10 Voice of Customer Tools You can Start with Today

Similar to total experience, it’s about focusing all your company resources and efforts on listening, understanding and acting on what customers want.

Here are 10 voice of customer tools that can help you do just that. For each tool, we discuss how quickly you can be up and running with a simple voice of the customer program based on three steps: collecting customer feedback, feedback analysis, and ease of Ease of taking action.

Ombea

Ombea is an experience management platform that helps you discover and address issues before they become problems. Ombea combines smart algorithms and a module-based architecture to provide experience management at scale. It requires little to no setup, so you’re up and running in minutes and not days or weeks. It's the perfect voice of the customer tool.

Collecting customer feedback

Ombea’s module-based architecture means you can collect customer feedback from just about any touchpoint -- on-site, online, and anywhere. You can use simple sentiment questions with smiley buttons, or you can go deeper with QR code and SMS surveys. Ombea also pulls in public review data from Google and Facebook and organizes it in an easy-to-use inbox feature.

Feedback analysis

Ombea presents you graphs and charts where you can see a time-based breakdown of your customer feedback. It can also present your data using either net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), or even Ombea’s own Insights index.

Ease of Ease of taking action

If you don’t want to drown in charts, Ombea tells you exactly what to do to act on the voice of the customer. On the dashboard, you’ll see a list of actionable steps you can take right now to increase your satisfaction scores. Using the inbox feature, you can reply to positive and negative feedback right as it comes in, so you’re always on top of all digital channels.

MonkeyLearn

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MonkeyLearn is designed to help you listen to the voice of the customer and “show” you how it sounds. It helps you crunch qualitative data, and comes with useful integrations like Zendesk, Google Sheets, and more.

Collecting customer feedback

MonkeyLearn’s design lets you “plug in” your customer feedback data. You can, for example, feed it customer emails, support tickets, survey responses and NPS feedback. You can even automate these processes by connecting your existing apps to the system directly.

Feedback analysis

MonkeyLearn uses something called aspect-based sentiment analysis, where all customer feedback data is categorized into different tags. This process clarifies the underlying causes behind positive or negative opinions in the feedback received.

Ease of Ease of taking action

Through the MonkeyLearn Studio dashboard, you can start to understand why you received certain feedback. It also sheds light on your brand’s general perception, and can point you in the right direction when it comes to acting on the voice of the customer.

Read more here: https://monkeylearn.com/blog/

Medallia

Medallia allows you to listen to everyone at the same time - whether that’s customers, employees, or other relevant stakeholders. Like similar platforms in this list, it’s designed to capture feedback from as many touchpoints as possible and organize it in a meaningful way.

Collecting customer feedback

You can start by feeding Medallia your physical customer survey data, although capturing physical feedback is not part of their service. Medallia can interface with other applications such as SalesForce and import customer data. Medallia also pulls in data from online sources such as review sites and social media.

Feedback analysis

Medallia does sentiment analysis, for example, parsing through text-based feedback and categorizing them depending on the categories that are most important to you. In this case, it can be something like “positive”, “negative”, “neutral”.

Ease of taking action

You can always see your feedback either through the web or mobile. You can also respond to feedback right from their platform. The platform learns from your data over time, so it can anticipate negative feedback based on overall patterns and trends. Like similar items on this list, however, Medallia only helps you listen to and understand the voice of the customer, but it doesn’t tell you what to do.

Read more here: https://www.medallia.com/

Sentisum

image source Sentisum applies machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to derive insights from customer support tickets.

Collecting customer feedback

Sentisum doesn’t include feedback collectors as a feature, but is very good at working with non-text data sources. You can feed it text-based feedback from surveys, online polls, or even recorded phone conversations. Whatever isn’t text-based is converted into text.

Feedback analysis

Sentisum takes all that you feed it from all of your apps, and uses machine learning to determine sentiment. If the data source is text-based, like a survey, the analysis is done immediately. If it’s a non-text source like a phone call, Sentisum converts it into text and performs the same sentiment analysis.

Ease of taking action

All the customer feedback data that’s fed to Sentisum is then categorized in your dashboard. You can then understand what are the drivers of specific behaviors -- what causes customer dissatisfaction, what makes them gravitate towards your brand, etc. It is up to you to make sense of this data, however.

Read more here: https://www.sentisum.com/

ConfirmIt

Confirmit takes a consultative approach to the voice of the customer, designed to work with bigger organizations. It integrates customer feedback from different sources, crunches the data, and presents recommendations. Here’s how their process fits into our 3-step VOC framework:

Collecting customer feedback

Confirmit takes care of defining your business needs and implementing a continuous listening architecture based on those needs. You can, for example, poll your customers with surveys sent right from the platform. They also offer 3rd party data integration with popular applications through their Horizon API.

