Analyzing high volumes of customer feedback on a regular basis is not a job for humans.
We takes ages. We get things wrong. We bring opinion into the mix. And, frankly, we get bored easily.
But, do you know who (or what) excels at this task?
Computers. It's computers.
Especially those equipped with artificial intelligence—which just loves to process language and derive meaning from vast quantities of free text left by customers who can hardly spell (no shade, you know it's true).
In this article, I'll introduce you to 7 customer feedback analysis tools equipped with AI and built to turn your surveys, reviews, and support conversations into piercing insights that you can use to finally prove to your boss to fix that thing that's been annoying you.
P.S. Save yourself a 20-minute read and check out the best ever Feedback Analytics Platform directly. No, we're not biased.👀
4 Must-Have Features of a Customer Feedback Analysis Tool
- Does the tool bring together all your feedback channels into one place? The best customer feedback analysis tools will integrate with all your customer channels—whether support conversations (emails, webchats, voice calls, etc) or feedback (surveys and reviews).
- Does the tool provide genuinely useful insights? Impactful tools will help you get to the root cause of customer sentiment drivers—and the more granular and actionable the analysis the better. We want confident, evidence-based insights—not word clouds.
- Is the tool easy to use by anyone who needs it? Advanced analytics don’t need to come at a high training cost. Complex tools create difficult-to-use insights, but insights really should be easy to access, share, and take action on—by any member of the team.
- Is the tool’s dashboard flexible and empowering? A truly great customer feedback analysis tool will empower you with deep customizations and automations to make your teams’ every-day work more efficient.
In this guide, we’ll introduce you to SentiSum (our AI-powered customer feedback analysis platform) and show you how it excels in the above areas.
We’ll also list 6 alternatives to help you make an informed decision and choose the right tool for you.
The 7 Best Customer Feedback Analysis Tools (In a Nutshell)
In a nutshell, here are the six customer feedback analysis tools we'll look at today:
- SentiSum: The Best Customer Feedback Analysis Tool
- MonkeyLearn: The Best Customer Feedback Analysis Tool for DIY Text Analytics
- Idiomatic: A Great Alternative Multichannel Customer Feedback Analysis Tool
- Brandwatch: The Best Customer Feedback Analysis Tool for Social Media
- SurveyMonkey: The Best Customer Feedback Analysis Tool for Complete Beginners
- SupportLogic: The Best Customer Feedback Analysis Tool for B2B
- CustomerGauge: The Feedback Analysis Tool for B2B Net Promoter Programs
1. SentiSum: The Best Customer Feedback Analysis Software Overall
Quick summary: SentiSum is a flexible and easy-to-use tool for customer feedback analysis. With its AI technology, it serves insights from across all your support channels, surveys, and reviews, to help you confidently make customer experience decisions.
SentiSum is a customer feedback analysis software that uses AI to analyze feedback from every single customer channel. In a nutshell, here’s how it works:
- Natural language processing (NLP) technology consumes and analyzes each customer conversation, review, or survey response
- Machine learning applies granular tags on customer sentiment, topics, keywords, and more
- SentiSum’s customizable dashboard makes it really easy to dig into key, relevant insights, using generative AI to answer any questions you may have.
Customer experience and support teams in medium and large enterprises often receive thousands of customer tickets and feedback every month. At this volume, it’s really difficult to analyze and extract insights that you can have any confidence in.
That’s a problem SentiSum was designed to solve. The customer feedback analysis tool brings together insights from all of your customer interactions, in real-time. This way, you can easily access concrete evidence of how your customers are feeling—and then take action.
Let’s look in detail at how SentiSum compares next to the factors we outlined above.
1. SentiSum analyzes feedback from all your customer interactions
Without a holistic tool, customer feedback and sentiment insights get siloed in different teams. One team may have survey data, while another has customer reviews.
The trouble is that each team only gets a part of the puzzle—and they end up making decisions based on incomplete information.
That’s why SentiSum uses machine learning to bring together and analyze what your customers are saying across every single feedback channel. This way, everyone gets a joined-up picture of how customers are feeling, no matter how they’re interacting with you.
With SentiSum, feedback teams can:
- Link up customer survey data with support tickets. SentiSum lets you track customers across various feedback channels. It often happens that a customer might leave you an NPS score, without telling you why. By connecting all your feedback, you can cross-reference data for relevant insights.
