What motivates a customer to take an advocacy action? This question grows more and more important as the buying process grows more customer-centric.

But the truth is that there are so many advocacy actions customers can take, and in so many different contexts they can take them, that an equally important question to consider is this: what will customer advocacy look like in three years?

So, that’s the question I’m going to tackle today using three primary sources of information: external reports and research I have consumed, two advocacy surveys I conducted, and my own experiences working on the customer marketing team here at HubSpot.

The Most Successful Customer Advocacy Programs are Entirely Customer Focused

A customer advocacy program is a marketing tactic to drive customers to be your spokespeople.

It seems rather obvious that a customer advocacy program should be customer focused (I mean it’s literally in the title), but a surprising amount of companies get this wrong.

Rather than working on cultivating interactions that drive value for their advocates, most advocacy programs try to harvest customer generosity, with little success.

The way you think about why a customer would participate in an advocacy program should align with the way you think about why a prospect would buy your product/service: they would never buy it if they didn’t believe they were going to get more out of it than they put in.

It’s the exact same for a customer advocacy program: customers should feel they are getting much more out of the advocacy program than they are putting in.

But how can you actually do this? How can you drive value for your advocates? The key is not looking at success within the product, or even success based on how many advocacy actions they have taken, but instead by looking at success as determined by the customer based on their own intrinsic motivations. And the key to tapping into these intrinsic motivations lies in personalization.

Now personalization can be a touchy subject – it’s tough to do well, challenging to accomplish with limited data, and can be tricky to scale.

Well, I am here to tell you that when it comes to advocacy, personalization can in fact be done well, with limited data, and at scale through the use of the four advocate personalities.

The Four Advocate Personalities

When I say that advocates come in four basic personalities, what I mean is that if a customer of yours raises their hand saying that they want to be an advocate for your brand, their motivations for doing so are likely to land them in one of four groups, which was developed by Forrester analyst Laura Ramos:

Image Source

But why are advocate personalities so important in creating a truly customer-focused advocacy program? There are two big reasons:

1. Advocate personalities help you know which content and opportunities are appropriate to give to each advocate.
2. Advocate personalities help you know which advocacy requests are appropriate to make of which customers.

So, in theory, advocate personalities can be a helpful tool for creating an epic advocacy program, but they aren’t worth anything if they are difficult to determine or if they can’t actually be leveraged to predict behaviors. As such, I decided to put them to the test.

Putting the Personalities to the Test

I wanted to find out how easy it might be to determine what personality a given advocate falls into. Could it be done, say, with just five short questions?

So that’s what I did: I conducted a survey with 731 participants and asked the respondents to imagine themselves partaking in a fictional advocacy community. Each of the questions had one answer that correlated with a given advocacy personality.

I was then able to assign four scores of 0-5 to every participant – one for each personality type.

I then plotted the responses for all the participants on the graphic shown below; the sizes of the circles indicate how many users had a given set of scores, and the colors do not mean anything.

As you can see, the majority of the respondents fell within the Educator and Validator quarters of the plot, with a great deal falling right along the line between the two personalities.

So, we are able to fairly accurately determine someone’s personality type (or types) based on these five simple questions – if the scoring system had not worked, we would expect all the respondents to be in the center of the plot or to see little variation.

Can Personalities Predict Behavior?

Knowing a given advocate’s personality is great, but being able to use that information to predict behavior would be even better. What if I could use a given advocate’s personality type to accurately predict what form of recognition they would value most? That would be pretty great right?

So, that’s exactly what I tested, I posed the following question to all of the survey respondents:

If a brand were to express their gratitude for your participation in their advocacy community, which of the following would you appreciate most?

a. A heartfelt, personal thank you letter

b. A small cash or gift incentive

c. More helpful content for your career or personal goals

d. Exclusive access to new products

The answers weren’t intended to correlate with a given personality type as the previous questions had, rather, I simply wanted to see if any trends presented themselves.

When we look at all respondents, we see that the majority of respondents would value a small cash or gift or incentive as their reward. This isn’t too surprising; cash tends to be a big motivator for most people.

But, where it gets really interesting is when we parse out the desired gifts by personality type.

Now would you look at that? Actionable personalization can not only be performed with a small amount of data and at scale, but it can enable you to serve your customers better.

With just five short questions, we can predict with a high degree of accuracy what kind of gift a given advocate would most value receiving.

And the greatest part? This is just one example of how this information can be leveraged. Imagine all the ways this additional information could be used to better and more efficiently serve advocates.

But how does this all fit into the broader vision? How does this help answer the question “What Will Customer Advocacy Look Like in 3 Years?”

In three years, customer advocacy will be an active community of customers who are driven by their own intrinsic motivations to take actions that help themselves grow better while simultaneously helping the business they advocate for grow better.

1. Lean away from monetary rewards as the primary motivator.

While monetary rewards can be a motivator to get people in the door, they should not be the point of being an advocate. What this does is create compliant behavior when your community should really be based upon self-directed behavior – when this occurs an advocacy community truly starts to drive value.

In addition, most advocacy communities, on average, have very low redemption rates (9-24%), and less success is typically seen in point-based advocacy communities.

For example, if you want customers to participate in a customer advocacy program you can use motivators such as access to new products or content.

2. Lean into a lightweight, hyper-personalized experience for your advocates.

A shift in focus away from monetary rewards as the primary motivator is likely to cause a great deal of advocates, who may only be there to get points and redeem gifts, to leave. However, losing these ‘advocates’ is absolutely okay: if these customers are only participating because they want gift cards, do you really want them in your community?

But, if you’re going to move away from gift cards and swag, how are you going to keep advocates engaged? Try heavily embracing personalization to create unique experiences for each and every advocate.

I see a future where new advocates take a short welcome survey when they join the program, and their responses on that survey guide how they progress through the program.

With a smaller community and more data on the advocates within that community, a greater opportunity to run more small scale experiments with your advocates presents itself. You can then discover the best ways to engage your participants based on their different personalities.

3. Bring process and structure to your advocacy program.

Most advocacy programs are run ad hoc with minimal resources. They also often end up disappointing the marketing/salespeople they’re designed to assist as well as the advocates within the program. Studies have shown that it actually costs a company more to generate social proof, like references in an ad hoc fashion, rather than having a single team run them centrally.

Advocacy programs are often under-resourced because they’re tough to track and difficult to evaluate. This tends to be the case because advocacy efforts happen around the entire flywheel and because much of advocacy takes place by word of mouth in ways that aren’t easily measured (emails, conversations, meetings, slacks, phone calls, etc).

So, how can you take action to make sure that your advocacy program is truly driving success? The key is establishing clear goals – which come in two forms:

1. Business Goals: Of course, it’s important to set goals for what your organization is hoping to get out of your advocacy program: referrals, references, reviews, whatever it is.
2. Advocacy Goals: The success your advocates see within the program. Is being a member of your community driving significant value to your advocates?

Now here is the point of note: the advocacy goals should be your primary goals. Every report on B2B advocacy communities out there will tell you the same thing: the minute you start prioritizing your company goals over your advocates’ goals you have already lost – you’ve ruined your chances at hitting both.

This doesn’t mean that you should just throw all your company goals for advocacy out the window, but it’s important to track them in the context of how your customers are finding success in the program. If your advocates start to find value, trust that the references and referrals will come.

4. Centralize and standardize your advocacy efforts.

Often times advocacy activities and behaviors are not considered such. I think that this can actually do both advocates and businesses a huge disservice.

For example, you may have people referring leads through an additional affiliate or referral program that falls under acquisition, rather than directly into your advocacy efforts. Or maybe you have an excess of promoters on social media, but their voices also aren’t being included in the advocacy program.

Whatever it is, acts of advocacy are often spread between multiple teams within the same business, and having these separate often leads to duplicative work and prevents advocates from reaching their full potential.

This is truly a situation of 1 + 1 = 3, by bringing these efforts together they become more than they can be on their own. This can prevent over-communication with your advocates, better measure their advocacy actions, and better demonstrate the effectiveness of the program.

5. Layer on technology to better scale.

The important note here is that you want to avoid molding your advocacy efforts to match whatever software is being used. Instead, finding a platform that allows for your advocacy program to scale your current efforts with flexibility.

Getting forced into performing advocacy as prescribed by another organization, rather than how you prefer, should be avoided.

What Customer Advocacy Is Not

Understanding what advocacy is can be helpful, but I think it’s equally as important to highlight what advocacy is not:

1. A group of people engaging in transactional behavior.

Rather than mindless drones looking for Amazon gift cards, you want people that are engaged because they want to grow themselves, their company, or their career.

2. A community of engagements that primarily benefit your business.

It’s important to actively put value out if you expect to receive value in return.

3. “Nice to have.”

If treated well, advocates represent tremendous value for your brand and they deserve to be treated as such — advocates should be viewed as no less than a corporate asset

4. Restricted by software.

Avoid rushing into the purchase of a software that forces you to perform advocacy as the software sees it

Customer advocacy is going to play an increasingly important role in how B2B companies do business in the future.

So, if I can leave you with one last thought when it comes to advocacy, it’s that advocacy programs should be incredible customer-focused. The truth is that it’s the easiest thing to dismiss but also the most important. So, in conclusion, don’t forget the customer.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

With all the focus on customer acquisition these days, it’s easy to overlook one of the biggest potential sources of new revenue out there: your existing customer base.

The existing customers you’ve retained may be the key to your company’s massive growth, and customer surveys are one of the best tools for driving these future wins.

Data gathered by Invesp’s Khalid Saleh suggests that it’s five times more expensive to attract a new customer than to sell again to an existing one. But despite this, he claims, “44% of companies have a greater focus on customer acquisition vs. 18% that focus on retention.”

But if you’ve never sent a survey before, how do you know what to send? What types of surveys will be most effective, and when should they be sent?

In this post we’ll cover:

• What is a customer survey?
• Goals of Using a Customer Survey
• Customer Survey Questions
• 3 Customer Survey Examples to Drive Growth and Measure Loyalty
• Customer Survey Templates
• How to Design Your Customer Surveys

The Goals of Using a Customer Survey

The development of digital survey technology has made it easier than ever before to poll your customers. But with this great power comes great responsibility.

Send too few surveys, and you’ll miss valuable feedback. Send too often, and you risk alienating the customers you’re counting on for future growth. Developing a survey strategy that’s informative, but not intrusive, requires an understanding of what you’re hoping to achieve with your customer surveys.

A few possible survey types to consider include:

• Post-purchase surveys to measure satisfaction with the product or service purchased, the delivery, or the onboarding experience.
• Net Promoter Score® (NPS) surveys to determine customers’ likelihood of recommending your brand to others.
• Product or service development surveys intended to capture customers’ desires for future launches (for example, asking for advance feedback on a possible line extension).

Customer Survey Questions

Asking the right questions in a customer survey is key to getting the information you need to make informed decisions. Here are some typical customer survey questions and what information their answers reveal.

1. On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [PRODUCT/SERVICE] to your friends and colleagues?

This is an NPS survey question that measures customer loyalty. If the customer responds with a 9 or a 10, they’re loyal customers who may be willing to serve as your advocate.

But if their score is between 0 and 8, you need to do some more work to make them happier. Reach out to them proactively to ask for feedback.

2. How satisfied were you with your experience?

This is a customer satisfaction survey question that measures how happy, or unhappy, a customer is with your product or service, or a one-off customer service experience.

3. How easy was it to solve your problem with [PRODUCT/SERVICE]?

This is a customer effort score (CES) survey question that measures how easy or difficult it was for a customer to use your product or service.

4. How would you rate your experience with [PRODUCT/SERVICE]?

This is a semantic differential survey question used to measure customer sentiment about your product or service.

Each of these survey questions can be used in different ways to gather important customer feedback that will help you improve and fine-tune your customer experience.

3 Customer Survey Examples to Drive Growth and Measure Loyalty

1. Post-Purchase Surveys

Since a post-purchase survey is asking for feedback on a transaction that’s already occurred, it doesn’t necessarily drive growth by stimulating additional purchases (though offering a coupon or discount code for survey completion can have this effect).

Instead, post-purchase surveys allow you to do several things:

• Improve brand sentiment by positioning your company as one that cares about customers’ outcomes.
• Identify problems with the ordering process – or your products and services themselves – that can be corrected before they lead to bad reviews.
• Gather additional information about your customers in order to send more targeted promotions in the future.
• Deepen the relationship you have with new customers.

The specific questions you’ll ask on your post-purchase survey will depend on which of these goals you’re trying to achieve.

To get started, check out this sample from SurveyMonkey, or Square’s post-transaction feedback survey, shared by Joshua Porter on his Bokardo blog:

If you’re using a marketing automation tool, create a workflow or campaign so that this message is sent out automatically upon purchase. But you may want to incorporate a delay so that this survey request isn’t sent out immediately, but instead is delayed for a few days so that customers have a chance to get up and running with your product.

If it makes sense to do so, you can also include a request to take your post-purchase feedback survey in a more traditional welcome email.

Test different message contents and sequences to find the combination that spurs the most survey completions among your new customers.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys

Adding a post-purchase survey to your checkout flow is a good way to capture valuable business-building feedback from new buyers. But what about customers that are already in your system? What if you want to turn them into advocates for your company?

Again, customer surveys can be your new best friend.

In this specific case, you’ll want to use what’s known as a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. The goal of an NPS survey is to determine which of your past customers like your brand enough to refer you to others.

This is done by asking them to rate the likelihood that they’d advocate for your company on a scale of 0 to 10. According to the official Net Promoter Score definition, those who score your company as a “9” or “10” are “promoters.”

Those who give you a “7” or an “8” can be considered “passive customers,” while those who rate you below a “6” may actively be detractors.

Most email marketing providers offer templates for these types of surveys (whether they call them NPS surveys or not).

So what do you do with this information?

Certainly, if you receive a “detractor” score from a customer, you’ll want to investigate further to determine what went wrong. Again, this can lead to the kind of information needed to grow sales by improving the satisfaction and experience of future customers.

“Passive” respondents can be followed up with in much the same way. Rather than ask what went wrong, ask what could have made their experience even better to capture process- or product-improvement information.

Finally, identifying the “promoters” among your customer ranks is the first step in implementing a formal referral-marketing program.

According to Extole, referral marketing is “a method of spontaneously promoting a business’s products and services to new customers by word of mouth. This can happen through a variety of channels such as email, mobile, and social media.”

Referral marketing programs can be formal or informal. An informal referral marketing program might involve asking customers who have identified themselves as “promoters” to suggest your brand to family members or friends.

A more formal program might involve the creation of a one-way or two-way incentive program through which customers earn cash or credit towards future purchases for successfully recruiting new customers.

There are plenty of reasons to implement a referral marketing program, according to Nielsen data gathered by AnnexCloud:

• 92% of consumers trust referrals from people they know
• People are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend
• 77% of consumers are more likely to buy a new product when learning about it from friends or family

Effective referral marketing programs come in all shapes and sizes, but they all allow you to drive more sales from your existing customers.

Set yours up manually or using a marketing automation campaign so that customers who respond positively to your NPS survey are sent invitations to join your program, as well as instructions on how to participate.

I’ve personally found that the best time to send the NPS survey is after the customer has reached the “aha moment” where the value of your brand becomes clear to them.

For ecommerce companies, this can occur after the first purchase (assuming you’ve created a positive delivery experience).

For SaaS companies, or those with greater onboarding and activation requirements, this may be later in the game, after new customers have carried out their first major project or campaign using your tool.

For more on finding your own “aha moment,” check out the following resources:

• The Growth Marketer’s Guide to an Aha Moment
• This Is How You Find Your App’s Aha Moment
• How to Figure Out Your Aha! Moment

3. Product or Service Development Surveys

You can create surveys with HubSpot’s Customer Feedback Software

The potential of customer surveys to drive future sales is really limitless. But because covering all of them would take an entire book, one last survey type I want to cover is the product or service development survey.

Let’s say you’re thinking about adding a new product or service to your company’s existing offering. Who better to advise you on whether your new addition will be a home run or a strikeout than your current customers?

Surveying them in advance on what they’d like to see and how they’d respond to future offerings minimizes your risk of serving up duds.

In an article on For Entrepreneurs, Brent Chudoba, VP at SurveyMonkey and General Manager of the SurveyMonkey Audience business, shared the example of Modify Watches — a young start-up that was having trouble building an audience.

To determine how to allocate its limited resources, Chudoba helped Modify develop a survey intended to measure how future customers would respond to different price points or delivery models. For instance, one of the questions asked was whether or not respondents would be likely to purchase through a subscription model (roughly 60% of participants were at least slightly likely to do so).

Because this 60% was high compared to the 70% that indicated they’d be likely to purchase a Modify watch at all, the company could confidently make the decision to pursue subscriptions as a pricing model.

According to Chudoba, “If you want to talk to your own customers, and understand product satisfaction, feature requests or anything else, a survey can be a great tool. You most likely have email addresses for your customers, or can provide a feedback link on your site, or even embed a survey in-product.”

You can create surveys using HubSpot’s Customer Feedback Software and analyze the results.

Customer Survey Templates

Here are a few basic templates for common customer surveys you might implement in your own customer surveys:

1. NPS Survey

2. Customer Satisfaction Survey

3. Customer Effort Score

4. Semantic Differential

How to Design Your Customer Surveys

If putting all of these different surveys into place sounds overwhelming, don’t worry — you don’t have to do it all at once.

Instead, start with the survey type that makes the most sense, given the particulars of your business:

• If you’re a new company, start with post-purchase surveys so that you identify any problems with your processes early on.
• If you’ve built a customer base, but they’ve grown dormant, pair an NPS survey with a new referral marketing program to jumpstart sales.
• If you’re approaching a new product or service launch, focus first on a survey that’ll give you the information needed to maximize its financial impact.

Expand as you go, keeping your customers’ needs at the forefront.

With a little effort, these surveys will make it possible to drive massive growth based on the engagement of your existing customers alone.

Are you using customer surveys to drive growth? If so, share any other tips you’d add to this guide with me on Twitter.

Want more? Learn how to create a survey on Facebook, using Google Forms, or with Excel.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

You wouldn’t believe how many books I read last year — and it’s not because I became great at finding them myself. I’ve got the Kindle store to (blissfully) blame.