Feedback analysis

From all the data collected, the system can then design a voice of the customer program based on your business’s needs. It not only analyzes structured data such as text-based feedback, it can also deal with unstructured data such as phone conversations and offline interviews.

Ease of taking action

Confirmit is designed to get you to act on the results. However, based on online reviews, there is a significant learning curve. Creating and sending surveys, as well as navigating the user interface, can be a challenge for new users. Most reviews agree that Confirmit is a great voice of the customer tool, although you have to dedicate considerable time to gain valuable insights.

Read more here: https://www.confirmit.com/

InMoment

InMoment is a cloud-based platform that focuses on “experience improvement (XI)”. This term describes their mission to “transform the way your organization approaches business initiatives.”

Collecting customer feedback

InMoment collects data from different sources, including surveys and social reviews. You can set up these collectors right from the platform, and distribute them through a variety of channels including SMS and online.

Feedback analysis

InMoment takes care of organizing all customer feedback into an easy-to-use dashboard. It can also give you a timely breakdown of what’s going good and what’s going bad based on the feedback data.

Ease of taking action

Using the dashboard in conjunction with the reports, one can use the information to take action.

Read more here: https://inmoment.com/

Clarabridge

Clarabridge provides different experience management solutions targeted at different audiences. For customer experience, Clarabridge offers the Customer Experience Management (CEM) platform, which uses AI and speech analysis.

Collecting customer feedback

The CEM platform can take data mainly from customer conversations, live chats, private messages and social media.

Feedback analysis

The data fed to the CEM platform is then used to determine variables like NPS, ease of doing business and root cause for customer behaviors.

Ease of taking action

From the CEM dashboard, you get a full view of the state of customer experience in your business, including emerging trends, riskiest interactions, and daily insights (provided in charts and graphs).

Read more here: https://www.clarabridge.com/

Verint ForeSee

With the Verint Experience Cloud, the sole purpose is to help you “close the feedback loop.” The platform is focused on helping you constantly engage customers, so nobody falls through the cracks.

Collecting customer feedback

The main data sources that Verint uses are unstructured data such as conversations and text-based surveys. It can also read behavioral data such as web session length and service call duration.

Feedback analysis

Verint ForeSee uses AI and data science to crunch the numbers for you. The idea is that, as more data is fed into the system, the platform gets better at understanding your customers and can therefore recommend steps to mitigate negative experiences and boost the positive ones.

Ease of taking action

The platform presents its data in neat charts, and supports a variety of metrics. You can also program real-time alerts to respond to customers whenever it is necessary. However, it only goes so far as to point you in the right direction -- not telling you exactly what to do to guarantee a top-level customer experience.

Read more here: https://www.verint.com/engagement/our-offerings/solutions/experience-management/

NICE satmetrix

NICE satmetrix’s stated purpose is to eliminate silos and close the feedback loop through a digital-first approach. There are some heavy-hitters involved in this project with one of the creators of the net promoter score index on the team.

Collecting customer feedback

NICE satmetrix collects feedback from three main sources - direct feedback such as SMS surveys and comment cards, indirect feedback such as service calls recordings, and operational feedback data such as waiting times and contact center paths.

Feedback analysis

Using text-based analysis and machine learning algorithms, NICE satmetrix crunches data from different touchpoints and comes up with repeating themes. These themes can be negative feedback at specific points in time, particular comments or even behaviors.

Ease of taking action

Your feedback data is readily available in the dashboard area, where you can assess the overall sentiment towards your brand. It is then up to you to make sense of your analytics and take action.

Read more here: https://www.satmetrix.com/

Panelista

Panelista allows you to use video to capture customer feedback. The idea is to breach the gap between customers and the team, but also increase the total amount of feedback one can collect.

Collecting customer feedback

You can capture data at different touchpoints by using QR codes, or you can send questions to your audience through SMS or web widgets. Another way of capturing feedback is for you to gather a panel of your own customers, send them a question using video, and let them give you direct feedback similar to a social media post.

Feedback analysis

As panelists comment on your video questions, you can see a conversation emerge. Panelists can reply to each other’s comments in addition to creating new original comments. This means you get raw feedback from your audience.

Ease of taking action

Based on panel and touchpoint feedback, Panelista can generate reports which point you in the right direction when it comes to improving your customers’ experience.

Read more here: https://panelista.com/