feedback forms that encourage user interaction. With its pre-designed templates and built-in photo and video libraries, Typeform makes creating surveys and soliciting user feedback an intuitive process. 

Its conditional logic feature lets you ask your customers questions based on their previous answers—which is ideal if you’re trying to narrow down insights to a specific product feature. 

In addition to its surveys and polls, Typeform’s videoask tool helps you collect user insights through face-to-face interviews. It also has a no-code chatbot builder that lets you set up a personalized chatbot to engage with users and automatically recommend specific features.

Other Typeform features let you:

• Create more conversational product feedback surveys with single-page questions 

• Embed surveys on your website or share links in emails or on social media

• Generate reports based on survey results

• Connect and share data with other tools to analyze survey data in-depth

💡Typeform in real life: audience intelligence tool SparkToro uses Typeform to find and understand the right audience for its product. It sets up a form for people to sign up for its Beta launch, while also collecting information about its ideal customer profile (ICP). Typeform helped SparkToro identify users’ struggles and develop its product to address common pain points better.

2. Hotjar’s product experience (PX) insights

Hotjar (that’s us👋) is a product experience insights platform that helps you empathize with your users, understand their behavior, and bring the voice of the customer (VoC) into your decision-making.

Use Hotjar’s Survey and Feedback tools to collect insights while customers use your product. For example, if you’d like to see what customers think about recent product developments, you can schedule a pop-up survey to appear when people use that particular feature.

Hotjar’s Heatmaps and Session Recordings tools analyze user behavior and contextualize qualitative feedback—helping you identify the ‘why’ behind customers’ comments and interactions.

For example, if you’re receiving negative feedback about a particular product feature and want to know the reason, watch session recordings—playbacks of what your customers do on your site or product—to see if there’s any evidence of rage-clicking or visible frustration. 

Hotjar also helps you:

• Receive more comprehensive product feedback with the Feedback widget, which lets users rate their page experience and attach screenshots

• Analyze user reactions to product updates by comparing pre-and post-product release metrics in Hotjar’s Dashboard

• Identify product features that customers are missing or choosing to ignore with the Heatmaps tool

• Use its Highlights tool to save and share key insights with your team and senior execs, helping you validate assumptions and get buy-in from stakeholders  

🔥Hotjar in real life: Ryanair uses Hotjar Surveys to gather user insights and better understand how customers interact with its products. When customers use Ryanair’s site or app to book a flight or reserve a hotel room, Hotjar’s Survey tool measures user satisfaction, helping the airline detect barriers and spot problems—and ensure its processes are easy to use.

3. Qualaroo’s customer and user feedback software

Qualaroo’s product feedback software helps you collect in-product VoC feedback and get insights the moment a user engages with your website or web app. But why’s this important? In-product surveys have a much higher response rate and provide feedback responses that more accurately capture user sentiment.

The platform’s Nudge technology lets you send survey questions based on user actions— like which pages they visit, how long they stay on the page, and how many times they visit a specific page. 

Qualaroo also segments users by pricing tier, how long they’ve been a customer, and whether or not they’re in a trial period, making it easy to specify your reach and send the right questions to the right audience. 

Qualaroo’s software also helps you:

• Collect quantitative and qualitative feedback like user comments from Net Promoter Score® (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys

• Conduct AI-powered user sentiment analysis based on keywords found in user feedback

• Put surveys directly in product design templates and easily test out product changes and design prototypes

• Utilize branching logic for surveys to ask users questions depending on the information that they already provided in previous responses

💡Qualaroo in real life: online learning and teaching platform Udemy uses Qualaroo to gain insights from students and make product adjustments to better cater to their needs. For example, it asked students to rate the quality of machine-generated captions on their courses. Based on their responses, Udemy modified its caption-editing tool and made courses more accessible to students who speak different languages all around the world.

4. Parlor’s 'User Relationship Management' system

Parlor’s User Relationship Management (URM) system consists of three pillars: User Engagement, Voice of the User (VoU), and User Intent Tracking.

Parlor’s User Engagement tool helps you deliver welcome guides and in-product walkthroughs for customers. You can also collect feedback like bug reports and feature requests, and run NPS®, CSAT, or custom surveys.

Parlor’s Voice of the User (VoU) pillar helps you collect user feedback from various sources—like customer support tickets, bug reports, or product suggestions—into a single system of record. Then, you can use the VoU tool to determine which product requests have the highest business impact, based on the volume of requests, potential revenue, and the urgency of the issue.