After I read a book that I really liked, I wanted to take a look at what else Amazon would suggest. Not only did I get recommendations for other highly-scored books from the same author, but also for others in the niche.

The thing about Amazon is that it’s as amazing at recommending good reads as it is at suggesting products in its ecommerce store. Nowadays, I don’t look for books anywhere else; I don’t need or want to, as the customer experience is just unbeatable.

I’m just one consumer, of course, but I’m no different in this regard from other online buyers. Customers expect brands to exceed their expectations — and that’s something where intelligent customer experience (ICX) can help.

Table of Contents

• What is intelligent customer experience?
• ICX vs. CX
• The Importance of Intelligent CX in 2024
• Key Components of an ICX Strategy
• How to Implement an Intelligent Customer Experience
• ICX as the Only Way to Meet Customer Expectations

What is intelligent customer experience?

Intelligent customer experience (ICX) is about making customer interactions more personal by using smart technology such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analysis.

To better illustrate it, let’s imagine you run an online store. You could use AI to analyze your customer data, including past purchases and browsing data, and predict what products they might like. The next time they visit your store, they can see personalized product recommendations. If they have a question, an AI chatbot could provide answers instantly.

ICX vs. CX

Customer experience is a broad term – it refers to the overall ‘feel’ and impression a client has from all their interactions with your brand.

You can think of it as an informal scoring system, where points are either awarded or deducted every time your and your clients’ paths intersect. This covers situations like how they’ve engaged with your website, how they’ve used your product and services, and what their conversations with your support team were like.

So, what exactly do you score points for? Here are the factors:

• Ease of use, i.e., how simple and intuitive using your product or services is
• Consistent experience across all of your channels and touchpoints
• Personalization, i.e., adjusting your communication based on customer preferences and your mutual history
• Quick and high-quality support, if they ever need help or have a question for your support team.

Where and how does intelligent customer experience (ICX) fall into this?

The “intelligent” part means you’re using technologies to dynamically analyze and improve your CX strategy for each client individually. So, ICX is a means (i.e., use of technology) of offering great customer experiences — it’s not a strategy that contradicts traditional CX.

ICX uses artificial intelligence to help you analyze customer data, predict their behavior, and provide personalized recommendations. It lets you automate routine interactions through automated emails or chatbots, allowing your team to redirect their attention to more demanding tasks.

The Importance of Intelligent CX in 2024

Faster Improvement Opportunities

In the olden days, if you wanted to spot recurring customer behavior or sentiment, you’d have to spend hours watching website recordings or perusing your conversations. That’s what I did whenever I wanted to understand how customers interacted with an interface or a website I’ve written copy for.

Nowadays, ICX can give you a helping hand. You can spot issues before they grow into actual customer problems.

Courtney Zalesak, CEO at Home Service Amplifier, has seen first-hand how AI can analyze each user interaction to improve CX. She says that her company has used it to increase the customer lifetime value by over 50% for her agency’s clients in the last two years.

“For example, one HVAC company struggled with low retention and poor reviews. We implemented a ‘smart survey’ using predictive analytics to identify dissatisfied customers early,” Zalesak told me. “The company then reached out proactively, resolving issues before they escalated.”

From this action alone, the business saw a 28% decrease in cancellations and a 15-point increase in online ratings.

Offers Good Experiences at Scale

Intelligent CX lets you ‘supercharge’ your teams, without sacrificing that humane, brand feel that helps build relationships with clients.

“Traditionally, to do that, brands would have to scale by hiring more agents. Then they tried to use ineffective and frustrating chatbots,” says Larry Barker, Senior Customer Experience & Operations Manager at Teamshares.

Now that AI has become so prolific, companies can finally start seeing tangible results from automating parts of the customer’s experience. Barker says that companies that will use ICX methods while still leaning on human agents for complex issues, moments of frustration, and to create human connection are those who’ll come out ahead.

Josh Cremer, founder at Redfox Visual, agrees that the “scaling” factor is equally strong for both reactive and proactive measures.

“Customers expect highly personalized interactions and to feel understood and cared for. At Redfox Visual, we use marketing automation and predictive analytics to craft custom messages for each stage of the customer journey,” Cremer says.

He also mentions a potential blocker that unjustly keeps some businesses from using intelligent CX: a high perceived complexity and cost.

“Tools and skills to implement it are more accessible than ever, and the ROI is enormous — not just in revenue and loyalty, but also in operational efficiency,” he underlines. “The companies that recognize this earliest will have a key competitive advantage.”

Turns Data into Meaningful Interactions

Intelligent CX is the future of business because it allows you to turn data into personal, meaningful interactions. Scott Cohen, CEO at InboxArmy, says his team has harnessed AI to anticipate customer needs and tailor their communications in real time.

Such an approach allowed the brand to transform bland, generic emails into messages that feel personal and relevant, almost like a friend reaching out. When customers feel truly understood and valued, their loyalty grows, and it’s evident from the analysis InboxArmy constantly performs.

“I’ve watched our engagement rates soar because of this shift from reactive to proactive customer service. Intelligent CX is a revolution, not just an improvement. Our ability to engage with our audience is being enhanced by this combination of true empathy and smart data use, which is transforming ordinary interactions into unique ones,” adds Cohen.

Focuses on What Matters Most

AI allows companies to stay human. How so? By handling routine, time-consuming tasks and letting customer success teams focus on meaningful client interactions. David Sides, director of operations at FHV Legal, says, “We can focus on providing emotional support and truly listening to our clients’ stories.”

By using Intelligent CX, FHV can work more efficiently, potentially resolving cases faster and securing better compensation for those they represent.

“It‘s not just about technology — it’s about using these tools to provide more caring, responsive legal services. This approach helps us fight more effectively for our clients through the court system,” says Sides.

Key Components of an ICX Strategy

Data-Driven Insights

If I were to pick one element that is the backbone of every IXC strategy, it would be data. By collecting and analyzing information, businesses can understand customer preferences and behaviors.

Based on these insights, they can check what causes clients to churn, how they interact with the brand, what they like and dislike about the product or service, etc. Thanks to these findings, companies can better respond to customer needs and turn their experiences into more pleasant ones.

It’s worth mentioning that as businesses collect an increasing volume of data, they should make sure it stays safe.

Personalization

Personalization is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s a matter of survival.

McKinsey says that 71% of consumers want businesses to offer personalized experiences, and as many as 76% are upset if these expectations aren’t met. Only by diving into data can businesses provide a level of personalization that goes beyond including someone’s name in an email. By collecting information, companies can:

• Offer product recommendations.
• Organize targeted promotional campaigns.
• Adjust their communication channels.
• Provide customized content, including websites, newsletters, etc.

Personalization gives brands an opportunity to build long-lasting relationships with customers. It’s a way of showing their appreciation. According to HubSpot’s research, 66% of customer support specialists say that AI and automation tools help them offer more personalized customer experience.

Omnichannel Experiences

You need to let your customers interact with the brand however they want — some will prefer an email, or a chatbot, while others a good old phone. I personally hate phone calls and will always pick a live chat. But these days an omnichannel experience goes beyond offering multiple communication channels; it’s also about integration.

If a customer starts chatting with a support agent on social media, but then decides to switch to a phone, they should be able to do so without explaining their issues all over again. A true omnichannel experience allows for channel switching without losing context.

Seamless Integration

Intelligent CX is impossible if you can’t connect and exchange information across your tools.

Take a situation like a technical glitch in your customer checkout flow. If a client reaches out to report the problem via chat, your chatbot can provide a quick reply that you’ll look into the issue and get back to them ASAP. It could also:

• Decide, depending on its settings, whether to redirect the issue to a human agent
• Automatically create a ticket and assign it to the relevant team
• Respond to them in whichever channel they’re currently available
• Offer a discount code once the issue has been fixed for any inconvenience.

All this is possible with customer service software like Service Hub. And while the above was just a hypothetical scenario, the numbers you can get by using the right tools for ICX aren’t.

Service Hub lets your company reach up to 13x faster resolution times and, as a result, an 84% CSAT increase as compared to using siloed customer management tools.

How to Implement an Intelligent Customer Experience

Use data to know your customers.

Start off by gathering all the information you have about your customers. Take note of the features like how they use your website and what your product helps them achieve.

Your end goal here is to break your customer base into very specific segments. To do this, you’ll need to look into aspects like demographics (or firmographics if you’re in B2B), purchasing history, on-site behavior, customer survey scores, past conversations, etc.

For example, say you notice that a customer frequently visits a specific product category, like Japanese photography albums.

If your data tells you that they’ve responded to discount codes well in the past, you could email them a special code for items in the category. Or, if they aren’t a fan of promotions but like to shop for new releases, you could customize your newsletter to bring those forward in your emails.

As you can see from this example, you can be flexible with your tactics and customer behavior predictions.

Set up smart tools.

I’ve mentioned earlier that ICX is all about data, and you cannot collect it without the right tools (duh!). On top of deploying a chatbot on your website to answer customer/prospect’s queries, here are other tools you can consider:

• Website analytics: Google Analytics, Livesession, Mixpanel, etc.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): HubSpot, Pipedrive
• Feedback tools: survey platforms like Typeform, review sites like G2Crowd, and feedback forms like Google forms
• Social Media Analytics: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn – whichever you use
• Email Marketing Platforms: HubSpot, Mailchimp, SendGrid.

There are plenty of options to choose from. These are only a few examples. The most important thing is to pick software from each category to make sure you’ve got all the data you need.

Don’t know where to start? Give HubSpot’s Free customer experience tools a try.

Personalize the experience.

Part of effective ICX is personalization. And given how much data you can collect, personalizing the customer experience shouldn’t be that hard. You just have to segment your customers correctly.

Let’s imagine you run a SaaS company. If you collect data like usage patterns, subscription data, customer feedback, and engagement data, you could split your customers into the following segments:

• New users
• Power users
• Churn risk
• Engaged, but low usage.

Based on these segments, you could adjust your tactics to make their experience more personalized. For example, with new users, you could create a detailed onboarding email sequence. For power users, you can offer a loyalty program. For those at risk of churning, you can offer limited discounts. You get the point.

Monitor and improve.

You need to revisit and, if necessary, update your ICX tactics regularly. Look at how the user flows you’ve built are performing. For example, if you notice that certain topics that are now handled fully by AI don’t have a high success rate, then consider how you could improve it.

Sometimes, it’ll come down solely to giving your AI better data. Other times, you’ll see that the problem relates to something broader, like a problem with the website’s usability.

Remember that you’re building AI-powered solutions to serve your customers better. And no one will understand clients’ needs more accurately than humans, which is why your staff should always be kept in the loop.

ICX as the Only Way to Meet Customer Expectations

I know that everyone keeps talking about cut-throat competition, limited marketing budgets, and the constant pressure to innovate fast.

All of this makes acquiring new customers harder than ever before. But that’s why we all should put even more effort into making sure that our current clients are happy. And one of the ways to do so is by investing in intelligent customer experience solutions.

This not only allows you to put your data to good use by personalizing the client experience. It also lets your human CS agents focus on what matters the most: building meaningful relationships with clients.

I remember when project management tools first came out. I signed up for a free trial and was excited about the prospect of streamlining my team’s workflow. However, my enthusiasm quickly waned as I found myself lost in a maze of confusing menus. It felt like I needed years of experience just to create a simple task list. After several frustrating attempts, I canceled my subscription.

This experience highlights a critical flaw in the application’s onboarding process: It was too focused on showcasing features and not enough on guiding users toward achieving their goals. This is where product-led onboarding (also known as PLO) comes into play.

PLO flips the script on traditional onboarding by putting the user at the center of the experience. Instead of overwhelming users with information, PLO empowers them to discover the value of your product through self-guided exploration and contextual guidance. It’s about creating those “aha!” moments that turn curious users into loyal customers.

In this article, I’ll dive into the world of product-led onboarding. I’ll explore the different types, how they’re used, and some real-world examples. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to create a PLO strategy that not only delights your users but also fuels your business growth.

Table of Contents

• What is product-led onboarding?
• Product-Led Onboarding vs. Product-Led Growth
• 8 Types of Product-Led Onboarding
• How to Implement Product-Led Onboarding
• Product-Led Onboarding Examples
• Using Your Product to Onboard Your Customer

A recent study by Userpilot found that businesses using product-led onboarding experienced a 30% increase in activation rates compared to those relying on traditional methods. The focus on delivering immediate value through the product itself became a key differentiator in the marketplace.

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Product-Led Onboarding vs. Product-Led Growth

While both product-led onboarding (PLO) and product-led growth (PLG) are user-centric approaches, they serve as distinct purposes within the customer journey.

PLO is a tactical method focused specifically on the initial user experience, aiming to accelerate time-to-value and drive early adoption. It includes strategies like interactive walkthroughs, contextual tooltips, and personalized checklists, all designed to familiarize users with the product’s core features and benefits quickly.

In my own experience working at a subscription clothing startup, I’ve seen firsthand the transformative power of well-executed product-led onboarding.

At first, we struggled with high churn. However, by implementing a series of personalized questions and customized style discovery, we were able to significantly reduce the time it took for users to experience their first “aha” moment. This resulted in a 25% increase in activations and a 30% decrease in churn.

PLG, on the other hand, is a broader strategic approach that leverages the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion. It involves a shift in mindset across the entire organization, aligning marketing, sales, and customer success efforts around the product experience.

According to the OpenView Partner’s 2023 Product Benchmarks Report, companies with a PLG model typically see a 2.8x faster growth rate compared to their peers.

This underscores the transformative potential of PLG for businesses seeking to accelerate growth and create a sustainable competitive advantage.

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8 Types of Product-Led Onboarding

There are several different types of product-led onboarding, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The best type of onboarding for your product will depend on your target audience, product complexity, and business goals. I’ll discuss each option below.

For HubSpot users, product-led onboarding is a strategic opportunity to deepen customer relationships and drive growth. By leveraging HubSpot’s robust toolkits, you can create tailored onboarding experiences that guide users toward success, turning them into loyal advocates who champion your product.

And if you want to learn more about implementing a CX strategy after the sale, check out our guide The Post-Sale Playbook.

1. In-App Guidance

This method uses interactive elements like tooltips, walkthroughs, and hotspots to guide users directly within the product’s interface, providing contextual support and highlighting key features. HubSpot does this as soon as you sign up, making getting started a breeze.

I’ve also experienced the benefits of this firsthand. As a growing professional with multiple income sources and investments, I found that tax preparation software like TurboTax was a great example of in-app guidance for complex situations.

Their software guided me through reporting my full-time W-2, freelance 1099 income, investment dividends, and capital gains and losses. When I was unsure about deducting home office expenses, the app provided clear, step-by-step guidance in the form of questionnaires that guided me toward the correct outcome.

Throughout the process, pop-up explanations clarified tax jargon, while interactive tools helped me understand the impact of different financial decisions on my tax liability.

The personalized, educational approach not only simplified a potentially overwhelming task but also improved my understanding of the principles and processes behind it, leaving me feeling more empowered as a user.

2. Interactive Tutorials

These step-by-step guides actively engage users, allowing them to learn by completing tasks and interacting with the product in a simulated or real environment.

As someone who has worked in Silicon Valley, I’ve seen my fair share of onboarding experiences. Now, as a budding consultant, Hubspot’s interactive onboarding for their CRM really stood out when I set it up for my side gig.

I loved how it felt like having a knowledgeable buddy guiding me through the process. The tool asked me about my business goals and then tailored the setup accordingly.

It didn’t just dump features on me, which can be overwhelming. Instead, it walked me through creating my first contact, setting up a deal pipeline, and even crafting an email template — all things I actually needed.

This approach not only got me up and running faster but also showed me the real value of the CRM for my specific needs. By the end, I felt like I had a solid grasp on how to use Hubspot to manage my clients and pipeline.

It’s this kind of personalized, interactive onboarding experience that leaves users feeling confident in their ability to navigate and use a product successfully.

3. Personalized Checklists

These dynamic lists adapt to each user’s progress, outlining specific actions they need to take to get the most out of the product, creating a sense of accomplishment and direction.

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Asana offers a great example of personalized checklists. Over the years, I have found their project setup particularly helpful for personalized onboarding. When starting a new project, I’m prompted with suggestions for templates tailored to my specific needs.

The checklists within these templates guide me through setting up the tasks, assigning team members, and creating deadlines — making the whole process more structured and manageable.

What I appreciate most is how these personalized checklists simplify the getting started process. They are usually relevant to my project type, which makes onboarding quicker and more intuitive.

4. Contextual Help

This approach offers support resources like tooltips or help articles precisely when and where users need them most, minimizing disruptions and maximizing relevance.

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When I think of a role model, I turn to Intercom, especially for customer support. In my previous experiences building out support operations, I found that Intercom’s in-app messages and tooltips were tailored to the exact steps I was taking.

The messages offered real-time guidance that kept me moving forward without needing to search for help elsewhere. What I found most helpful was how seamlessly the support was embedded within the product, as if I was being coached through the process that was in a way specific to my needs.

This kind of contextual assistance made onboarding smoother and helped me quickly understand and implement the tools I needed for my support ecosystem.

5. Self-Service Resources

This comprehensive library of FAQs, tutorials, and video guides empowers users to find solutions independently, reducing their reliance on customer support reps. The Zendesk 2023 CX Trends Report points out that “69% of customers want to resolve as many issues as possible on their own,” emphasizing the need for these resources in your PLO strategy.

My favorite self-service resource by far is conversational chatbots, especially those powered by agent-trained natural language models. There’s something fascinating about the way they interpret and respond to queries in a fluid, almost human way.

Unlike static FAQs or traditional help articles, conversational chatbots allow me to interact with them on my own terms — whether it’s asking specific questions, troubleshooting an issue, or even exploring a product’s services and features.

What makes them so effective is their ability to provide personalized responses that feel relevant to my needs at the moment. Plus, the immediacy of their answers helps me stay productive without having to leave the task at hand.

These chatbots are trained to understand user intent, context, and nuances like tone, making interactions feel more natural and less mechanical. This capability makes them a powerful self-service resource that creates an increasingly personalized and fluid user experience.

6. Gamification

By incorporating elements like badges, points, and challenges, this technique transforms onboarding into a fun and rewarding experience, boosting user engagement and motivation.

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From my personal experience with Duolingo, their gamified approach to onboarding has been exceptionally engaging and effective. What stood out to me was how the app transforms language into a series of interactive challenges and games that make the process feel both fun and rewarding.

