If you want to hear your customers loud and clear—and show them that you’re listening—these voice of the customer tools may be just what you need.

According to research from Salesforce, 80% of customers consider the customer experience (CX) to be just as important as the product or service a company provides. And standards for the quality of that experience are higher than you might think: “66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.”

The best way to understand customer needs and expectations is to listen to what customers are telling you. That’s why many companies have put the voice of the customer (VoC) at the center of their strategy by investing in tools that help them listen to, analyze, and act on customer feedback.

If you want to hear your customers loud and clear—and show them that you’re listening—these 7 VoC tools may be just what you need.

Medallia: Turn customer feedback into insights and action

Medallia provides enterprise customer experience management (CEM) software that gives you a comprehensive view of what your customers are saying.

Why you should care

Focusing on the voice of the customer is only useful if you’re able to do something with the data that you collect. For large companies, that can be challenging because the amount of VoC data available can be staggering. Separating the signal from the noise, translating the data into a coherent story about your customers, and deciding on a course of action are all tremendously valuable.

What Medallia does

Medallia aggregates and analyzes customer feedback and other VoC data, surfaces insights, and recommends actions to take across your organization.

How it does it

Medallia collects customer data from multiple systems, including:

• Customer relationship management (CRM) software
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software
• Feedback surveys
• Other external sources—Medallia integrates with numerous tools and data sources

It then combs through the data to identify core feedback themes and determine what factors are driving customer satisfaction. Based on that analysis, Medallia recommends specific actions for you to take and maps those actions to departments and job functions across your organization.

Qualtrics: Create better experiences by predicting customer response

Qualtrics provides CEM software that focuses on designing the customer experience.

Why you should care

Customers are like snowflakes: no two are exactly alike. An experience that might be perfect for one customer could end up driving another customer away. The more you understand how different customers experience and respond to various interactions, the better equipped you are to design the best experience possible for each customer.

You can’t expect to provide this kind of personalized, high-quality CX to a large customer base if you rely on manual processes. Automation is essential to keeping customers happy at scale.

What Qualtrics does

Qualtrics analyzes your customer interactions, determines which groups of customers love and hate each one, and gives you recommendations on how to design and deliver better experiences for each type of customer.

How it does it

Qualtrics collects every customer interaction (thanks in part to its impressive roster of integrations), analyzes what customers say about their experiences, and creates a highly detailed profile of each customer. It then groups customers into highly targeted segments based on their responses to your various experiences.

With these detailed customer profiles and groupings, Qualtrics can model the impact of each interaction based on how customers responded to it. This information helps you create more personalized, relevant experiences for each customer. Qualtrics also supports you as you deploy these unique experiences at scale by automating how your organization responds to interactions.

SupportLogic: Predict and prevent customer escalations

SupportLogic provides “support experience” (SX) software that monitors support conversations, predicts when a customer is a churn risk, and alerts the support team, so they can proactively step in and make the customer happy.

Why you should care

Companies have recognized that customer support and customer experience are inextricably linked. CX is a top customer support priority for 88% of companies, according to Deloitte.

Listening to what customers are directly saying, as well as the sentiment behind it, helps you better understand what they think about your company (and may be saying about you elsewhere).

What SupportLogic does

SupportLogic mines customer support interactions to identify when the customer may be getting frustrated or upset. It then alerts the support team, so they can take a closer look and proactively resolve the situation. This helps you:

• Improve the customer’s experience.
• Retain customers who may have otherwise stopped doing business with you.

How it does it

SupportLogic scans the content and historical context of your customer support tickets and uses its patent-pending artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) technology—trained through over 60 million customer interactions—to analyze customer sentiment.

When it identifies that a customer is likely to escalate a support ticket, might be thinking about canceling their account, or otherwise needs extra attention, SupportLogic alerts your team so that they can proactively assess the situation, determine how to resolve the problem, and make the customer happy.

UserReport: Discover what your customers want

UserReport provides streamlined tools for collecting customers’ suggestions for your company.

Why you should care

If you build features that customers don’t want instead of the ones they do, your business suffers in two ways:

• You waste money and time creating features customers don’t want.
• You signal to customers that they aren’t your top priority.

If you can uncover which changes customers value, you can better focus your product roadmap.