Use Parlor’s third tool, User Intent Tracking, to organize users into different segments, and communicate insights across your organization. If several users request the same product feature, Parlor segments them and makes your product team aware of their requests. It later notifies customers about any improvements or relevant updates. 

Parlor.io’s features also let you:

• Share your product roadmap with users and request that they vote on new features

• Analyze user sentiment, opportunity, and friction based on survey data

• Import existing customer feedback and data from tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Slack

💡Parlor in real life: Transparent Language uses Parlor to centralize product feedback and understand customer needs by segment. It then evaluates the business impact of its customers’ needs and shares valuable insights across the organization. 

5. UserReport’s user engagement tools

UserReport’s feedback tool consists of two widgets: a survey widget and a feedback widget. You can use both as integrated parts of your website or app to gather user insights directly. 

The survey widget lets you track user satisfaction, measure NPS® scores, and gather information about audience demographics. The feedback widget, on the other hand, helps you easily capture product feature requests and bug reports, which is useful if you’re looking for a way to test prototypes or prioritize product improvements. 

You can also use UserReport’s features to:

• Create a space for users to discuss the product and vote on feature requests

• Customize the color and font of the widgets to reflect your branding

• Connect UserReport with Google Analytics to obtain a blend of qualitative user insights and quantitative information

🔥UserReport in real life: Honolulu Cookie Company uses UserReport to collect feedback from its customers and improve the user experience on its website. Through UserReport’s surveys, it successfully evaluates customer satisfaction and resolves issues that users face on its online store.

6. Pendo’s digital adoption solutions

Pendo helps you capture and prioritize in-app feature requests and quickly spot revenue-generating opportunities. 

Pendo’s in-app surveys let you segment users based on their activity, so you can solicit feedback for specific product features. This means that if users tried a newer version of a feature or one that you’re trying to update, you can send them a survey to understand their experience while using that specific feature.

Use Pendo to quantify feature adoption and see which product features customers use the most. This data shows you where you need to improve awareness about certain features, change the user onboarding process, and make improvements to the overall user journey.

Here are some other ways to use Pendo:

• Monitor user activity with product analytics and make data-informed decisions

• Deliver in-app guides to spread awareness about lesser-known product features

• Increase response rates with surveys targeted to specific user segments and product interactions

🔥Pendo in real life: cybersecurity leader Symantec uses Pendo to collect user insights and develop their cloud-based application. In its initial phases, Pendo’s product team was able to fix and adjust the cloud platform based on problems that users were experiencing. Later, when many users needed to migrate from Symantec’s on-premises solution to its cloud-based app, Symantec used Pendo’s in-app guides to support customers during their transition.

7. Productboard’s product management software

Productboard’s product management software helps you prioritize product updates based on user needs. The tool lets you build a roadmap based on customer feedback, and uses AI to transform feedback into actionable insights. By using this feature, you place customer needs at the center of your product strategy.

Productboard’s Insights Automation tool lets you automatically filter and send relevant customer feedback information to the right teams. This tool gives your team visibility and makes product updates much more efficient, allowing you to specify whether product updates are ‘critical’ or ‘nice to have’. 

Use ProductBoard to:

• Consolidate product feedback from surveys, sales conversations, and support tickets in one place

• Collect feedback about future product development ideas and source new ideas from customers

• Share and celebrate new product updates with customers

💡Productboard in real life: Propeller Health uses Productboard to identify customer needs, despite having product feedback spread out across various channels. While onboarding with the tool, Propeller Health imported customer service tickets and past feedback from Slack onto Productboard. The company used Productboard to consolidate information and quickly recognize persistent problems, which helped it make product improvements based on feedback from customers.

Placing customer needs at the heart of product updates

Finding the right product feedback tool will help you put your customers’ needs at the forefront of product improvements and business decisions. 

It helps to think about the specific needs of your business as you sort through your options:

• Think about what your needs are first. Consider how you’d like to collect product feedback and what kind of tools will provide you with value.

• Consider which tools will be able to seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack

• Look for tools that not only provide you with relevant product feedback but also a contextual understanding of your user responses

A product is only as good as its feedback. Adopting a user-centric approach to product feedback helps you understand what customers need—so you know why they feel the way that they do about your product experience.