The use of levels, streaks, and immediate feedback creates a sense of accomplishment with every completed task, which keeps me motivated to continue learning. This gamified structure not only breaks down the language learning process into manageable, bite-sized pieces but also makes the overall experience more enjoyable and less daunting.

Duolingo uses gamification throughout its platform. I would love to see more companies take a page out of the app’s books, adding these experiences to client onboarding.

The dynamic nature of their gamified approach ensures that learning feels like an engaging game rather than a repetitive task. This thoughtful design makes them a standout example of how integrating gamification into onboarding can lead to a more immersive and effective learning experience.

7. Email Triggers

These triggers help guide users through the onboarding process, ensuring they receive timely and relevant information to enhance their experience and increase engagement.

I really appreciate email triggers for onboarding because they provide timely, personalized guidance that helps users navigate their initial experience with a product. What makes a great onboarding email series, in my view, is its ability to deliver contextually relevant information at the right moments.

Effective email triggers are tailored to user actions and engagement, offering helpful tips, reminders, and encouragement as users progress through their onboarding. This approach also helps motivate users to explore and use key features.

Something that makes an onboarding email series genuinely helpful is its clarity and relevance. When emails are crafted to address specific user needs, they provide actionable insights and support without overwhelming the recipient.

At Skybound Entertainment, we use these emails to drive awareness and engagement for our Insider Loyalty Program. Members get to learn about updates happening in the Skybound Universe while also engaging with activities that further drive their loyalty program adoption and ultimately their fandom.

I find that a well-designed email series ensures users feel guided and supported throughout their journey, ultimately leading to a smoother onboarding and user experience.

8. Community Driven

This is typically a platform or hub that enables users to connect, ask questions, share tips, and learn from each other, fostering a sense of belonging and collective knowledge-sharing.

I find community-led onboarding appealing because it leverages the power of peer-to-peer support and shared experiences to enhance the onboarding process. Engaging with a community of fellow users and experts offers new users access to diverse perspectives, “real-world” advice, and practical solutions to common challenges.

This collaborative approach not only helps users learn more effectively but also fosters a sense of belonging and connections to the product. I’ve found that genuine support and shared knowledge within a community can make the onboarding experience feel more personalized and less isolated.

Now, this is not to say there aren’t areas where community-led onboarding fall short. Sometimes, it can lack structured guidance and immediate responses, which can be challenging for users who need direct or more timely assistance.

To address these gaps, it’s beneficial to pair community-led onboarding with other onboarding methods, such as tutorials or email triggers. Combining these approaches ensures that users receive both the structured, step-by-step guidance they need alongside the communal support that can offer deeper insights and encouragement.

Another popular method is to have human agents moderating the community to ensure timely support and accurate knowledge-sharing. These integrated approaches provide comprehensive onboarding experiences, recognizing the need for immediate support and community-driven learning.

How to Implement Product-Led Onboarding

Let‘s imagine a fictional company, “CloudCanvas,” a cloud-based graphic design platform aimed at small businesses and freelancers. As their onboarding consultant, my main goal is to improve their user experience and ignite growth. Here’s my playbook:

Step 1: Define your ideal user persona.

I start by diving into CloudCanvas’s customer data, and analyzing demographics, behavior patterns, and pain points. This helped me craft a detailed user persona, a fictional representation of their ideal customer. In this case, “Sarah,” a freelance graphic designer juggling multiple projects, seeking an intuitive and efficient design tool.

Step 2: Map the user journey.

Next, I put myself in Sarah’s shoes, signing up for a free trial and meticulously documenting every interaction. To map out Sarah’s user journey, I would take the following approach.

Sign-Up Experience

Start by going through the registration process as Sarah would. Document each step, noting any friction points or areas where additional guidance is needed. Pay attention to how easily Sarah can understand and complete the sign-up process.

Onboarding Guidance

After signing up, assess the onboarding experience. Examine how CloudCanvas introduces Sarah to its features — whether through in-app guidance, interactive tutorials, or welcome messages. Make sure to evaluate how effectively these methods highlight key functionalities and help Sarah get started quickly.

Initial Interactions

Use CloudCanvas as Sarah would, focusing on the first few tasks she might perform post-sign-up, such as creating a new project or using a design template. Then, track how intuitive and seamless these interactions are, and identify any areas where Sarah might get stuck or need extra help.

Engagement with Features

Explore the deeper features of CloudCanvas, such as advanced design tools or integrations. Document your experience with these features as if you were Sarah to ensure they are discoverable and add value.

Feedback and Support

Review the support options available, including help centers, chat support, and community forums. Make sure to assess how easily Sarah can access help and whether support is timely and relevant to her needs.

“Aha!” Moment

Identify the point at which you, as Sarah, fully appreciate the value of CloudCanvas, otherwise known as the “Aha!” moment. This could be upon the successful completion of a project, when using a unique feature, or when experiencing a moment of great efficiency. It’s important to ensure that this moment is clearly defined and facilitated by the onboarding process.

Post-Onboarding Experience

Finally, track your experience after the initial onboarding phase. Do you know how to engage with CloudCanvas and where to get help if you run into barriers?

Step 3: Identify friction points.

Throughout the user journey, I pinpointed several critical friction points that hindered a smooth onboarding experience. For instance, the sign-up process was cumbersome, creating unnecessary barriers for new users.

Additionally, the FAQ page appeared cluttered and disorganized, not to mention there were scattered resources about getting started instead of a centralized onboarding hub.

These observations highlighted key areas for improvement, where streamlining the sign-up process, organizing FAQs, and creating a unified onboarding center would significantly enhance the user experience and reduce onboarding friction.

Step 4: Craft the onboarding experience.

With Sarah’s needs and pain points in mind, I would design a comprehensive onboarding experience for CloudCanvas that integrates multiple elements to enhance usability and engagement.

Interactive Guidance

I would create a series of interactive tooltips and hotspots that guided Sarah through the core features. These elements not only introduced the functionality but also demonstrated their benefits in real-time, ensuring she understood how to them effectively. The walkthrough was designed to be non-intrusive, allowing Sarag to explore at her own pace while receiving valuable guidance.

Personalized Checklist

A dynamic, personalized checklist could be implemented on Sarah’s dashboard. The checklist would be tailored to her specific goals and project requirements, providing a clear, step-by-step plan for getting the most out of CloudCanvas.

Contextual Help

I could embed contextual help resources throughout the platform, including in-app articles and tutorials. These would be strategically placed to offer just-in-time support, addressing Sarah’s immediate questions or challenges as she navigated the platform. This approach ensures that help is available exactly when needed, reducing frustration and facilitating a smoother learning curve.

By integrating these elements, the onboarding experience could be improved to be engaging, supporting, and responsive to Sarah’s journey, ultimately leading to a more effective and satisfying introduction to CloudCanvas’ product.

Step 5: Test, iterate, and optimize.

After the new product-led onboarding is ready, it’s time to test. To do so, I would gather a group of freelance designers similar to Sarah, observe their interactions, and gather feedback. You’ll want to follow these steps.

Recruit participants.

Select a diverse group of freelance designers who match the profile of Sarah. Ensure participants are representative of your target user persona by screening for relevant experience levels, design needs, and familiarity with similar tools.

Design a testing framework.

Clearly outline what you want to test. This could be the usability of certain features, the effectiveness of onboarding tutorials, or the clarity of the user interface.

Then, create realistic scenarios or tasks that participants perform during the test. These should reflect common tasks Sarah would undertake, such as setting up a new project, using specific design tools, or integrating with other platforms.

Conduct usability testing.

Arrange individual or small-group sessions where participants can interact with CloudCanbas while being observed or recorded. Provide testing scenarios and ask them to think aloud as they navigate the platform.

Think of it as a focus group. After the testing sessions, conduct interviews to gather detailed feedback.

Analyze data.

Review the collected data to identify common issues or patterns in user behavior. Look for trends such as frequently encountered problems, areas where users hesitated, or features that were particularly well-received. Then, prioritize the issues based on their impact and focus on resolving the high-impact problems that affect usability or lead to user frustration.

Implement changes.

Based on your analysis, create actionable solutions that may involve redesigning onboarding elements, adjusting learning resources, and improving feature discoverability. Apply your changes, but make sure to test them. Continue to gather feedback and fine-tune.

Optimize and refine.

Repeat the test and optimization process as many times as needed. Each iteration should bring incremental improvements based on the latest feedback. Make sure to monitor key metrics like user engagement, completion rates, and satisfaction scores to evaluate the effectiveness of the new onboarding approach.

Communicate findings.

Lastly, document and share your findings and improvements with stakeholders. Provide your recommendations for ongoing adjustments and future enhancements based on the user feedback.

By following this approach, you can ensure that the onboarding process for CloudCanvas is continually refined and optimized to meet the needs of designers like Sarah, leading to a more effective and user-friendly experience.

Product-Led Onboarding Examples

While these examples offer valuable insights into effective onboarding strategies, the best way to truly understand product-led onboarding is to experience it firsthand.

I’ve highlighted below three companies that have mastered the art of product-led onboarding, each showcasing unique approaches that cater to their specific target audience and product offerings.

1. Notion

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I find Notion’s onboarding approach particularly impressive. Their interactive walkthrough guides users through the basics of creating pages, databases, and notes, all within a clean and intuitive interface.

I love how they emphasize the flexibility and customization of the platform, allowing users to tailor Notion to their unique workflows. The clear explanations and helpful tooltips make it easy to grasp the core concepts, and the ability to create sample pages further solidifies understanding.

2. Duolingo

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Duolingo, the language-learning app, takes a gamified approach to onboarding that I find both engaging and effective.

From the moment you sign up, you’re immersed in a colorful and interactive world where learning feels like play. The bite-sized lessons, immediate feedback, and rewards system make it easy to stay motivated and progress quickly.

I appreciate how Duolingo uses personalized pathways based on your learning style and goals, ensuring that the onboarding experience is tailored to your individual needs. This gamified approach not only makes onboarding fun but also accelerates the user’s journey to fluency.

3. Slack

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Slack, the workplace communication platform, excels at creating a seamless and intuitive onboarding experience.

When I first joined Slack, I was immediately greeted with a friendly welcome message and a series of interactive tutorials that walked me through the basics of channels, direct messages, and file sharing. I also received personalized recommendations for channels to join based on my interests and role.

Slack‘s onboarding approach is a great example of how to quickly get users up and running while providing them with the resources they need to explore the platform’s full potential.

Using Your Product to Onboard Your Customer

Great product-led onboarding is more of an art than a science, I’ve learned. It requires understanding your users, their needs, and their journeys within your product.

If you’re new to the process, I suggest starting with inspiration. The examples I’ve highlighted from Notion, Duolingo, and Slack are great case studies you can learn from. From there, really think about your user. Where are their biggest snags in the onboarding process? How can you innovate on those pain points with a video, game, or activity to make the process more fun?

Once you have your PLO ready, you’ll see users who are ready to use your product to tackle their challenges.

Would you make a major purchase without first checking the reviews? In today’s digital age, visiting review sites has become a natural part of our buying process. Reviews give us insight into the quality and reliability of a product based on the experiences of others, which allows us to make more informed buying decisions. We navigate to review sites in hopes of finding transparent feedback that will help lead us to a satisfying purchase.

Whether I’m shopping for a new office chair or booking a hotel, I always check the reviews prior to completing a purchase. My buying journey for software was no exception. When it came time for me to find an NPS survey vendor for my company, I naturally set out to research software options and read the reviews.

If you also check reviews prior to purchasing, you’re in good company. According to TrustPilot, 89% of global consumers check online reviews as part of their online buying journey. And in the software industry specifically, 86% of buyers say reviews are important or very important to evaluate software before making a purchase.

So, which review sites are the best, and are they really all that different from each other? I’ve compiled a list of some of the top SaaS review sites as of 2024 (and a few non-SaaS ones as well). We’ll look at what each review site offers and what makes them stand out. In this article we’ll cover:

Table of Contents

• What Is a Software Review Site?
• The Benefits of Software Review Sites
• What Are the Best Review Sites for SaaS Tools?
• My Favorite Consumer Review Sites
• Summing Up My Favorite Review Sites

Purchasing a new software tool is a major decision, and reviews play a critical role in the buying journey. In fact, the majority of software buyers will read up to 10 reviews before making a decision, and qualitative commentary is the most important factor in the review.

The Benefits of Software Review Sites

Gain First-Hand Insight

Using a software review site in your buying process allows you to gain first-hand insight into what it’s like to use a product or service. One of the biggest benefits of reviews is that you’re hearing directly from the users of the software, without any marketing or fluff in between.

Prioritize Your Criteria

Many software review sites organize their results into buying-centric categories such as the tools’ ease of use, overall pros and cons, user satisfaction, and available integrations. This allows you to easily search for the information you’re looking for about a product, and makes prioritizing your own criteria around the software much easier. Looking for a certain integration? Have a concern about whether a certain feature is robust enough for your needs? This is where you can find out.

Product Comparisons

Software review sites often offer great side-by-side product comparisons, which I recommend taking advantage of. Sometimes, all you need to see is a grid that clearly shows features and specs for two different products. Suddenly it’s a whole lot easier to make an informed decision.

What Are the Best Review Sites for SaaS Tools?

Here are my top five software review sites and why I think they’re worth visiting.

1. G2

Chances are you’ve heard about G2.com or even received a request to review a software tool on their site. Founded in 2012, their site says they’re “building trust by showcasing the authentic voice of millions of software buyers,” and they list that over 60% of Forbes Cloud 100 are G2 customers.

So what makes their review site so great?

• G2 provides extensive reviews from real users, giving you trustworthy insights based on genuine experiences. They use a rigorous review moderation process to ensure authentic results. They even show you the source of the review (if G2 invited the reviewer to participate, etc).
• G2 organizes their review information into four main categories: Product Information, Reviews, Pricing and Features. When you search for a company in G2 and land on that company’s review page, you can scroll and see things like recent reviews, security information, media and official downloads, interactive demos if available, and more.
• The overall review is rated on a 5 star scale, and they also offer a sliding scale rating for things like time to implement, return on investment, and ease of setup. They list out pros and cons (compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes). G2 also lets you search reviews for keywords and includes a section called “popular mention” that provides clickable topics you can sort the reviews by (for example: customer support).

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• Under the Features tab, G2 offers up top-rated alternative products so you can easily check out the competition, and towards the bottom of the page you’ll find a Comparisons tab that lets you click into a comparison view of the product and a competitor.
• If you search the site by Software and then Category, G2 will show you the best product to choose based on your business segment with its “at a glance” feature.

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What I think sets them apart:

• G2 reviews hold significant weight for companies. I’ve personally been part of initiatives meant to drive more customers to review our product on G2 because our competitor had more reviews than we did. B2B buyers use and trust G2.
• G2 lets you search reviews for a topic (which I love) and allows you to click on popular topics mentioned in reviews, which makes it easy to find reviews based on your individual buying criteria. I also like that they include review sentiment for things like ROI and implementation.

My takeaways:

• When I’m reviewing software, I naturally come here first. But after reviewing the multiple software review sites in this list, I’ll admit that some of the other review sites make it much easier to share the review data with other people. G2 should definitely consider adding a “download” or “share” option.
• Note that you’ll need to create a free account in order to see the full reviews.
• If you’re a business looking to use G2 to drive customer reviews and use them in your customer marketing, they have a host of other features to explore.

2. Gartner Peer Insights

Gartner is no stranger to data and research, so it doesn’t surprise me to find that they’ve built a software review site. Here’s what it’s about:

• Gartner Peer Insights is a free, public resource that provides access to reviews of enterprise software and services from over 175,000 peers. Gartner vets the reviews to provide objective insights to executives and their teams. Gartner analysts also use the reviews as a source of information for their research.

• Gartner review pages have sections for Product Overview, Reviews, Alternatives, and Likes and Dislikes. A few things I liked right away were the ability to download a PDF of a review page or email the page to someone. If you’re the one in charge of doing a competitive analysis and need to present your findings to others, those options could come in handy.
• Their review score is based on a 5-star rating scale and is broken up into 3 sections: Overall Review, Customer Experience, and Product Capabilities — and you get a separate review score for each section.
• Gartner offers the option to view and download the peer insights data (account creation required). The download expands on ratings by market feature and additional company size information. You’re also given an “overall experience” section with one positive and negative review, as well as likes and dislikes at a glance.

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• At the bottom of each review you’re given the top alternative products that vendors considered before making a purchase, so it’s easy to explore similar product offerings.

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What I think sets them apart:

• Gartner’s ability to easily share review information is unique, and the option to email a review page, download the review page, and download data and insights makes putting together a competitive analysis much easier.
• Gartner has created a digital community platform called Peer Community for verified members to engage in discussion and share knowledge. Their website states, “Peer Community produces entirely peer-driven, high-quality, and detailed insights in a trusted environment that is meant to eliminate the distractions of self or brand-promotion, sales, and recruiting.”

My takeaways:

• I like this review site and would recommend it to people in my network. I trust their review validation process and think they bring in a lot of great additional resources and insights into the reviews. Also, the downloadable information in the Peer Insights section had some additional helpful information.

3. GetApp

I wanted to include this one because it’s new to me and I was eager to check it out for myself. GetApp’s site says they’ve been recommending software for 14 years, and they host over 37,000 software profiles with over 2 million reviews. They offer objective, independent research and verified user reviews. Here’s what I found:

• Right from the homepage you’re able to easily search for a software category, which then populates results for you with four ways to sort: Highest Rated, Category Leaders, Ease of Use, and Value for Money.

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• When you click into the review page, it shows you overall info, pricing, features, reviews, alternatives, and integrations.
• In the info section, you can see the key benefits of the product as well as a section explaining the vendors’ typical customers, support options, platforms supported, and training options. I think this is a nice touch!

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• The reviews are rated on a 5-star scale overall, but you are also given a review score for individual components, such as Value for Money, Ease of Use, Features, and Customer Support.

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• GetApp offers suggested software alternatives, as well as an easy “compare” button to launch a comparison.

What I think sets them apart:

• I love that GetApp has an integration comparison tool — that’s something I haven’t seen yet with review sites. Seamless integrations are critical when purchasing a new piece of software.
• I also love that they include a review component on value for money. After all, isn’t that what we all want to know: Is this going to be worth the price tag?