What UserReport does

UserReport gives businesses an easy way to get customer feedback on what features, products, or changes to implement.

How it does it

UserReport adds a feedback forum to your website. On the forum, customers can vote on potential new features (that you or other customers have suggested) and add their own ideas.

Get More Reviews: Use customer feedback to build credibility

Get More Reviews provides an easy way to get customers to share their opinions of your business with you and the world.

Why you should care

Companies can win more customers by creating a steady stream of positive reviews. Over 90% of people read online reviews, and 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a recommendation from a friend.

Negative feedback is also helpful—it shows companies where they need to improve.

What Get More Reviews does

Get More Reviews helps businesses generate online reviews and address any negative feedback they receive.

How it does it

Get More Reviews sends customers an email and/or SMS with a link to review your company.

You can choose which sites to ask for reviews on—from major sites like Google, Yelp, and Facebook as well as niche ones like G2Crowd and Capterra—to build up your credibility on a given site or spread the reviews across multiple platforms.

Usersnap: Get more, better feedback from customers

Usersnap helps companies uncover what users think of their software.

Why you should care

The easier you make it for customers to share feedback, the more customers will do so, and the more representative of your overall customer voice that feedback will be.

Along the same lines, if you give customers the tools to include additional details (such as videos or screenshots) with their feedback, the more useful and actionable that feedback is likely to be.

What Usersnap does

Usersnap collects suggestions, bug reports, and other actionable product feedback from customers directly within your mobile or web app.

How it does it

Usersnap prompts customers to rate their experience, suggest improvements, report problems, and contact support directly in your app. It also gives customers user-friendly tools to include screenshots, annotations, and video recordings with their feedback so that you get a full picture of what they’re experiencing.

Promoter.io: Improve your e-commerce experience

Promoter.io provides a plug-and-play solution for Shopify stores and other e-commerce companies to collect customer feedback and connect with their biggest fans.

Why you should care

In order to make good decisions about your products, pricing, messaging, and more, you need to understand what customers think when they visit your e-commerce store.

You can increase revenue by finding and engaging with both your brand advocates and your detractors:

• Engage with brand advocates to generate testimonials, online reviews, and other marketing assets.
• Engage with detractors to reduce returns, increase customer loyalty, and maximize lifetime value (LTV).

What Promoter.io does

Promoter.io prompts shoppers to rate their experiences and share more detailed feedback. This helps companies identify their brand advocates and detractors.

How it does it

Promoter.io collects feedback via one-time or recurring surveys that it delivers either on the store, in an email, or via SMS. It also makes it easy for customers to include audio or video with their feedback so that you can more fully understand what they’re experiencing and thinking.

Based on the feedback that people leave, Promoter.io identifies fans and detractors so that the company can reach out to them.

Promoter.io: Improve your e-commerce experience

Promoter.io provides a plug-and-play solution for Shopify stores and other e-commerce companies to collect customer feedback and connect with their biggest fans.

Why you should care

In order to make good decisions about your products, pricing, messaging, and more, you need to understand what customers think when they visit your e-commerce store.

You can increase revenue by finding and engaging with both your brand advocates and your detractors:

• Engage with brand advocates to generate testimonials, online reviews, and other marketing assets.
• Engage with detractors to reduce returns, increase customer loyalty, and maximize lifetime value (LTV).

What Promoter.io does

Promoter.io prompts shoppers to rate their experiences and share more detailed feedback. This helps companies identify their brand advocates and detractors.

How it does it

Promoter.io collects feedback via one-time or recurring surveys that it delivers either on the store, in an email, or via SMS. It also makes it easy for customers to include audio or video with their feedback so that you can more fully understand what they’re experiencing and thinking.

Based on the feedback that people leave, Promoter.io identifies fans and detractors so that the company can reach out to them.

Choose the VoC tool that’s right for your business

Whether your business needs help listening to customers, figuring out exactly what they’re communicating, or translating their feedback into a plan for improving your customer experience and growing your business, there’s a tool above that may be able to help you.

With SupportLogic’s Support Experience Platform, you can analyze and predict when customers are likely to be unhappy with their customer support experience. With the platform’s powerful features—such as predictive alerts, quick customer overviews, and easy collaboration—your support teams can reduce escalations while providing the most integrated and well-rounded customer experience possible.