Voice of the Customer Tools for Product Managers

Voice of the Customer programs can drive user centric product development and growth strategies.  Every good product manager not only shows up for work but cares about customer feedback. Fortunately, product managers don’t have to deal with crazy foodie types that post pictures on Yelp and leave feedback. Instead, some great Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs exist to help you tap into customers’ wants, needs, and expectations in a constructive manner.

Voice of the Customer tools help collected insights to decrease churn, improve customer loyalty, and address customers’ needs more precisely. This selection of tools is geared towards mid-sized SaaS companies. 

The market for Voice of the Customer tools is huge, so we’ve broken this out into best of breed in each category:   360° product feedback, idea management, in-app surveys, and feedback widgets. This list includes our favorites. If they don’t work for your organization, a quick Google search will reveal bazillions of options.

360° Voice of the Customer Feedback

These tools offer a solution to capture ideas from every corner: an ideas portal, in-app user feedback, and customer facing team members.

UserVoice

The great thing about 360° product feedback software is that it lets you get feedback from every party involved in a product’s chain of distribution. UserVoice provides these ideas and feedback in a centralized location making it easier to make product-related decisions and justify them to stakeholders.

Pros: The software works well for customer support, especially because it offers feedback forms in more than 40 languages. It also has responses that easily work for FAQs and instant responses to question. It’s simple to use, easy to install, and integrates with Salesforce, Jira, zendesk, and more.

Cons: It requires manually merging similar ideas. UserVoice is not as customizable as other products. It doesn’t force customer registration—your users may like this, but from a business standpoint, it isn’t a plus.

Cost: UserVoice does not offer pricing on their website, so you need to contact their sales department. They do offer a free trial for those who want to test out the software.

Idea Management

These tools capture feature requests in an ideas portal where customers and team members can comment and vote on them.  These tools can be extremely valuable for early stage businesses and B2B SaaS products with a small base of high ARR customers.  Idea Management tools help you collect qualitative feedback at scale.

Receptive.io

For B2B SaaS businesses with a small customer base, getting customer feedback is an integral part of a successful business.  Receptive is an idea management software tool that helps you organize ideas from your customers and put them to work in your decision-making process.

Pros: You can send out personalized engagement emails to each customer, which often times increases feedback. The software is easy to install and set up. You can share your product development roadmap with customers if you choose to do so. Other programs often result in a massive backlogA backlog is a primary entry point that shows a prioritized list of work that needs to be done.; Receptive organizes ideas so you can take action.

Cons: There is no advanced search capability. Receptive does integrate with product management software, but not seamlessly. Managing users takes some time.

Cost: Receptive offers monthly pricing that starts at $199 per month and increases based on business size.

Crowdicity

Like shoulder pads and legwarmers in the 80s, crowdsourcing is the new hot thing. Crowdicity offers a platform for crowdsourcing product feedback, so businesses can get ideas and input from anyone who might be able to help their organization.

Pros: The platform is user-friendly, easy to brand and customize, easy to navigate, and provides diverse feedback.

Cons: No emojis 🙁

Cost: Crowdicity does not offer pricing on its website, so you will need to contact them for a demo.

In-App Surveys

These tools capture feedback through those little pop-up surveys in your product. Surveys catch the user in context, when they’re more likely to respond.

Cost: Survicate offers a professional and ultimate pricing plan. The professional plan allows you to collect unlimited responses for $149 per month and the ultimate plan for high traffic websites is $549 per month. 

Qualaroo

Qualaroo boasts that they seek to help businesses understand the “why.” While they offer surveys for user feedback, they shine with their sophisticated user profiling and targeting, plus sentiment analysis to scale qualitative feedback.

Pros: The platform is user friendly and easy to brand. Qualaroo’s feedback is real time; response notification and aggregate reporting are intuitive. Surveys have branching technology making it easy to target customers based on their behavior. 

Cons: The reporting function is limited and logic branching could be improved. Qualaroo’s NPS question type is constraining compared to competitors

Cost: Basic pricing plans for Qualaroo start at $99 per month and go up from there. They also have a 14-day free trial for you to take a test drive with the software.

Survicate

Survicate is a comprehensive 360 tool for medium size customer bases. Their voice of the customer platform that offers targeted website surveys, user-initiated feedback widgets, in-message surveys, NPS email surveys, and questionnaires. One tool allows users to gather customer feedback across all areas.

Pros: The platform is easy to use and has great customer service. Survicate’s widget is fun to use and easy to configure. The software is cost effective and priced less expensive than many competitors. Through its collection of data, Survicate serves as a great lead-generation tool.

Cons: Backend is slow at times. Survicate lacks integration capabilities with product management and other programs that you might use. Although simple, customizing widgets is time-consuming.

Informizely

Informizely is another survey platform for mid-sized Saas companies that allows users to collect customer feedback using targeted website surveys, link surveys, integrated polls, and email surveys. 

Pros: The platform’s user interface is intuitive and easy to use. Plus, Informizely is the least expensive tool for companies in the early-stage voice of the customer programs looking for just the basics. The “push-to-Google-Analytics” feature allows users to integrate quantitative and qualitative data to get a deeper picture of customer behavior.

Cons: Informizely doesn’t support sentiment analysis or auto-categorization. The interface is a bit dated and the surveys don’t appear great on mobile devices. Design and display options are rudimentary, yet professional.

Cost: Informizely has three different pricing plans based on company size that vary in price from $59 per month to $289 per month.

Feedback Widgets

Tired of cryptic bug tickets with weird descriptions? These tools make it easy for the user to share screenshots and visual feedback through in-app widgets.

UserSnap

UserSnap is a feedback widget that collects bug reports and associated customer feedback. The platform allows for users to report bugs immediately in browser without filling out endless forms.

Pros: UserSnap is incredibly easy to set up and easy to use with point-and-click annotation tools. Customers can snap screenshots and share with customer support. The software works on multiple platforms.

Cons:  Features are limited beyond screenshot sharing. Chat functionality is not as good as it could be and the program doesn’t have history support.

Cost: UserSnap’s company pricing plan is $149 per month, but they offer downgrades and upgrades for different size teams and companies.

Doorbell.io

Doorbell is an in-app user feedback widget that works on iOS apps, Android apps, and websites. This popular, by large companies such as Walmart, Target, and Ticketmaster.

Pros: Installation and set up takes minutes. Doorbell is easily customizable, multilingual, and integrates well with product management programs.

Cons: The in-app user experience isn’t as good as the web. Sometimes there are issues with syncing messages. The platform doesn’t have session recording features.

Cost:  Doorbell has a free plan to try out the product, but premium pricing includes plans that range in price from $29 to $99 per month.