My takeaways:

• I think Getapp brings some pretty unique and beneficial points to the software review process. Things like a vendor’s list of typical customers, their customer support options, and the list of available integrations are things I’d naturally be looking for in my search process, so I like that they did the work for me and provided it upfront.

4. Capterra

Capterra has been providing purchasing insights to buyers since 1999, and they currently host an impressive 2 million verified reviews from real users. Their mission is to “provide you with insights needed to find the best solution for your business based on your industry, size, budget and specific requirements.” They not only offer software reviews, but they have a section for service reviews as well. We’ll focus on the software review section here.

Let’s take a look at what they offer:

• You can search by software category or vendor name. When you click on a vendor to learn more, you can see at the top of the page their overall review score on a 5 star scale as well as how many reviews exist. You can click straight into the reviews to read them from the top of the page, which is a plus.
• Underneath the review score, you have a section with some overall information that includes a recent review, the starting price for the software, and more.

• Capterra provides an easy-to-read list of pros and cons so you can see at a glance what people’s experiences have been with the product. There is also a basic overview of the software tool, available integrations, similar software that you can click over to and compare, pricing information, features, and more. Capterra also gives you an “Alternatives” section where it shows you the overall review rating for a few alternative software offerings, as well as popular comparisons so you can take time to research popular competitive software vendors.
• When you get to the review section, it’s divided into three categories: Overall, Ease of Use, and Customer Service.

What I think sets them apart:

• Capterra offers you the chance to talk to an expert for a recommendation, which can be helpful if you’re feeling stuck in your decision. They also have a dedicated team of software researchers, content analysts, and review moderators to ensure an authentic and relevant review experience.

My takeaways:

• There seems to be less vendor influence on this site than some of the others, making it feel like a neutral research experience. Three separate times throughout the page scroll, there was an option to review or compare alternatives and competitors, which I think gives you a healthy opportunity to do more unbiased research.
• I like that they explicitly include a review score for customer service. Great customer service is key to having a great experience with a product or company.
• You can also filter the reviews by things like company size, reviewer’s role, etc., but I would have liked an option to look at reviews by specific keywords or search for topics within the reviews.

5. SourceForge

SourceForge not only provides B2B software comparison and reviews, but it’s also an open source software directory. Their site states, “Together, our business software comparison platform and open source software directory makes SourceForge the most complete software review, comparison, and discovery platform in the world.” They have a software directory of over 97,000 software titles to review.

For the sake of this review, we’ll focus on their Business Software Review offering.

• The SourceForge site is simple and separated into two main categories: open source software and business software. You can search for an offering or browse by category.

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• When you click into a software tool to review, you can see their overall rating on a 5-star scale as well as how many reviews have been submitted. You’re shown four main categories at the top of the page: About, Reviews, Pricing, and Features. Within the reviews, you can filter by things like rating, company size, reviewer’s role, length of use, or frequency of use.
• The Features section is the most extensive, showing checkmarks on available features under specific feature categories, such as Artificial Intelligence.
• The pricing section covers the basics and mentions if there’s a free version or a free trial available.

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What I think sets them apart:

• SourceForge’s ability to also obtain and review open-source software is a standout for the developer community.

My takeaways:

• SourceForge has a large title of software products and an impressive number of reviews, and they cover the basic “need to know” points of a piece of software. However, I find that it’s missing some of the components offered by other review sites that I’d find helpful in making a purchase decision. Things like competitor comparison tools, searchable topics within reviews, and recommended software by category were things that I found missing from this offering.
• I like that I did not need to create an account to access any of the review information.

These are just a few of the many software review sites that are out there. If you’re looking for even more options, check out Trust Radius, TrustPilot, and PeerSpot.

My Favorite Consumer Review Sites

Much like with purchasing software, when it comes to major consumer purchases (or even travel and vacation planning), reading reviews can give you a sense of what to expect with a product or experience.

Research shows that 8 out of 10 shoppers check product reviews on their smartphones while shopping in person at a store, and 91% of online shoppers read reviews regularly before making their purchase. Whether you’re shopping in-store or online, having access to product reviews can help you feel more confident in your buying decision.

Here are a few consumer review sites (in no particular order) to keep handy. These sites include both direct customer reviews and editorial reviews.

1. Trust Pilot

Trust Pilot lets you easily explore categories like banks, stores, companies, and services. The results are automatically sorted by the highest rated companies.

Best for: Finding a new company — like a new insurance agency, bank, electric company, etc. (They do not do reviews for products.)

2. Consumer Reports

Consumer Reports hosts reviews for consumer goods. You’re given free access to see the overview and ratings/reliability for a product, but if you want to see the “recommended” section (results of being tested, reviewed, and rated by Consumer Reports themselves) you’ll need to sign up for a paid membership. You can also access a free buying guide for products to help you with your decision.

Best for: Any physical item that you’re considering purchasing — from cars to toaster ovens, you can find reviews for it here.

3. The Verge

The Verge is a little different in that they don’t host public reviews, but they test new tech gear and give their professional reviews of the product. They also share deals on products they have personally tested and recommend. Plus, they include buying guides to make your research easy.

Best for: Technology purchases. The Verge specializes in reviews and buying advice for tech gear. I liked that they have not only buying guides but gift guides as well.

4. Good Housekeeping Product Reviews

Similar to The Verge, these reviews are crafted by the Good Housekeeping editors who independently research and test products. They may not host public reviews, but their write-ups reference public reviews of the products (Example: “This item has 4.5 star rating on Amazon”), so you don’t have to go out and do the digging yourself.

Best for: Household items like appliances, kitchenware, vacuums, and more.

5. Wirecutter

Wirecutter independently tests and reviews thousands of products a year, and they only post recommendations for products if their team actually thinks it’s the best. You can find their professional recommendations for a multitude of categories like home & garden, kitchen, baby gear, tech, and more.

Best for: Anything you want a more research-focused opinion on. I was impressed that each write-up comes with a “Why you should trust us” section and talks about the research process that each editor does (including talking to professionals in the field).

6. Honest Product Reviews

Honest Product Reviews researches other first-hand customer reviews from websites to create a list of the top five products in a specific category. They include their opinion on each as well as pros and cons, a link to check the price, and an explainer on how they did their research and selected their recommendations.

Best for: If you want to know the top 3-5 items in a specific category, or you have no idea where to begin with your search, this site can give you a starting point.

7. ChatGPT

What can’t ChatGPT do? I asked ChatGPT, “What is the best office chair out there?” and it not only gave me some buying criteria to consider, but it populated a nice list of seven options with their pros and cons. It also asked me if I wanted more information on any of the options listed or advice tailored to my specific needs.

8. Amazon

I know, I know… but I would be remiss not to include them. They carry almost everything and customer reviews are a key part of their platform. I like to filter the reviews by most recent (they automatically default to the highest review), and their newer AI overview in the review section is helpful in pulling out key decision factors and highlighting pros and cons.

There are obviously many more customer review sites, like Google and Yelp.

Pro tip: If you’re a business looking to gain more online reviews, check out these tips and tricks to ask for (and get) good customer reviews.

Summing Up My Favorite Review Sites

As someone who tends to do obsessive research before I make a major purchase, I’m thrilled to know there are so many different review site options out there — and that you can find review sites that cater to a specific category.

My favorite SaaS review site was a tie between G2 and GetApp. In my opinion, G2 and Getapp have created review criteria that not only cater to the initial purchase but also give insights into whether or not customers will see value in the tool and want to renew.

Being able to search for specific topics on G2 and seeing the “value for your money” rating on GetApp allows buyers to do comprehensive research on whether this could be a long-term tool in their tech stack.

In fact, I’d love to see one review site with both of those features combined!

Add in the ability to share the review information or download it and you’ve got the supreme SaaS review site offering.

As a content marketer, I’m constantly experimenting with new ways to incorporate AI into my workflow — to save me time and energy to focus on what I’m best at. I’ve found a ton of interesting use cases in my research, especially how you can use AI for customer feedback analysis.

In our State of AI Report, we spoke to customer service experts to learn more about how they are using AI in their workflow. It turns out 28% of customer service experts use AI to collect and analyze customer feedback, making it the second most popular customer service use case for AI/automation. (First place goes to routing requests to reps, at 29%.)

To learn more about the process, I speak to folks already walking the walk within their businesses. We discuss the tech’s benefits, limitations, and practical applications below.

Table of Contents

• Why use AI for customer feedback analysis?
• How to Use AI for Customer Feedback Analysis
• AI Feedback Analysis: Is It Worth It?

Why use AI for customer feedback analysis?

It’d be all too easy for me to praise AI without a second — let alone critical — thought. (Isn’t that the cool thing to do now?) And I genuinely believe customer support is an area where the pros of AI can outweigh the cons — if you apply the technology thoughtfully within your operations.

But here’s the thing: For you to make an informed decision about how, or even whether, to apply AI to customer feedback analysis, I need to go beyond the benefits. So, for each benefit, I share a corresponding limitation. The cherry on top? Benefit or limitation: I’ve paired each with a real-world example.

Benefit: Analyzing Vast Amounts of Data at Speed

There’s no two ways about it: AI can gather, segment, and analyze an amount of data that’s simply unfathomable to our human brain. What’s more, it can do so in mere minutes — seconds, even. It all depends on the complexity of the task.

If you struggle to wrangle all the customer feedback data you receive across multiple channels, AI could help you analyze it and reap the benefits.

Real-World Example

“I recently worked with a SaaS company that was struggling to keep up with the volume of customer feedback they were receiving,” says Richard Dalder, a business development representative at Tradervue.

To address this issue, Dalder’s team implemented an AI-powered feedback analysis tool. The tool automatically collected and categorized feedback from all channels, using natural language processing (NLP) to understand the context and sentiment behind each comment. “It then generated reports that highlighted key insights, such as common pain points, feature requests, and positive experiences,” Dalder recalls.

Limitation: Fewer Face-to-Face Interactions with Customers

Yes, AI can reduce the time and resources needed for customer feedback analysis. The downside? You can develop a bias toward gathering written customer feedback. We’re talking email, social media, and customer surveys — all of which are helpful.

But in the long term, you risk having fewer face-to-face interactions with customers. Face-to-face customer interactions are a chance to build a genuine rapport, ask follow-up questions, and gain honest insights you might not have gathered otherwise.

Real-World Example:

Justin Silverman, founder and CEO at Merchynt, says their company uses AI now for every step of the customer journey.

That has given the ability to provide their customers with “a near-instant personalized strategy plan based on information we gather during their sign-up process,” says Silverman.

The trade-off? According to Silverman, Merchynt has experienced fewer interactions with our customers. That means they are missing valuable opportunities to gather feedback on how we can continue to improve our offerings.

Benefit: Sentiment Analysis

In 2024, 69% of consumers “would feel positive about using a business if its written reviews describe positive experiences.” Most consumers expect to see responses to their reviews within two to three days (34%) or a week (22%). Further, 11% expect a response the same day — yikes!

Through sentiment analysis, AI can help you understand the emotional context and, thus, the level of urgency behind the customer review (aka feedback.) Here’s how.

Let’s say 100 customers have left you product reviews in the last week. AI can analyze and segment those reviews into categories based on language sentiment. It can also prioritize the reviews in order of urgency. That means you can respond to the most negative customer reviews first and de-escalate the situation before it worsens.

Pro tip: Scale customer support, drive retention, and improve response times with Service Hub.

For a bonus, the faster you respond with a customer service solution, the more likely customers are to withdraw the negative review. Even if they don’t, it shows other customers that you’re timely in your responses.

But wait, there’s more. AI sentiment analysis can also help you improve your products and services.

Real-World Example

“One key application is sentiment analysis, where we use AI to analyze the emotions expressed in customer reviews, emails, and social media mentions,” says Sam Speller, the founder and CEO of Kenko Tea.

“But rather than simply detecting whether something is positive or negative, we can deploy AI to detect more subtle emotions — anger, confusion, delight — in customer comments,” Speller notes.

For example, Speller thinks back to a few months ago. Through the AI sentiment analysis tool, Kenko Tea started seeing more reviews mentioning “inconvenient packaging” in relation to loose-leaf matcha.

Speller adds, “Nobody complained about the quality of the matcha, just the resealable pouch, which wasn’t easy to reseal. We were able to find and implement a new pouch design within a few months, after which the number of negative reviews about packaging dropped by half, and customer satisfaction scores increased by 10%.”

Limitation: Understanding of Nuance

Don’t get me wrong; AI is getting better at understanding the broader context and nuance behind human language. Hence, “sentiment analysis” being added as a benefit of using AI in customer feedback analysis.

That said, sometimes AI might struggle with more challenging issues like high frustration or cancellation intent. And if I’m honest, many folks brought this up as their primary limitation with AI feedback analysis.

I think this is where you need human intervention within the process. By all means, you can use AI to speed up data gathering, analysis, and segmentation. However, a human agent or team member should be involved to review and validate the insights.

Or as Sam Speller puts it: “AI isn’t yet capable of context and nuance. Our human reps are still vital for understanding the ‘why’ behind the sentiment and for adding the personal touch.”

Real-World Example

“AI’s limitations include potential misinterpretation of nuanced feedback and a lack of creativity and emotional understanding,” says Sally Bannerman, director of product marketing at ICUC.Social. According to Bannerman, human analysts complement AI in this area.

“Once our human analysts review these AI reports, they interpret the insights to double-check accuracy and identify more nuanced responses. This is key to connecting the dots between raw data and actionable advice because a robot simply won’t have the contextual knowledge needed to interpret certain trends properly,” Bannerman says.

Bannerman adds that this misinterpretation can lead to inaccurate sentiment analysis and skewed data.

“This is when it is important for human analysts to step in and review the data to provide context, as they’re more likely to piece this information together and make sure the feedback is correctly understood,” Bannerman says.

How to Use AI for Customer Feedback Analysis

Here are eight ways folks use AI to fuel their customer feedback analysis processes.

1. Analyze customer reviews at scale.

Matthew Franzyshen, business development manager at Ascendant, has been a driving force behind the implementation of AI solutions into business processes.

“One major benefit I’ve experienced is the ability to process vast amounts of feedback data in record time,” says Franzyshen. “We once analyzed over 10,000 customer reviews in just a few hours, a task that would have taken our team weeks to complete manually.”

Although AI excels at quantitative analysis, like Speller and Bannerman, Franzyshen also warns us about nuance: “I’ve found that it sometimes struggles with nuanced language or sarcasm, potentially misinterpreting the true sentiment of feedback. To mitigate this, we always have human oversight to validate AI insights.”

2. Determine client satisfaction.

Next up, VP of Analytics Services Ben Vaughan, shares two ways Brewster Consulting Group uses AI.

“Within Brewster Consulting’s clients, we leverage an AI Notetaker (fireflies.ai) to record our meetings and transcribe them. Fireflies.AI has a Chat-GPT-like tool embedded into their platform that allows you to query based on the transcript of a conversation.”

Vaughan adds: “So we’ll ask it things like ‘Based on the conversation, do you believe that Client X feels they are getting a good value for their money?’ or ‘Does Client X exhibit any indications that they may end our relationship in the near future?’ These insights provide a bias-free opinion on client satisfaction.”

3. Facilitate text mining.

“When we do analytics work for our clients, the primary area that we leverage AI in is text mining,” continues Vaughan. “When a customer has a large number of, say, survey responses, we leverage AI to create sentiment analysis and find common words/phrases in the text responses to better tailor the customer’s product.”

Vaughan notes that AI analyzes the responses much faster than a human could and can provide customers with tangible feedback they can use.

“A couple of example phrases we‘ve pulled out are: ‘This event needed more activities’ or ‘The product doesn’t taste like [its competitor],’” says Vaughan.

4. Develop a product roadmap.

Lucas Carval, growth specialist at Mention, shares their use case for AI in customer feedback analysis.

“We recently used AI at Mention to analyze all our reviews from G2 and Capterra, our NPS scores, and feedback from churned customers to better position ourselves in the social listening market,” says Carval.

Carval AI helped the team condense hundreds of reviews into a 10-minute report, which highlighted what customers liked about the software and areas for improvement. Carval categorized the customer feedback into three groups (positive/neutral/negative) using sentiment analysis.

Carval continues, “Based on this information, we’ve developed a product roadmap to address the main issues customers were encountering (mainly to improve the ease of use of our software). This analysis will guide our development for Q3 and Q4.”

5. Forecast trends and opportunities.

Founder and CEO of Kenko Tea Sam Speller, shares more about their experience with AI-driven customer feedback analysis.

“AI can also help us forecast trends and opportunities by analyzing the key topics and keywords that appear most often in customer feedback,” says Speller.

For example, Speller recalls, the company learned from reviews that customers were increasingly looking for recipe inspiration.

“This led us to develop a thorough recipe section on our website as well as our email campaigns with ever-expanding collections of healthy and delicious ideas for incorporating matcha into meals, snacks, and drinks,” Speller says.

The result? “We are able to anticipate and meet many of our customers’ needs, increasing brand loyalty and encouraging repeat business.”

6. Analyze customer emails at scale.

“We use AI to process and understand thousands of customer emails every day,” says Chad Gouws, founder at FDB Analytics. In doing so, FDB Analytics hopes to achieve three things:

1. Understanding how the customer feels about their current problem and the insurance company’s way of handling it so far. If the email is flagged as negative, it is prioritized so that the customer success team can solve the problem, Gouws notes.

2. Identifying trends in the issues that customers face. “We want to find patterns or parts of the business that are having issues so we can solve these issues at their root cause, improving the overall customer experience,” Gouws says.

3. Identifying which competitors customers are mentioning and dealing with to gain an understanding of the insurance landscape.

Gouws warns that data is the main limiter to this approach: “If customers are not communicating through consistent channels or the data is not available in an accessible manner, this method struggles to produce results.”

7. Automatically categorize and prioritize feedback.

“In my experience, one powerful use case for AI in customer feedback analysis is automatically categorizing and prioritizing feedback,” says Jon Gordon, managing partner and co-founder at Sheer Velocity.

At a previous company, Gordon says, there were thousands of customer support tickets and product reviews pouring in daily. Manually sorting through all that unstructured text data was incredibly time-consuming and error-prone.

According to Gordon, they implemented natural language processing models to “automatically tag feedback as relating to specific product areas, surface high-impact issues based on sentiment analysis.” They could then route items to the appropriate teams.

Gordon adds: “This AI-driven workflow allowed us to be incredibly responsive to customer needs, quickly addressing pain points and requests for new features. The AI streamlined what would otherwise have been an unmanageable deluge of data into clear, actionable insights.”

8. Anticipate customer issues before they escalate.

Alari Aho, CEO and founder of Toggl, cites their use of AI in customer feedback analysis as pivotal in enhancing Toggl’s suite of productivity tools. But how are Aho and the team using AI to achieve that?

“We employed AI-driven predictive analytics to anticipate customer issues before they escalate,” says Aho. “By analyzing historical feedback data, AI models can predict which features or aspects of our tools are likely to cause user frustration or delight.”

According to Aho, this proactive approach helps refine Toggl’s product development strategy and customize its customer service responses.

“We specifically use AI here because it allows us to anticipate and mitigate potential problems, ultimately leading to a proactive rather than reactive customer service approach, thereby increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction.”

Despite the success, Aho warns that the initial setup and training of AI systems require “substantial time and data to function effectively.” That said, “the long-term gains in customer engagement and operational efficiency are well worth the investment.”

AI Feedback Analysis: Is It Worth It?

Short answer: Yes. However, it really depends on your situation and setup.

If you have a TON of customer feedback from reviews, emails, and survey responses and struggle to wrangle the data manually, then yes, an AI-driven feedback analysis is worth it.

If you’re a freelancer with a client roster of five? The juice from AI feedback analysis probably won’t be worth the squeeze. You’d be wiser to spend that time on delivering great work for your clients.

That said, even if it makes sense to use AI to speed up and improve customer feedback analysis, it isn’t a “perfect” solution. That’s not to say you shouldn’t benefit from AI’s strengths (volume, speed, segmentation). But remember to pair this with human input and intuition.

When left to its own devices, AI often struggles with nuance. For example, it might completely overlook the sarcastic tone of a review and misinterpret it as the hallmark of a positive customer experience. (Awkward!)

Nuance aside, AI still can’t deliver that personal touch quite like a human can. So, remember to gather face-to-face customer feedback and use your intuition to analyze it occasionally.

Managing a customer’s experience is now a requirement to succeed – in fact, 90% of businesses are making it a priority.

Throughout my career managing various customer-facing teams and consulting for numerous clients, I have learned two critical factors that shape a customer’s experience:

• Do your products/services fulfill an unmet need in your target market?
• Does your team create moments of customer delight?

Once you have a handle on those questions, the next step is to consolidate all of the interactions a customer has with your business. But what functionality and features do you need to address your organization’s use case?

The answer lies in a customer experience (CX) platform. This platform centralizes all touchpoints within the customer journey – from interacting with your product to engagements with your team pre- and post-sale. It provides you and your leadership with a comprehensive view of customer sentiment and loyalty.

Table of Contents

• What Is a Customer Experience (CX) Platform?
• Types of CX Platforms
• How to Choose the Right Customer Experience Platform
• Customer Experience Platform Examples
• A CX Platform is Crucial for Success

A CX platform either natively records or integrates data to deliver actionable insights for your team. By leveraging this platform, organizations can better understand their customers needs, behaviors, and preferences – enabling their teams to enhance satisfaction and retention.

The Importance of a CX Platform

In today’s competitive environment, delivering exceptional customer experiences can be a competitive differentiator.

A CX platform allows your organization to:

1.  Gain a holistic view of the customer journey. By consolidating data from multiple touchpoints, businesses can see the complete customer journey and identify areas for improvement.
2.  Enhance decision-making. With real-time insights, companies can make informed decisions to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3.  Drive personalization. Understanding individual customer preferences allows organizations like yours to tailor experiences, making each interaction more meaningful, impactful, and personal.

Implementing a CX platform correctly streamlines all customer interactions, while also empowering your team to deliver outstanding service on a consistent basis. This is an ideal way to follow through on the promises made in the sales process, and can be codified in an overall strategy. Keeping your customers happy and retaining them by even 5% can increase profits by 25-95%.

The CX platform translates your strategy into real actions your team can use to realize customer satisfaction, retention, and growth. (If you want to dig more into developing your CX strategy, check out our free Post-Sale Playbook.)

That said, there are numerous types of CX platforms to consider what is right for you, and I’ll explore some of them below.

Types of CX Platforms

CX platforms come in various forms, each designed to address different aspects of the customer journey and provide unique insights. While some tools employ numerous features and address an organization’s customer experience strategy, others are highly specialized and concentrate on one distinct part.

Nonetheless, these platforms are barometers your organization can use to quantify the impact their teams are making on their customers, identify pain points to increase satisfaction and retention, and employ strategies to encourage growth.

Here are some types of CX platforms:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems

CRM systems manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. They help organizations visualize the customer journey, improve relationships, retain customers, and measure growth.

Examples: HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce

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Customer Feedback and Survey Platforms

These platforms collect and analyze feedback from customers through surveys, reviews, and other mechanisms. They help organizations gauge customer satisfaction, identify pain points, and gather actionable insights.

Examples: Medallia, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey

Customer Support and Helpdesk Software

Customer support platforms consolidate functions used during interactions with customers – logging issues, troubleshooting, routing, live chat, and knowledge management – ensuring timely and effective resolution of customer issues.

Examples: Intercom, Freshdesk, Zendesk

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Voice of the Customer (VoC) Platforms

VoC platforms aggregate and analyze customer feedback from multiple sources. These provide deeper insights into customer sentiment and help organizations prioritize improvements.

Examples: Forsta, NICE (Satmetrix)

Customer Analytics Platforms

These platforms analyze customer data to uncover trends and behaviors, driving predictions around customer retention, growth, and churn. Moreover, these platforms provide queues around behaviors customers are taking, and help inform data-driven insights to enhance the customer experience.

Examples: Amplitude, Google Analytics, Mixpanel

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Loyalty and Rewards Platforms

Loyalty platforms manage customer loyalty programs, offering rewards and incentives to encourage repeat business and retention.

Examples: LoyaltyLion, Smile.io, Yotpo

Understanding the value add with these customer experience platform types, organizations can gain a deeper understanding of their customers, deliver personalized and consistent experiences, and drive customer satisfaction.

How to Choose the Right Customer Experience Platform

Ever since the early days of my career, I constantly thought about how I could quantify my actions to demonstrate my contribution and better collaborate with others in my organization. That mentality helped me consult better with customers, which is an important part of the customer experience.

When taking the criteria to choose the right CX platform, consider the following.

Quantify Actions

Understand the actions you need to perform and inform your team’s metrics and contribute to your organization’s business goal. Examples of this include customer calls, feedback surveys, renewal conversations, and onboarding milestones.

Quantifying your actions can show the correlation on your performance, as well as for your organization – improvement on customer sentiment, revenue retention, upsell/cross-sell opportunities, and referrals for future business.

Enhance Collaboration with a Customer-First Mentality

Ensure the platform facilitates collaboration within your customer-facing teams and across the organization, aligning with sales, marketing, customer success, product, and others. This can help promote and tie your actions (and others) towards embracing a customer-first mentality.

Enhanced collaboration and demonstrating a customer-first mentality can elevate your entire organization culturally. This fosters improved and positive relationships both internally and with customers, helping everyone understand other’s needs and desires, while aligning customer issues with their business goals and use-cases for context.

Customer Experience Platform Examples

1. HubSpot

HubSpot is a customer platform with an overarching mission to help millions of organizations grow better. This mission was certainly felt by me during my years working in the customer success department as a customer success manager and a consultant on their professional services team, before leading both sets of teams.

The platform has grown in numerous ways to embody the capabilities of a CX platform.

HubSpot is best for organizations wanting to scale their go-to-market and operations teams together in one system. From a one-person business to a 2,000+ employee enterprise, HubSpot customer platform has the marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and content management features you need to build the best experience for your customers.

There are also numerous ways you can translate your business goal, metrics, and initiatives through the platform so that you can record, store, automate, and view insights of how your customers are interacting with your business.

While there are numerous pricing tiers for HubSpot, there are also options to utilize a specific number of features to summarize your customer interactions, and how your team interacts with them in response.

Worth noting: HubSpot’s AI capabilities have been a highlight in the past year, and will only enhance their functionality for customers going forward.

2. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a popular customer feedback and survey platform, and has a vision of “amplifying individual voices.” They certainly embody that through their user interface and product, the education curated on how to attract survey submissions, how to respond to that customer feedback, and connect feedback with your go-to-market motion.

The customization goes far beyond the core measurements of customer feedback like NPS and CSAT. SurveyMonkey’s product allows you to customize and structure your survey questions to balance the quantitative with the qualitative. For those interested in the data management aspect, SurveyMonkey’s answers can be entered into fields in numerous forms – numbers, open line text, enumeration, single/multi-checkbox, and more.

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SurveyMonkey’s value adds for me are simplicity and scalability. Moreover, their extensibility is demonstrated by their vast array of integrations to connect with other systems – especially other types of CX platforms – to seamlessly transfer their data and further inform the rest of the organization on customer’s feedback and sentiment.

Due to their emphasis on prioritizing the user experience, many of their pricing plans provide a progress check on how far a user is in a survey (and provide that in subsequent reporting on the backend as well).

Additionally, their AI capabilities feature greatly here to aid in the user interface, branded as SurveyMonkey Genius, to create customized surveys based on a prompt.

3. Zendesk

Zendesk has been providing solutions in customer support and helpdesk functionality for years in an effort to make the customer experience “extraordinary.” This mirrors part of a larger trend CEOs are reporting to invest more in customer service teams to gain a foothold in better understanding their customers.

They evolved from their initial customer support tool to incorporate sales and CRM functionality to align customer service and sales teams better.

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The core of this functionality, though, speaks to consolidating all types of interactions between a service team and customers. It gives service teams the ability to receive tickets, categorize issues, route and escalate, and view themes of common issues to inform better decisions for a management team. To automate repeated motions that a service team experiences, triggers help with scaling a service team’s operations.

Zendesk’s tools are a foundation that prioritize a customer service team’s importance on understanding and managing the customer experience. The industry would not exist without customer platforms like this powering the channels to receive, manage, triage, and respond to customer issues effectively and at scale.

Their expansion into CRM shows their willingness to embrace the alignment that is required to incorporate the customer experience to their service and go-to-market teams going forward. All the while, Zendesk has proven to be a platform that grows with you – their AI capabilities enhance decision making on where to invest in terms of your customers.

4. Google Analytics

Google Analytics can give you a complete understanding of your customers’ interactions in your organization, across brands, devices, and products. Renamed Key Events, this platform can measure user action taken on your website and can be pulled in numerous ways to provide insights to drive action for keeping users engaged with you.

The advantage of Google Analytics, and any Google application for that matter, is that its native connectivity to Google gives it the ability to seamlessly integrate with the suite of tools your organization uses. Furthermore, there are many customization options on the reporting side of things to give yourself full control of what insights you need to see, when, how, and how often.

Google Analytics also provides numerous recommendations and insights on user behavior to clarify your takeaways. Their flexibility in integrating with a myriad of systems seamlessly allows their analytics to show up against that of your other systems, so you are able to come up with a shared understanding of what your analytics mean for taking action and improving your organization’s acquisition and retention of customers.

A CX Platform is Crucial for Success

Customer experience, as IBM notes, will continue to evolve, especially with the rise of generative AI. Managing interactions and behaviors of your customers requires a system that drives actionable insights and aligns your organization to uplift the customer experience. Considering a customer experience platform is a necessary and important task to devote time and resources towards.

Getting reviews is one of the most important aspects of growing your business—they’re a barometer of how you’re doing and are invaluable as a marketing tool for many reasons. Yet, as a marketing strategist, so many of my clients haven’t baked getting reviews into their process and struggle to follow up consistently. That’s where review management software comes in.

Most of my projects involve working with clients to get reviews so we have effective voice of customer data and testimonials to build trust and social proof. However, it can be like pushing a boulder uphill to get reviews in a timely fashion, so to make their next project smoother sailing, I always do my best to help them integrate the process of asking for reviews at the conclusion of every project or sale.

Some automate it through their email or SMS marketing software. Others have CRMs with review management features. Still others use standalone review management software to help them track customer sentiment, improve products and customer service, and grow their sales.

Because sorting through all the options can be challenging, I’m breaking down some of the best review management software options to simplify your search.

Table of Contents

• Best Review Management Software
• What is review management software?
• Benefits of Review Management Software
• How to Choose Customer Review Management Software
• Ready, Set, Manage Your Reviews

What is review management software?

Review management refers to the process of getting, analyzing, and responding to customer reviews. The more complex your business (and the more platforms your customers are on), the more important it becomes to use review management software to keep track of what people are saying about you online.

For example, when I’m mining customer reviews for data, I might look at reviews on sites that include, but aren’t limited to:

• Google.
• Facebook.
• LinkedIn.
• Yelp.
• G2.
• TrustPilot.
• Clutch.

What’s more, I might also set a Google Alert for mentions of my client and their company and check out forums like Reddit.

As your company grows, keeping track of all the reviews, responding to them appropriately, and integrating the feedback with sales, marketing, and operations can become a full-time job — unless, of course, you bring in a tool to help you streamline it.

Looking for prompts or ideas for responding to reviews? Grab our FREE Review Response Templates here!

Benefits of Review Management Software

Most people today — 93% of us — are influenced by reviews when it comes to making purchasing decisions. So, while you already know reviews are important, you may not understand the benefits or, more importantly, the role review management software can play.

Makes It Easier to Get Reviews

In my opinion, the number one benefit of customer review management software is that it makes it easier to get reviews in the first place. If this is not baked into your process, you may not have enough data to make decisions. And as I’ve mentioned, having reviews is helpful on so many levels. Whatever your industry, your buyers are using reviews and personal recommendations to make decisions:

• 94% of B2B purchasers use online reviews to make decisions. (Clutch)
• 82% of review site users say reviews are more influential than sales claims. (B2B SaaS Reviews)
• 84% of consumers place as much trust in online reviews as in personal recommendations. (CapitalOne Shopping Research)

And if those stats aren’t enough to help you understand the importance of reputation and review management software, here are a few more:

• 94% of businesses using reputation management tools see an ROI. (BrightLocal)
• 75% of customers recommend companies based on a great experience. (SalesForce Research)
• Conversion rates increase 270% when online retailers display reviews and peak with a 4.9 out of 5-star rating. (CapitalOne Shopping Research)

So now that you understand the importance of reviews in your sales process, let’s explore some of the other benefits.

Helps Your Marketing Strategy

I can talk about marketing all day long, but let’s keep this brief. Here are some of the top marketing benefits of using review management software:

• Voice of the customer data. When you use the words your customers use to talk about their problems, it’s easier to build trust with them because you can show you understand their needs.
• Social proof. People like what other people like, so having reviews that show how incredible your products or services may tip the scale in your favor.
• Buzz building. When you get new reviews in places like Google My Business, it helps the search engines build trust in your business, plus it gives you content to share online.

But it’s also about authenticity. Anytime you can share the review in its “natural” environment, you can combat some of the fears of fake reviews. 79% of people think that fake reviews are a problem, so when you can alleviate their concerns, you’re ahead of the game.

And because different types of review management software make it easier to gather, analyze, disseminate, and respond to feedback, it can save you considerable time.

Improves the Customer Experience

In addition to being a marketing buff, I’m also laser-focused on processes and experiences. Creating a great customer experience doesn’t have to mean going all out—it simply starts with doing what you say you’re going to do when you say you’ll do it. (It’s also about great customer service.)

93% of customers say good service makes them more likely to return, and 80% say the experience is as important as a company’s products or services.

Reputation management software allows you to read the room — especially when you’re not in it so you can get hints about what people are saying about your business and plug any holes that appear or adapt based on what your audience wants.

In fact, unhappy customers present one of the best opportunities to learn and improve. So, even though good reviews are important, your response to negative feedback can also help build trust.

How to Choose Customer Review Management Software

With so many options out there, choosing the right review management software can be a real struggle. Here’s how you can zero in on the right review management software for your business:

First, I recommend taking some time to identify what you need. A good place to start is by considering questions like these:

• How many reviews will you need to manage and respond to on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis?
• What are the review platforms that are most relevant to your business (e.g., Google, Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor)?
• What features are important to you (review collection, response management, analytics, sentiment analysis, and integration capabilities)?
• What investment am I comfortable making?

Then, make a list of the different review management software options and the features they offer and compare them to your needs.

A few things to consider when you compare:

• Pricing. Weigh the cost vs. value provided by each option, and be aware of costs like setup fees, additional charges for premium features, or per-user fees.
• Ease of use. The software should be intuitive and easy to navigate for all team members.
• Scalability. Ensure the software will still work for your business as it grows.
• Reviews and case studies. Check review sites like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot to see what other users are saying about the software, and look for reviews from businesses similar to yours. Many software providers have case studies or testimonials on their websites which can help you learn how the software is used and has helped other businesses.
• Integration and compatibility. Find out if the software integrates with your existing systems, such as your CRM, email marketing, and social media management tools. I also recommend checking if the software offers API access for custom integrations.
• Support and training. Your review management software should have excellent customer support and make sure you have what you need to start out on the right foot. They should offer onboarding and training resources such as tutorials, webinars, and documentation.

Next, it‘s time to test the software. There’s no better way to find out if the software will work for you than to take advantage of free trials and demos so you can experience it first-hand.

At this point, if you‘ve landed on an option that checks all the right boxes, you can move forward with signing up, knowing that you’ve made the right choice.

By taking a methodical approach, you can save yourself a ton of headaches (that I’ve seen many business owners suffer) by being too hasty.

Try HubSpot’s Customer Feedback Software to get a better understanding of what they want and think so you can wow them. Get a demo today.

Best Review Management Software

1. HubSpot

HubSpot provides a suite of tools — marketing, sales, customer service, and customer relationship management (CRM) — to help you attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.

From the lens of review management, HubSpot has created customer service feedback software that helps you easily share valuable data with your team and seamlessly works with all of its other features. Hubspot is the go-to for serious marketers.

Features

• Centralized review dashboard. Monitor and manage all your customer reviews from different platforms in one place, making it easier to track and respond.
• Automated review requests. Boost the reviews you get for your business by requesting them through email or SMS.
• Review aggregation and display. HubSpot’s software aggregates reviews from multiple sources. You can display these reviews on your website or landing pages using customizable widgets to enhance credibility and social proof.
• Sentiment analysis. Use the provided sentiment analysis tools to gain insights into your customer satisfaction and areas that may need improvement.
• Integration with CRM. You can link customer reviews to individual customer records and get a full understanding of each customer’s experience and history.

What I like: I love how easy it is to use Hubspot and how many different tools it offers! You can use the platform for customer service (ticketing and knowledge base creation), marketing (email marketing, ads/content management, analytics, and reporting), and landing page building.

Pros: Hubspot is a powerful tool for just about everything. It‘s easy to use, and it’s a clean dashboard for your business (you don’t have to log into a dozen different tools!).

Cons: Some users have found that Hubspot‘s pricing can be a little complex, and it’s a significant price jump from one tier to the next ($15 USD per month for a basic plan up to $800 per month for the Marketing Hub Professional plan). Also worth noting is that it’s easy to hit limits if you choose a free plan (for example, you can send 2,000 emails per calendar month).

Free plan? Yes, HubSpot has a free plan! It includes a whole suite of tools, such as forms, website traffic analytics, ads management, and retargeting.

Pricing: Paid plans range from $15 to $3,600 USD per month, depending on the tier and number of users.

2. HighLevel

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HighLevel is designed for small businesses and entrepreneurs. It aims to simplify workflows by automating day-to-day tasks and providing sales funnels, email marketing, appointment scheduling, and pipeline management features. HighLevel is an all-in-one CRM option, but it includes review management features that make it an essential part of your business workflows that I’d like to highlight.

Features

• Conversations. One click shows all your reviews, SMS, Google chats, and email conversations, allowing you to read and reply to reviews from a single, easy-to-use window.
• Spam and unfair review dispute. A quick link feature directly within the review interface makes it easy to dispute spam or unfair Google reviews. This will help protect your business from harmful feedback and maintain your online reputation.
• Detailed reporting. Reporting tools track the number of reviews, overall ratings, trends, and customer sentiments. You can set goals and sort reviews by source, star rating, and date range, providing valuable insights into your review performance.
• Automated review requests. You can make the review request process hands-off and send customized automated requests via SMS and email. This will encourage customers to leave feedback with less work.
• Integration with CRM and other tools. You can link reviews to customer records and blend your review processes within your existing workflows.

What I like: Personally, I moved to GoHighLevel because I was tired of trying to integrate all the apps and was happy to have a solution that just worked, but was also flexible enough to work with my business.

Pros: Lower cost than other CRMs. Plus, customer service is available equally across all service tiers.

Cons: Some users have said that they had difficulty migrating over to HighLevel and that certain features were paywalled beyond the monthly cost.

Free plan? There’s no free version, but HighLevel offers a 14-day trial.

Pricing: Their plans range between $97 and 297 USD based on the tier you select. Other people may white-label High Level and offer varying degrees of support.

3. BirdEye

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Birdeye helps you improve your customer interactions and manage your online reputation by providing tools to gather customer feedback, manage reviews, and enhance your overall customer satisfaction.

Features

• Review management. Monitor, respond to, and manage reviews so your business can maintain a positive online reputation. This includes platforms like Yelp, Google and Facebook.
• Review generation. Send automated review requests to customers via email or SMS to increase reviews and improve your online ratings.
• Customer surveys. Create and send customizable customer surveys to gather valuable feedback.
• Listings management. Manage your online listings to improve local SEO and help your customers find you easily.
• Social media management. You can manage your social accounts, schedule posts, and monitor social media activity.

What I like: What stood out to me is that you can use Birdeye to chat with your customers as they’re live on your website. You can handle questions and offer support right away.

Pros: You can easily aggregate reviews by field so that you can identify trends and quickly understand how your business performs in specific areas. You can also send out surveys very quickly after a customer visits your business to get reviews while you’re top-of-mind.

Cons: I found their pricing information was not transparent without providing business details and an email address first. Users have also mentioned that their contract terms are very long (12 months) and automatically renew.

Free plan? No free plan, but they have a demo that you can watch once you provide business information.

Pricing: None provided.

4. Reputation

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Reputation focuses on helping businesses manage and enhance their online reputation. I’ve found that their tools are helpful for monitoring, managing, and improving your customer feedback and online reviews through actionable feedback.

Features

• Social media monitoring. Track mentions, comments, and reviews on social media platforms to stay informed about what your customers are saying.
• Review management. Track, respond to, and analyze online reviews from platforms like Google, Facebook, Yelp, and more so you can maintain a positive online image and address customer concerns promptly.
• Survey and feedback. Create and distribute customer surveys to gather valuable feedback directly from your customers. This feedback can help you improve your products, services, and overall customer experience.
• Customer experience management. Monitor and manage your entire customer journey, from when they first contact you to following up after they buy.
• Business listings. Create profiles that help you stand out from your competitors and ensure they’re accurate and optimized for local SEO. You can also track clicks and conversions from your listings.

What I like: Reputation has a very clear metric called (wait for it!) Reputation. This score helps you get a high-level view of where you stand with your online reputation and is based on review ratings and volume. You even get relevant suggestions for making your score better.

Pros: When I viewed a demo of Reputation, I saw that it was easy to navigate, but robust. And, I liked the clean interface.

Cons: Some users have said that the social media functionality is a bit lacking and that the onboarding can be challenging. I also found no information about pricing.

Free plan? No free plan, but you can watch a demo.

Pricing: None provided.

5. Podium

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Podium is a platform that can help you connect with customers more effectively and manage your online reputation. You can communicate with customers, gather their feedback, and even take payments.

Features

• Messaging platform. Communicate with customers through multiple means, including SMS, email, and web chat. This makes it easy to have conversations in one place.
• Review management. Ask for, manage, analyze, and respond to online reviews. You can request reviews from customers via text message, which can help increase your positive reviews on Google, Facebook, and Yelp.
• Feedback and surveys. Podium allows businesses to create and distribute surveys to gather valuable feedback from customers. This helps businesses understand customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.
• Webchat. Engage with your website visitors in real-time, answering questions and providing support, which can help convert website visitors into customers.
• Payments. You can send payment requests via text message, making it easy for customers to pay your invoices quickly and securely.

What I like: Podium really leans into its SMS functionality and makes it effortless for your team to send a review request to a customer‘s phone right after they buy. I was impressed by how fast the process was — click a button in the dashboard, enter their name and phone number, and press send. That’s it!

Pros: Podium makes it super easy to get Google reviews through their SMS review request process. There’s also integration for getting reviews on other channels like Facebook.

Cons: A number of reviews said that Podium’s onboarding process is a challenge, and there were many mentions of their 30-day cancellation policy (you need to provide notice to cancel).

Free plan? No free plan, but you can watch a demo.

Pricing: Their plans range from $399 to $599 USD per month, and they also offer custom pricing.

6. Reviews.io

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Reviews.io helps businesses collect, manage, and display customer reviews. The platform aims to showcase your most attention-grabbing and relevant reviews, boosting your business’s online reputation, improving customer trust, and increasing conversion rates.

Features

• Integration capabilities. Works with third-party apps, including e-commerce platforms (such as Shopify and WooCommerce) and CRM systems (such as HubSpot and Salesforce).
• Review nuggets. Highlight the most relevant parts of a review and feature it right next to your Buy Now buttons. You can even create review carousels that help drive higher conversions.
• Social proof. Showcase your reviews on social media platforms to attract more customers. The platform also has a trust badge widget that you can display on your website. You can display User-Generated content to boost your credibility.
• Multi-location support. If your business has multiple locations, you can manage reviews and reputation for each location separately.
• Video reviews. The platform supports the collection and display of video reviews, providing a more engaging and authentic way for customers to share their experiences.

What I like: What got my attention is that you can watch your customers as they navigate your e-commerce website in real time with their Session Replay feature. Some may find this a little controversial, but the information you can gain by watching highlights can be helpful if your goal is to increase conversions.

Pros: Their plans are not contract-based, and their pricing is transparent. As I was reading reviews, I noticed several users said Review.io’s customer service is excellent.

Cons: Many users commented that they felt the price was too high, and noted that many features are locked unless you’re in a high-tier plan.

Free plan? There is a free plan! You get up to 10 Survey Replies and 50 Replay sessions, as well as access to company and product reviews, the Reviews Widget, and surveys.

Pricing: They have a tiered pricing system, and paid plans start at $99 per month based on review invites. You can book a demo before you commit to a paid plan.

7. Reviewly.ai

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Reviewly.ai helps you generate and respond to Google reviews from your customers using AI. By automating the review collection process, you can easily request and respond to customer feedback, making sure every review is addressed quickly and properly.

Features

• Makes use of AI. The platform uses AI in a few unique ways – create personalized responses to your customers‘ reviews, help positive-rating customers generate written reviews, and draft responses to your customer’s reviews.
• Automated review collection and follow-up. Sends automated review requests via SMS (which has a high open rate). If a customer responds to an SMS with a poor rating, you are notified immediately so that you can follow up and resolve potential issues before they start sharing negative feedback.
• Integration capabilities. Works with third-party apps like Zapier, Twilio, Slack, and your Google Business profile so you can easily add it to your existing workflows.​
• Multilingual support. This enables your businesses to communicate with your customers in their own language.
• Insights and analytics. Detailed analytics and reporting tools help you review performance and how your customers feel about your business.

What I like: Reviewly.ai embraces AI at every stage of the feedback process, but what stood out to me is how the platform uses AI to help customers write reviews.

In my experience, one of the biggest problems with collecting reviews is that many people just don‘t know what to say, even if they’re thrilled with your business. This AI feature helps solve the problem without creating more work for you.

Pros: The platform makes the process of getting reviews for your business as uninvolved as possible while allowing you to respond very quickly when needed.

Cons: Since this platform is focused on Google reviews, it doesn’t offer much support for reviews across other channels like some of the previous options I reviewed.

Free plan? No free plan, but you can book a live demo and get a 7-day free trial.

Pricing: Plans range from $39 to $129 per month. Higher-tiered plans allow users to send more feedback requests and access priority support.

Ready, Set, Manage Your Reviews

It’s never been easier or more important to get high-quality reviews and manage them. With tons of great review management tools out there, it’s more a matter of what you need and what works with your existing tech stack. (And with Zapier, it’s possible to connect just about any two pieces of software these days.)

While I work with these types of products day in and day out, I’m always amazed at how good these tools can be and how AI is continually improving them. Right now, I use HighLevel to get reviews, but I’m really excited to play around more with Reviewly.AI to see more.

At the end of the day, if you’re not using any reputation management software, give one of these best-in-class options a try and start reaping the rewards of those reviews.

Dreading telling loyal customers that you have to raise prices?

Sending a price increase letter can be intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be.

In this post, we’ll explain what a price increase justification is, then we’ll review some best practices you should consider when making a price increase announcement to your customers, and give you a free price increase template to take with you.

Skip to:

• Reasons for Price Increases
• Price Increase Letter Tips
• Price Increase Letter Templates
• Price Increase Examples

Common Reasons for Price Increases

Most customers expect that the cost of their beloved products won’t remain stagnant forever. However, if a competitor’s prices are not increasing, this potentially puts you at risk for customer churn. You must handle a price increase quickly and authentically to ensure that your customers understand the situation and are willing to stick through it.

Some reasons companies increase prices are:

• Production Costs: Costs to produce and distribute your products play a key role in pricing. If those costs increase, you’ll need to raise prices to accommodate the added expense.
• Material Costs: Similarly to production costs, the price of materials can also go up which will affect your bottom line. Any adjustments to upgrade the quality of your product will impact pricing as well.
• Industry Trends: If you’re not a first-mover into your industry, chances are you’ll need to keep up with competitors to make sure your business stays relevant. Conduct a competitive analysis (if you haven’t already) to stay on top of industry standards. If you find deficiencies in your current business model, bringing your company up to speed may result in a price increase.

• Growth: Growth is what most businesses strive for and it can also present an opportunity to increase prices. Should you choose to increase due to growth, it’s important to offer existing customers benefits or new services to offset the negative effects of an increase.

Before deciding on any price changes, sync with your sales and customer service teams to make sure everyone is on the same page about whether the increase is justified and how to best communicate this change to customers.

Price Increase Justification

This conversation is never easy to have with customers. After all, who wants to hear that the product your business relies on is going to cost more?

No matter how well you communicate this change, your customer service team should expect at least a few negative reactions. If you aren’t seeing anyone complain about higher prices, then they’re still probably too low. This leaves it up to your discretion whether you want to increase revenue or maintain customer satisfaction.

If you’re experiencing pushback from your customer base, it’s helpful to sync your sales and customer service teams. Both departments should align when it comes to how you communicate this price change. It will provide customers with consistent information as they speak with both sales reps and service reps.

In general, the best approach your team can take is assuring customers that the increase will help maintain product quality. Customers who are dependent on your products will be more understanding of this reasoning and will want you to maintain the high quality that they’re accustomed to.

HubSpot’s Chief Executive Officer, Yamini Rangan, reflects on this approach in the quote below.

“Some price optimizations were successful and others weren’t. But the ones that we communicated well were always value-driven.” – Yamini Rangan, Chief Executive Officer at HubSpot

If you’re not sure how to begin the conversation, take a look at some of the best practices below before you get started.

1. Contact them directly.

Imagine if your Spotify Premium bill increased from $9.99 to $14.99 per month without your knowledge or consent. You would be pretty mad, right?

It’s unfair for a customer to suddenly find out there has been a price increase in their product. If a price increase occurs, go through your list of customers who use that product or service, and send a price increase letter notifying them of the change. If possible, address the letters to each customer to personalize the process.

Tom Edwards, founder of Bit Quirky Consulting, shares his thoughts on the difference a personalized message can make, “Personalizing your communication is crucial. I have always reached out directly via phone or even in person if possible, and followed up with a clear email. This shows you genuinely care about their business.

In the past, I have considered offering options like phased price increases and flexible pricing plans to make the transition smoother. Keep a positive and confident tone, emphasizing the value of your services. Encourage open dialogue, listen to their feedback, and be willing to make adjustments if necessary. By showing appreciation and maintaining high standards, you’ll reassure your customers that they’re making the right choice by staying with you.”

2. Let customers know well in advance.

You should provide your customers with plenty of time to come to terms with the price increase. They may need to re-assess their budget or consider alternative options, so you should keep them in the loop once you’re made aware of the situation. Additionally, encourage them to make one or more product orders before the price increase kicks in.

Edwards continues on to say, “The key is to communicate early and be transparent. Give your customers plenty of notice and explain the reasons behind the increase, whether it’s due to rising costs or because you’re enhancing your services. People appreciate honesty and are more likely to understand if they see why the change is necessary.”

3. Tailor messages to different customer segments.

Sam Hickson, CEO of TG Wireless – Wholesale Cell Phones, shares personal insight on the importance of differentiation, “I can say from experience that price changes have varying impacts on different users or clients. It’s very important to personalize your messages because, from my experience, a company often deals with various customers who engage with different products and services. 

Some customers might be on paid subscription plans, while others could still be using free versions. You also might be serving both corporate clients and regular end-users, who are each at different stages of their customer journey. All these factors need to be considered when crafting a price increase letter.”

Depending on the service or product that you offer, you need to meet your customers where they are, especially considering their individual needs. You can increase prices, but try to do so in a way that is feasible for varying budgets.

“I personally believe that it’s important to categorize your clientele into distinct segments and tailor different versions of a price increase notice to each group. It should follow a different approach for each user segment, taking into account their specific needs and the subscription plan they currently have.”

4. Remind them that higher prices mean better quality.

The necessity for a price increase can be confusing for customers, especially if they’ve been purchasing the same product for months or years. It makes it vital that you stress the importance of product quality.

Typically, products increase in price to match higher operating costs, increases in hires, or increases in prices of needed materials. To ensure the same level of high quality, sometimes you have to raise the price.

Erika Friedrich, Operations Manager at A-Temp Heating & Cooling Inc.shares a quote, “Despite rising costs, it’s crucial to maintain the guarantees you currently offer to maintain a high level of trust with your clients. Take time to emphasize the value they will continue to receive by detailing improvements in quality, new features, or additional benefits that justify the price hike. 

5. Explain the reasoning behind the price increase.

Craig Willis, CEO of Skore, explains why you should lead with reasoning, “Explain why you need to increase prices and provide examples of what’s driving it. If your staff costs are rising, say so. If it’s infrastructure, provide an example of how much that has gone up, etc. No customer expects you to run your business at a loss, so they will appreciate the honesty. If they don’t care, are they the type of customer you want?”

To make it clear that you’re raising the prices to maintain the quality of the product, you should explain what caused the price increase. For instance, as some raw materials become increasingly scarce and expensive, companies that utilize these materials are forced to increase the prices for products that use them. Laying that out to customers will prove your willingness to be transparent.

6. Ensure the entire organization is aware of the price increase before announcing it to customers.

It would be embarrassing for a frontline worker to accidentally charge a customer the wrong price because their company failed to notify them of a change. Even if all employees were made aware of the situation, they should all be on the same page in terms of the cost difference, the reasoning, and the logistics moving forward. That way, your company has a consistent voice on the matter.

7. Offer flexible pricing structures to maintain inclusivity.

Virginie Glaenzer, Fractional Chief Marketing Officer at AcornOak, emphasizes the value of accommodation with the quote, “Communicate with empathy, understanding the sensitivity of price adjustments, and provide channels for feedback to foster a dialogue.

Also, consider maintaining current rates for existing customers temporarily as a gesture of loyalty. Finally, monitor reactions and adapt strategies as necessary to maintain trust and satisfaction. This sophisticated approach not only manages the price transition but also enhances the overall customer experience.”

Reward your current loyal customers with a perk only they have access to at the beginning of the price change, while no customer is excited to see prices go up, they will feel more appreciated getting an exclusive discount amidst the change.

8. Allow customers to reach out with further questions or concerns.

You want to be sure your customers receive all the information they require. A lack of information could cause them to churn to a competitor with lower prices. Reassure them that they can always reach out to anyone in your company — including high-level executives — with any more questions or concerns that come up regarding the price increase.

Cari O’Brien, founder of Custom Content Solutions LLC, shares, “Encourage customers to respond with any questions or concerns and commit time on your calendar to speak with anyone who reaches out. The better customer service you provide, and the more transparent and honest you are throughout the process, the more likely you’ll retain your customers.”

Have a price increase coming but still not sure how to say it? Check out the following price increase letter templates to help you put it in the right words.

Price Increase Letter Templates

It’s important to let your customers know about an upcoming price increase, but telling them can sometimes be tricky to phrase.

If you’re stuck, take a look at the templates below for ideas on conveying the message to customers.

1. General Price Increase

This is an example of a letter that lays out a general price increase to customers. It states the exact percentage of the price increase and which products will be experiencing the higher cost. The letter also states exactly when the price increase will come into effect and reminds customers of how long they have to order their products at the current price.

2. Increase in Cost of Materials

This letter also states the exact percentage of the price increase and when it will go into effect. It gives a specific reason for the price increase, providing transparency that many customers will understand. To make this message more impactful, consider adding the value that the price increase provides to customers.

3. Increase in Operating Costs

Like the others, this letter states the percentage of the price increase and when it will go into effect. The letter begins by stating a clear reason for the change. It’s helpful to lay out the exact products that will be experiencing a larger price increase than the rest to avoid any confusion from customers.

Based on these templates, you can use the format below to create your price increase letter to send to your customers.

Sample Price Increase Letter Template

Keep in mind that you’ll want to adhere to the tone that you’ve set during the customer relationship so far, while being transparent and personal every step of the way. Templates can help provide the necessary professional context for price increases and other challenging topics, but be sure to customize them for maximum impact.

Click here to download a free price increase letter template, available exclusively in HubSpot’s 50 Customer Service Email Templates Kit.

How to Write a Price Increase Letter

Delivering notices of a price increase shouldn’t bring a sense of dread. With the messaging tips below, you can make things easier for your team and customers.

1. Be clear and concise.

Customers shouldn’t have to guess or assume what your correspondence means. Communicate the important information at the beginning of the notice, letting them know explicitly what the new pricing will be and when it will take effect. Outline any steps customers need to take before the increase happens. Next, explain what their options are and where they can get more information.

2. Be empathetic.

Depending on your industry, the language you use for written correspondence may need to be more formal, but it shouldn’t come across as cold. The Netflix letter above is a great example of being both personable and professional. It makes customers feel that their business is valued and that the company sees them as more than just a number. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about how you’d like to receive similar news while drafting the letter. Additionally you’ll want to thank them for their business before signing off.

3. Don’t apologize.

Companies raise prices all the time and it’s a completely normal aspect of doing business. Apologizing will not only make the reader think you’re unsure of the decision, but also creates unnecessary awkwardness. Your product or service provides excellent value and you should charge accordingly.

4. Send a follow up.

Email notices can easily end up in spam folders and customers can mistake physical letters as junk mail. To combat this, it’s good to send a follow up notice before the increase goes into effect. It will also give a bit of cushion for customers who maybe read your first notice, but forgot to follow up or take action to renew. Additionally, it will decrease the chances they’ll feel blindsided by an increase.

With these templates in hand, let’s go through some best practices for making your price increase announcement.

Price Increase Letter Examples

You have the tips. You have the templates. How do they work in real life? If you are a paid member of any subscription service, chances are you have received one or two price increase letters in your email inbox. Amazon Prime is a popular company you might have witnessed increasing prices over the last few years. They are not the only ones. Let’s take a look at examples from Spotify, Disney+, Upwork, Hulu, and Netflix.

1. Fabletics

Fabletics sent an email to its VIP members about an upcoming $5 price increase. The athleisure brand offers a monthly membership where members can purchase new outfits and clothing each month.

While this price increase letter is significantly longer than the other examples on this list, it’s great at conveying the value members will get along with the increase. It starts off by telling members what’s in it for them — an added $20 in purchasing power each month. Now for $59.95 per month, members can get up to $100 in merchandise each month.

The email reiterates multiple perks membership offers in addition to highlighting new collaborations with Lizzo. So instead of focusing on the price increase, attention is now directed to all the value membership provides.

2. Apple

Apple sent an email informing customers of a price increase to $6.99 (previously $4.99) for its Apple TV+ subscription.

The streaming platform notified customers directly via email and gave customers several weeks to decide between keeping or canceling a subscription. This price increase letter closes out with a call-to-action for customers to revisit their subscription.

Short, sweet, and to the point, this price increase email is an ideal example to imitate when you write your own letter.

3. Upwork

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Upwork, one of the largest freelancing websites, announced a price increase to its Freelancer fee structure. Since the change involved an increase for both freelancers and clients, the announcement posted on the website had to be thorough.

To explain the reasoning behind the price increase, Upwork includes an FAQ section that gives quick answers to common questions about the change, and where to go for more information.

At the close, this email does not prompt freelancers to reach out with further questions, but it does direct them to learn more about the changes happening to their membership. With Upwork being a platform where freelancers spend and make money, this price increase letter covers enough touchpoints to efficiently introduce customers to the change.

4. Hulu

5. Netflix

Netflix took a much more effective approach in their price increase messaging. Like Hulu, they sent notice well in advance but also took the opportunity to remind customers how their service adds value.

“This update will allow us to deliver even more value for your membership — with stories that lift you up, move you, or simply make your day a little better.” It perfectly sums up why customers should stick around despite the increase.

Overall, Netflix’s tone is warm and personable while still hitting all of the best practices listed above. To further retain customers, the company added a list of new releases and top picks in the footer to retain loyal customers — showing them all the great content they’ll miss out on if they were to cancel their subscription.

How to Raise Prices without Losing Customers

Don’t procrastinate. Your customers have signed up for a product or service, and they deserve ample time to make a decision. Most customers anticipate increased costs in the future. Follow the tips listed in this article, and keep moving forward.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Your business’s health relies on customer satisfaction, and a well-implemented customer service satisfaction survey helps you keep track of that.

Understanding customer satisfaction will help you decide where to focus your time and energy to keep customer delight at the highest level possible. It will also help you understand if a new product feature is worth investing in, areas for improvement, and more.

Your customers will tell you what they need, but you have to ask them.

That’s where customer satisfaction surveys come in.

In this post, we’ll cover:

• The Importance of Customer Satisfaction Surveys
• What Is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?
• How Can I Measure Customer Satisfaction?
• Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions
• Customer Feedback Questions
• Best Practices for Creating Customer Satisfaction Surveys
• How to Use Customer Satisfaction Survey Results
• Customer Satisfaction Survey Template
• Customer Satisfaction Survey Examples from Real Brands

The Importance of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys help businesses better understand and utilize the voice of the customer to sustain growth. There are several key reasons above and beyond this overarching goal that make customer satisfaction surveys a top priority for customer centric businesses.

1. Identifying negative themes in the customer experience: By conducting customer satisfaction surveys, companies can pinpoint negative themes that customers are having and work to resolve them. This helps improve the overall customer experience and increases customer loyalty.

2. Gauging customer loyalty: These surveys give customers a chance to share feedback that yields their propensity to be a loyal customer. Companies can use this information to better retain customers.

3. Identifying customer trends: Surveys allow companies to identify trends in customer satisfaction over time. For example, if several customers have the same complaint about a product, there may be a shift happening in the market that your business hasn’t noticed yet. Acting on this feedback can keep your business ahead of the curve to not only keep existing customers, but acquire new ones who are interested in that same trend.

4. Providing a competitive advantage: Companies that regularly conduct customer satisfaction surveys and make adjustments based on feedback are likely to outperform their competitors. This is because they are better able to meet customer needs and expectations.

5. Validating business decisions: Customer opinions and feedback are two of the most essential factors that validate decisions within your business, allowing you to become more equipped to meet their specific and immediate needs instead of basing your strategy on assumptions.

6. Shaping the customer lifecycle: Their opinions also shape the customer lifecycle. If you don’t know their thoughts, you have a lower chance of retaining them, delighting them, or enticing them to make future purchases.

With all of this in mind, it’s clear how customer satisfaction surveys provide crucial information for customer delight.

What is a customer service satisfaction survey?

A customer service satisfaction survey is a tool to collect customer feedback regarding their experience with your customer service department. Customer service satisfaction surveys are designed to measure customer satisfaction levels, of course. However, they can also identify areas for improvement in your service department and uncover product areas that need attention.

Your customer service team is likely the department with the highest level of customer touchpoints, so understanding what drives customers to call and how their questions are handled is invaluable information when it comes to iterating on feedback and meeting customer expectations.

How can I measure customer satisfaction?

There are plenty of ways to measure customer satisfaction, and they all come down to asking customers how they feel. You are probably familiar with customer satisfaction surveys. Typically, you’ll receive an automated email after a purchase or customer service interaction asking you to complete a survey or rate your experience from 1-10 and explain why.

Plenty of survey software can do this, including HubSpot’s Service Hub. However, you don’t have to pay for customer survey software if you’re not at that stage in your business. I’ve used Google Docs to create feedback forms for my customers, which is a free and easy way to gather feedback and get a feel for customer satisfaction.

I also like to measure customer satisfaction the old-fashioned way: speaking to customers. I’ve had a lot of success asking customers, “How was everything?” after a gig (I rent music gear). You can build rapport, get an accurate feel for customer satisfaction and improvement areas, and solidify repeat business by talking with customers.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys and Customer Loyalty Questions

Note: NPS is a critical SaaS metric used to measure customer satisfaction.

• On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your in-store experience today?
• How likely are you to recommend (insert product or service) to others?
• How likely are you to purchase again from us?
• How likely are you to return to our website?
• In your own words, describe how you feel about (insert company name or product here).
• How can we improve your experience with the company?
• In the future, would you be willing to take this survey again?
• May we contact you to follow up on these responses?
• Would you consider our product/service a good value for the price?
• How would you rate your overall satisfaction with our customer service?
• What aspects of the product/service were you most satisfied with?
• What was the primary reason for choosing our product/service?
• What other products/services would you like to see us offer?

Questions for Collecting Product Feedback

• What’s your biggest roadblock when (insert something related to your product)?
• What would be one word you’d use to describe us and why?
• If we were to update (insert product feature here), could we reach back out to talk about these changes?
• How long have you been using the product?
• Which alternatives did you consider before purchasing the product?
• How often do you use the product or service?
• Does the product help you achieve your goals?
• What is your favorite tool or portion of the product or service?
• What features do you find most useful?
• What features do you feel are lacking or could be improved?
• How does our product compare to others you’ve used in the past?
• What is the one thing that would make you use our product more often?
• How easy is it to use our product?
• Do you feel our product is tailored to your needs?
• Is there anything about our product that surprised you?
• How well does our product/service meet your needs?
• What could we do to make you more likely to recommend us?

Questions About Customer Support

• Rate your satisfaction with our team in resolving your issue.
• Did you feel that our team answered your inquiry promptly?
• Do you agree or disagree that your issue was effectively resolved?
• What can our employees do better?
• How can our employees better support your business’s/your goals?
• What mode of communication do you prefer when reaching out for support?
• How do you rate the accessibility of our customer service?
• Are there additional training or resources you wish our team had?
• How well does our customer support team understand your issues?
• What do you generally think of the wait times?
• Do you feel our support team is knowledgeable and competent?
• Would you describe our customer service as personalized?
• Do you feel the customer support team fully understood your needs and goals?
• Would you prefer to solve issues on your own using knowledge-base resources?

Marketing Research Questions

• What is your level of education?
• What is your approximate annual household income?
• Where do you work, and what’s your job title?
• What industry are you in?
• What’s your most important priority when (insert something related to your industry)?
• Why did you choose our product over a competitor’s?
• How do you generally learn about new products in our industry?
• What kind of advertisements catch your attention?
• Do you follow us on social media?
• What factors influence your purchasing decisions the most?
• How important is brand reputation in your buying decision?
• What do you think about our pricing compared to competitors?
• What trends are you noticing in our industry that are important to you?
• How did you hear about us?

Additional Engagement and Research Questions

• What’s working for you and why?
• How can we improve your experience with the website or the in-store location?
• Can we connect you with a customer success manager via chat?
• Would you be open to discussing upgrade options for your product?
• Can we send you a list of useful resources for getting the most out of your product?
• What additional support can we offer to enhance your experience?
• Would a loyalty program encourage more frequent purchases or interactions?
• How responsive do you find our online platforms?
• Would more frequent updates or newsletters be helpful?
• How personalized do you feel our communications are?
• What elements of our service exceed your expectations?
• Would you recommend us to a colleague?
• Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?

If you want to obtain valuable feedback from your customers, then you have to ask them the right questions. Sharing information isn’t always an easy task, and it’s not the customer’s job to provide your business with constructive criticism. Instead, it’s the surveyor’s responsibility to create a thought-provoking prompt that engages the participant.

Customer Feedback Questions

To get the most out of valuable customer feedback you’ll need to make sure you’re asking the right questions. Open-ended questions are a great way to gain more thorough explanations about your customer’s experience with your brand, but they’re not the only types of questions you can ask.

If you’re getting stuck on deciding what to ask your customers, here are some of the types of questions we recommend including on your customer satisfaction survey:

Product Usage

When it comes to customer success and satisfaction, your business must collect feedback about your product or service. If you don’t, then it’s more difficult to assess customer needs and provide effective solutions.

Finding out how satisfied your users are with your offer provides your marketing and product teams with valuable information that can be used to improve customer retention.

Some questions that you could ask in this section are:

• How long have you been using the product?
• Which alternatives did you consider before purchasing the product?
• How often do you use the product or service?
• Does the product help you achieve your goals?
• What is your favorite tool or portion of the product or service?
• What would you improve if you could?
• Which product features do you consider the most valuable?
• Which product feature do you use most often in your day-to-day?
• What points of friction have you encountered while using the product?
• If there was one new feature you could suggest, what would it be and why?

Demographics

Demographics are essential to marketing and sales teams because they make it easier for companies to segment customers into buyer personas. By grouping customers based on key characteristics, this categorization helps employees visualize their target audience. Marketing and sales teams can then use that information to pursue leads that are most likely to convert.

When asking these types of questions, be sure to embrace a proactive and inclusive approach. These questions shouldn’t be mandatory, so always provide an option for customers to omit an answer. Your goal is to extract honest information, but you don’t want it to come at the expense of the customer’s comfort.

Here are some demographics questions that you should consider including in your next survey:

• How old are you?
• Where are you located?
• If applicable, what gender do you identify as?
• What is your employment status?
• What is your marital status and do you have children?
• What is your level of education?
• What is your approximate annual household income?
• Where do you work and what’s your job title?
• What industry are you in?

Psychographics

Psychographic questions dig deeper than demographic questions, uncovering information relating to your customers’ preferences, habits, behaviors, and tendencies. It’s not about who your customer is, but why they do what they do.

Psychographic questions may seem intrusive, but they’re highly valuable pieces of information that give you a glimpse into the reasons for your customer’s buying habits. They’re usually phrased concerning your industry and not specifically about your product.

These questions are instrumental in customer satisfaction surveys because you can indirectly find out how you can better serve your customers.

Here are a few questions you might ask:

• Do you prefer to shop on your phone or your laptop?
• What’s your most important priority when (insert something related to your industry)?
• E.g. if you’re a mortgage lender, you might ask, “What’s your most important priority when buying a home?”
• What’s your biggest roadblock when (insert something related to your product)?
• E.g. if you’ve created a recipe-sharing app, you might ask, “What’s your biggest roadblock when trying to access the best recipes online?”
• How much time do you spend on (insert social media platform you’d like to use for advertising)?
• How much does sustainability matter to you in purchasing a product?
• How do you feel about (insert product type)?
• E.g, if you sell women’s razors, you might ask, “How do you feel about women’s razors?”
• What do you dislike about (insert product type)?
• How many hours a day do you spend doing (insert something that relates to your product)?
• E.g. if you sell ergonomic car seats, you might ask, “How many hours do you spend driving?”

Satisfaction Scale

Sometimes there are aspects of your offer or business that you want feedback on, but they aren’t things that your customers are actively addressing. In these cases, it helps to be direct and ask customers how they feel about these specific details.

Before you do, you’ll have to determine a quantifiable way to measure their responses. Adopting a satisfaction scale section is a great way to create a consistent approach to quantifying this subjective survey feedback. A few ways that you can implement this scale are:

• A scale measuring from 1 to 10 (or another number). 1 means the customer was extremely unsatisfied and 10 means the customer was very satisfied.
• A descriptive scale that measures a customer’s response from unsatisfied to satisfied. The customer is given a shortlist of responses to choose from that range from “very unsatisfied” to “very satisfied.”
• A picture scale that uses images to symbolize customer satisfaction. For example, you can use happy, sad, and indifferent emojis to quickly gather customer feedback.

Example questions include:

• On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your in-store experience today?
• How likely are you to recommend (insert product or service) to others?
• Rate your satisfaction with our team in resolving your issue.
• Did you feel that our team answered your inquiry promptly?
• Do you agree or disagree that your issue was effectively resolved?
• How likely are you to purchase again from us?
• How likely are you to return to our website?

Open-Text

Open-text questions are survey questions that allow the participant to write out their response within a text box. This allows users to fully express their opinions using the customer’s voice instead of the company’s pre-written responses.

While they can sometimes be time-consuming to analyze, these questions encourage the participant to be honest and give them the freedom to address any topic. Open-text questions can be an instrumental asset when determining the core values of your customers.

Here are open-text questions you can ask in your next survey:

• In your own words, describe how you feel about (insert company name or product here).
• How can we improve your experience with the company?
• What’s working for you and why?
• What can our employees do better?
• How can our employees better support your business’s/your goals?
• How can we improve your experience with the website or the in-store location?
• Why did you choose our product over a competitor’s?
• What would be one word you’d use to describe us and why?
• Do you have any additional comments or feedback for us?

Longevity

In the last section of your survey, you’ll want to include questions about the steps that’ll happen after submission. These questions permit your team to follow up with the participant in the future.

This comes in handy when you roll out changes and want to get updated feedback from the same customers that were surveyed earlier. You can phrase these types of questions in a few different ways:

• May we contact you to follow up on these responses?
• In the future, would you be willing to take this survey again?
• If we were to update (insert product feature here), could we reach back out to talk about these changes?
• Can we connect you with a customer success manager via chat?
• Would you be open to discussing upgrade options for your product?
• Can we send you a list of useful resources for getting the most out of your product?

While measuring customer satisfaction can be tricky to manage, asking effective questions can reveal highly valuable customer insights — and the questions we’ve listed above will do the trick.

Next, I’ll go over best practices for creating customer satisfaction surveys.

Designing a customer satisfaction survey is no easy task. Luckily, there are a few best practices that will help you increase response rates and get much-needed feedback from your customers.

1. Make sure you choose the right survey tool.

Choosing the right survey tool is essential because it can significantly impact the quality of your results.

A good survey tool should be easy to use, customizable, and provide in-depth analytics. It should also have the ability to automate survey distribution and analysis.

HubSpot’s Service Hub offers a powerful, easy-to-use survey solution to track customer satisfaction and visualize data in beautiful, ready-made charts.

Without the right survey tool, you’ll have a whole lot of data and no way to distill it or glean valuable insights from it. Choose a tool that allows you to ask different questions, examine basic metrics such as response rates, and track customer sentiment over time.

2. Always ask short and relevant survey questions.

No one enjoys spending a lot of time answering surveys, so be sure to keep your survey questions short and to the point. Asking short and relevant survey questions is the key to earning high completion rates. Long and complex survey questions can be overwhelming and may discourage customers from providing any feedback at all.

On the other hand, shorter questions allow customers to easily comprehend what is being asked and are more likely to provide accurate responses. When asking open-ended questions, keep the minimum character count short, make the question optional, or offer an incentive.

3. Send the surveys at the right time.

Give a lot of thought to the placement of your surveys throughout the customer journey. It wouldn’t make sense to send a survey to someone who’s only just subscribed to your blog — nor would it make sense to send one year after a customer stopped doing business with you.

Sending surveys at the right time is critical to getting accurate feedback. Customers are more likely to provide feedback when they are in a position to evaluate their experience with your company.

When do you send a customer service survey? Send it after a lengthy interaction with one of your teams, a few weeks after purchase or onboarding, and a few times throughout the year to measure the customer’s happiness.

4. Always A/B test your surveys.

A/B testing is an excellent way to find out whether your surveys are as effective as they can be. Simply create two versions of the survey with minimal changes. You can change the order of the questions, the number of questions, the wording, and even the color of the buttons. (Change only one thing at a time so you can accurately measure its impact on the survey.)

By comparing the results of each version, you can determine which version yields the highest response rate and provides the most accurate feedback. This can help you refine your survey strategy and improve the overall quality of your survey data.

5. Thank your customers for their feedback.

Thanking customers for their feedback is important to show that you value their opinion and are committed to improving the customer experience. It also helps to improve customer loyalty and increases the likelihood that they will provide feedback in the future.

Whether it’s through a gift card, a discount, or simply a nice email, always thank the customer for their time, regardless of the nature of the feedback.

By thanking customers for their feedback, you signal that you take their opinions seriously and are committed to addressing their concerns. This can help you maintain strong relationships with your customers and drive long-term business success.

Ready to craft your own customer satisfaction survey? Use the template in the next section to get started.

How To Use Customer Satisfaction Survey Results

1. Define customer segments.

Customer satisfaction surveys can be used to segment customers based on their preferences. With these survey results, you can tailor your approach to specific customer groups and provide more personalized experiences.

2. Track customer satisfaction over time.

Identifying changes in customer sentiment can be difficult if you don’t have multiple data points over a long period of time. Regular customer satisfaction surveys can be used to track this and address issues before they become systemic problems.

3. Benchmark against competitors.

Customer satisfaction survey results can be used to benchmark your company’s performance against competitors. This way, you’ll identify areas where your company may be falling short and implement changes to improve your standing in the market.

Customer Satisfaction Survey Template

The following customer satisfaction survey template can help you get answers from your customers in one easy step. It asks one simple question: “How satisfied were you with your experience today?” If you’d like, you can add more questions to get more details from your customers.

To make a copy of this template and get 4 bonus templates, click here.

Now you’ve got a template and are ready to create your customer satisfaction survey. In need of some inspiration? Take a look at these examples we pulled from different companies.

Customer Satisfaction Survey Examples from Real Brands

We’ve covered why asking for customer feedback is important and the types of questions to include, but you still might be wondering how to put it all together. Let’s check out the customer feedback example questions below from real companies to gain insight into how to roll out a survey of your own.

1. HubSpot

HubSpot is another company that uses NPS surveys to assess customer satisfaction. This score primarily comes into play with its customer support and success teams, who can be reviewed after each new interaction.

HubSpot’s engineers then use these responses to address areas in their software that could use improvement. By using this scoring system, HubSpot can attain both qualitative and quantitative data to direct its product development efforts.

What I like:

HubSpot uses its surveys to create product-level improvements, and the best part is that for customers, answering one question is an effortless way to give feedback. So it’s a win-win on both sides. When you carry out surveys, be sure to forward the feedback to the right department to address any issue that your customers brought up.

2. Airbnb

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Airbnb lets customers book overnight stays and experiences across the world. For Airbnb hosts to build a reputation, they rely on customer feedback to make them seem more credible.

In this survey example, Airbnb includes an eye-catching button that prompts recipients to take the survey. Once they click through, they’re taken to a user-friendly survey with a series of questions that can help Airbnb better understand why the recipient chose Airbnb as their provider. It’s extremely in-depth, too, prompting customers to provide as much detail as possible about their experience.

What I like:

Airbnb politely asks for customers’ opinions after their stay, giving them the space to decide whether they want to share feedback or not. In its survey request, Airbnb was intentional about the design of the button, too, by choosing an eye-catching brand color that entices people to click. Your survey invitation emails should have a call-to-action button, just like a marketing email would, to increase click-through-rate.

3. Hilton Hotels

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The Hilton Hotel company provides its customers overnight stays with promising customer service, upholding its century-old reputation.

To better understand what people’s stays were like, it offers a one-page survey where customers can willingly submit their feedback. It’s just a few questions long, most of which are logistical (such as where the visitor stayed and how long they stayed there for). Users then have the option of elaborating.

What I like:

This seemingly simple survey from Hilton gives unhappy guests an easy, friction-free opportunity to submit feedback about their recent stay. It’s hosted on a public URL that guests can access without needing to get through any barriers. The questions are simple and easy to answer.

4. Uber

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Uber has two target audiences — the drivers and the passengers — and it does a great job collecting opinions and reviews from both. The passengers give ratings after every ride, and the drivers rate the passengers as well.

What I like:

This survey makes it fair and transparent for both the driver and the passenger, and these ratings affect both parties’ reputation as well. If a passenger has a lower rating, the driver has the authority to decline the booking. If you run a business with two target audiences, create a survey for both.

5. Netflix

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Netflix provides its customers with curated entertainment recommendations that would not be possible unless they had a great understanding of customer satisfaction.

Overall, Netflix brings out its A-game when it comes to customer experience. With its recommendation system, it is as customer-friendly as one can get. Netflix studies the behavior of all of its customers and recommends movies and shows per their ratings, likes and dislikes, or just what they have been watching. It also collects feedback periodically to improve its offerings.

What I like:

In this survey, Netflix tries to better understand users’ behaviors and preferences. This shows that even if you dominate the market like Netflix does, you shouldn’t stop there. Continue collecting feedback from your customers and users, and don’t be afraid to get granular to understand their needs.

6. Slack

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Slack is a business messaging app that helps professionals connect from anywhere. It bases its product development entirely on customer feedback.

In fact, customer feedback is at the epicenter of its efforts. For instance, there’s a command within the application where users can send feedback to the Slack team, or just tell them what features the users would like to have. The co-founders read all the user feedback and made sure they responded to every ticket raised.

In the email above, Slack invites the user to take a survey to improve its offering. The email is short and to the point.

What I like:

Slack’s commitment to collecting customer feedback is commendable, and so are its invitations to take the survey. In the above example, Slack makes the survey seem more exclusive by mentioning that it was only sent to a few people. Don’t be afraid to curate a short list of customers to send the survey to, especially if it seems like those customers would be more likely to answer.

7. Drift

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Drift provides businesses with a revenue acceleration platform that caters to a buyer-centric world. The above survey asks one simple question: “How likely are you to recommend Drift to a friend or colleague?” Sometimes, that’s really all you need.

What I like:

Drift sends Net Promoter Score®, or NPS, surveys. NPS is a critical SaaS metric used to measure customer satisfaction. The only question it asks is whether the customer is likely to recommend the business to a friend or colleague — and this can be enough of an indicator of a customer’s happiness with your brand.

8. Paytm

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Paytm has always taken customer opinions into account and has taken serious steps to improve the customer experience.

Taking customer experience and security to another level, Paytm has created a “bug bounty” to catch fraudulent merchants. If customers accidentally buy fake movie tickets through the platform, for example, Paytm allows them to get refunds on their bookings.

What I like:

Paytm gives users the opportunity to tangibly improve the product by giving them the ability to report bugs directly on the app. Plus, it not only collects customer feedback, it acts on it, too, by fixing those bugs. Overall, Paytm provides plenty of avenues for turning an unhappy customer into a happy one.

9. Skype

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Another example of a product that provides great customer service is Skype, a business recognized for its telecommunication technology. If you call people using Skype, you know that it asks for feedback after every call. But more than that, it believes in immediately solving customers’ problems.

In the survey above, Skype asks for feedback on the quality of the call. It’s just three questions long, and when it comes to surveys, the shorter, the better. It also gives users the ability to quickly answer the questions by offering multiple choices instead of letting them write out an answer (though they have that option, too).

What I like:

Skype gets straight to the point in this simple three-question customer satisfaction survey. Even more, it keeps the focus on the product by only asking about “Audio Issues” and “Video Issues.” If you sell a product where users might run into issues, consider asking targeted product performance questions, then leave a blank text box for users to elaborate.

10. Amazon

Amazon, one of the most popular eCommerce websites in the globe, exceeds user expectations by collecting all kinds of information. When you contact its customer service department, it sends you a customer feedback survey that asks three questions about your interaction:

• Please rate the service provided by the Amazon representative.

• Please rate how well you could understand the Amazon representative.

• Anything else to add?

But Amazon doesn’t stop there. It makes information easily accessible in a knowledge base, so users can find answers and troubleshoot on their own. This reduces the chances of incorrect purchases, which can make all the difference in a customer’s buying decisions.

What I like:

Amazon’s customer satisfaction survey is a great way to gauge how happy the customer is after getting help from the customer service team. It’s important because customers only reach out when they’re unhappy — so sending a survey like this one helps Amazon understand whether the customer is happy again. Like Amazon, be sure to send surveys after your customers interact with your service team.

10. X

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Not only is X (formerly Twitter) great for direct (personal) and public messages, it’s working toward bridging the communication gap between brands and audiences. You can use the “Polls” feature to informally ask for customer feedback — or get more psychographic data about your target audience. This action is as simple as, well, making a Tweet.

While this is not an example of an actual customer satisfaction survey, publishing a Twitter Poll can be an excellent way to collect customer feedback quickly and effectively in an informal setting.

What I like:

We love the Polls option for customer satisfaction surveys because it’s not a formal sit-down survey. Your followers can answer one question as they scroll through their feed, and you get feedback from those who are interested in your brand, too. It’s a great choice for asking more general brand sentiment questions as opposed to product-based questions.

11. Zomato

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Zomato is one of the largest food delivery and review websites in the world, and its success can be largely attributed to customer satisfaction.

Another product with two types of audiences — restaurants and hungry diners — Zomato puts both of their needs and expectations into consideration. Every restaurant gets rated on the food, and every buyer gets to rate the restaurants. In the above survey, it asks for feedback with one simple statement:

“Tell us what you think about Zomato.”

Then it allows users to free-write their thoughts.

What I like:

This open-ended survey format is perfect for websites and apps. You would ideally always include the option to give feedback in a pop-up button, banner, or tab that users can click. That way, you don’t need to contact users first; they can voluntarily submit feedback to you.

12. Greyhound

Here’s a great example of a customer satisfaction survey from Greyhound that measures the qualitative sentiment and experience about interacting with and buying from a brand.

What I like:

In such a crowded space as bus lines, Greyhound needs to make sure that the service it’s providing works for its customers — or else they’ll start losing them to competitors. This survey, deployed immediately after a trip, is a great way to measure satisfaction at the moment when it’s most memorable for a customer.

13. H&R Block

H&R Block Advisors sent another well-timed customer satisfaction survey — just after “Tax Season” in the U.S.

For accountants and financial advisors, the months before the tax filing deadline are the busiest, so a prompt survey after filing with H&R Block helps the company gauge how many returning customers it can expect.

What I like:

H&R Block Advisors smartly sends the survey at a busy time for its business. If your business also has busy periods or periods where people are more interested in your products, send surveys during those time ranges to optimize the amount of responses you receive. You’ll get more submissions simply because you have more customers during those months.

14. GEICO

Measuring sentiment, in addition to satisfaction, is important when surveying your customers.

In this survey, GEICO asks about customer sentiment regarding a specific interaction during the purchase process — and the general feeling of the experience as well. In this way, GEICO can smooth out specific roadblocks throughout the customer journey, and get an in-the-moment snapshot of its wider customer sentiment.

What I like:

GEICO’s example is simple, short, and to-the-point. It only has three questions and gives an additional avenue for contacting GEICO’s customer service team. Always give respondents a second option for submitting feedback or contacting your team to better gauge how satisfied they are with your brand.

16. Taco Bell

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Well-known fast food company Taco Bell has made an outstanding commitment to gathering customer feedback.

Every receipt is printed with survey instructions that are placed in locations that are easily noticed. Taco Bell also incentivizes its customers by offering them rewards for filling out surveys, along with entering the participants into a raffle upon survey completion.

What I like:

Taco Bell prompts its customers to complete the survey just by including a survey number in the receipt. There’s no need for Taco Bell to email the customer after a purchase. Most importantly, the company increases responses by offering a prize. Try to provide incentives and to provide a link to the survey in a noticeable place.

17. Qualtrics

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Qualtrics is a data-collection company that helps businesses gather data on their customers. It’s no surprise that its customer satisfaction surveys are interactive and include plenty of features that keep participants engaged.

What I like:

In this example, each option has a dropdown menu where respondents can pick an answer to choose from. This keeps the survey’s design short and sweet, making it less intimidating to someone who’s looking to complete it in just a few minutes.

18. HubSpot for WordPress

HubSpot for WordPress is a plugin that adds CRM functionalities, forms, and live chat to WordPress websites. In this survey, HubSpot aims to find out whether the plugin has been working as designed. It has just one simple request: “Rate your experience using HubSpot for WordPress.”

We recommend using this format for product-related surveys — specifically those that have to do with a single specific feature. For instance, if you recently rolled out a new update, this single-question survey can help you measure your customers’ opinions about the new addition to their software or product.

What I like:

The five-star scale is simple to understand and makes it easy to answer, because all the user has to do is provide a star rating. The users can also answer straight in their email, instead of needing to access an external survey link. Sometimes, you don’t need to include complicated questions and options to create an effective customer satisfaction survey.

19. McDonald’s

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McDonalds is a fast food company that knows exactly how to cater to its customers, even deploying different strategies in countries across the world. One way it tracks success is through incentivized feedback.

What I like:

One feature that stood out on this McDonald’s survey was the labeled receipt on the right-hand side. The element is highlighted so participants know exactly what McDonald’s is asking them about in the corresponding survey. Not only does this ensure McDonald’s gets accurate information from the survey, but it also reduces any friction customers may have if they’re unsure or confused about a question.

20. Home Depot

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When customers go to hardware stores, they’re looking for a business that will satisfy their home renovation needs, and Home Depot delivers just that. It collects feedback from customers to improve its offerings and provide better service moving forward.

What I like:

To entice participants to take the survey, Home Depot offers a $5,000 Home Depot gift card. Offering a sweepstakes entry up-front is a great way to ensure that you get feedback from customers who are more likely to purchase from you again. If you weren’t interested in Home Depot, you wouldn’t take a $5,000 gift card. Right away, you get to gauge the customer’s continuing interest in your business.

21. Petco

Pet supply store Petco shows that it takes the customer experience seriously by sending store visit feedback surveys. The follow-up survey not only affirms the brand’s care of the customers’ pet, but asks a simple satisfaction question about a specific visit to a store location.

What I like:

Petco’s feedback survey does a lot right, with a quick turn-around email survey that’s both on-brand and simple. Notice that you don’t have to navigate out of the email; all it requires is one click as you rate your store visit experience.

22. Etsy

Etsy’s customer satisfaction survey takes a slightly different approach. Rather than sending the survey from a customer service rep’s email, it is sent from Etsy’s research team instead. Even more, a picture of the research team member is included at the end, making it easy to forge a human connection with the person who might actually read the survey responses.

Once you click on the link, you’re taken to an extensive survey that asks a multitude of questions. While shorter surveys are typically better, Etsy establishes the right expectations by sending the survey from the research team. This gives you the impression that the survey will be long and extensive, because it’s being used for research purposes.

What I like:

Etsy’s example is a winner because it opens with a personal greeting from one of Etsy’s team members. Even if the email was mass-sent, that greeting immediately makes it feel more personal, and the picture of the Etsy staff member only personalizes it further. Lastly, if you plan to send a long survey, feel free to call it “research” to establish the right expectations.

23. Autonomous NYC

Sometimes, you don’t need a fancily designed email to ask for feedback. Instead, you can send an email just like Autonomous NYC’s. And if you don’t feel comfortable including a picture of yourself like in the Etsy example, you can simply include your first name to give the survey request a more personal feel.

Once you click on the link, you’re taken to a 2-page Google Form survey that measures the user’s happiness with their experience on Autonomous NYC’s website. The survey is clear, succinct, and easy to fill out.

What I like:

Autonomous NYC’s customer satisfaction survey hits all the right notes. It’s short, but not so short that Autonomous NYC’s team can’t glean any insights. It also makes most questions optional, so that users have the choice to walk away after answering two questions. Give the same option to your survey recipients by making at least a few of the questions optional.

Get More Customer Feedback to Grow Your Business

Knowing how your customers feel about you is instrumental in growing your business. Use customer feedback surveys to collect information that can create lasting and positive changes in your company. When you know how your customer feels, you can make decisions that lead to higher revenue and increased customer retention, empowering you to grow better.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in November 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.