- Standardize the way you analyze every piece of feedback. If different teams are accessing different data in different tools, they’ll be analyzing that data differently too. SentiSum standardizes your analysis across all your tools, to give you more consistent, trustworthy insights.
- Access insights that would otherwise have remained hidden. SentiSum can extract insights from hard-to-access feedback channels such as voice calls, thanks to our NLP technology.
SentiSum makes it really easy to understand all your customer feedback in one place. This way, your feedback analysis is standardized and more complete, but it’s also a lot easier too.
2. SentiSum gives you customer sentiment insights you can have confidence in
As you’re receiving and analyzing customer feedback already, there’s a good chance you have a broad sense of how your customers are feeling. For a customer feedback analysis tool to have value, it should give you concrete, evidence-based insights you don’t know already.
SentiSum does exactly that, by extracting deep, actionable information from what your customers are saying. Our software empowers you to:
- Get real-time insights into customer feedback, thanks to automated sentiment and keyword tagging. As soon as feedback comes in, it’s automatically tagged by SentiSum’s sentiment analysis technology. This lets you quickly click through high-level customer topics, and dig deeper to identify specific keywords and phrases.
- Dig deeper into sentiment and feedback drivers. If your customers are repeatedly mentioning “late delivery”, you can dive deeper to see keywords such as “parcel tracking”. It gives you a much more granular picture of your customers’ issues—and how they’re feeling.
- Search or ask questions and get an immediate answer. You can search for your latest product and see every time customers have mentioned it. Or ask a natural-language question—such as “why have CSAT scores dropped recently?”—and SentiSum’s AI assistant will provide an answer.
SentiSum is built to equip your customer feedback and support teams with the evidence they need to make decisions confidently.
3. SentiSum makes it easy for anyone to access the insights they need
Too often, customer feedback analysis tools are difficult to set up and extract insights from. With SentiSum, your teams can start analyzing feedback and making improvements without any training at all.
We’ve built SentiSum to be as easy to use as possible. This way, customer experience teams can:
- Simply log in and get a clear, real-time picture of key data. You’ll immediately get an understanding of patterns in feedback and customer sentiment, including top negative drivers, how NPS and CSAT scores have changed, and more.
- Quickly find answers to any question you have. SentiSum’s AI assistant can immediately serve detailed, natural-language answers to any query—whether that’s on feedback trends, sentiment drivers, or recent products.
- Search for data and create clear reports in seconds. If a different department has a query, simply search SentiSum and get the answer. Then, you can share those insights into beautiful reports in a matter of moments.
4. SentiSum delivers the right feedback data to the specific team that needs it
Any customer feedback tool is only as useful as the dashboard itself. If it’s clunky, rigid, and difficult to use, it will be hard to access the insights you need.
We’ve developed SentiSum to make it as effortless as possible for each team to access the specific insights they need. Every team has a tailored view on the information that’s relevant to them, served directly to them by SentiSum’s automations.
- Tailor each team’s dashboard for department-specific insights. Your logistics team inevitably needs different feedback data to your marketing team. Each team can set up a dashboard to highlight the information they’ll need most urgently—so they don’t need to sift through insights that are irrelevant to them.
- Analyze separate feedback types in separate views. While SentiSum gives you a complete picture on all customer channels, you can separate them out to get a deeper view into each one. For instance, if you have a team member whose focus is customer surveys, they’ll have less need for support ticket data.
- Be served relevant data automatically. By immediately analyzing and tagging feedback, SentiSum can identify which teams can best handle specific customer interactions. The software will automatically direct that ticket or piece of feedback to the individual responsible—so they can respond more quickly and efficiently.
SentiSum Reviews
Pros
- SentiSum is really easy to set up and gain insights from. “I think I only spent about half an hour with the team at SentiSum when we first got it and I was able to pick it up quite easily, the technology is quite intuitive.” Bhavik Patel, Hopin. Read the case study here.
- SentiSum is highly flexible for different use cases and teams. "We're very impressed by the technology itself, but even more so by the relentless effort the team puts in to support our specific use case." Johannes Ganter, Head of CRM and Digital Transformation at James Villas. Learn more about their story here.
SentiSum supports action to improve the customer experience. “Overall, SentiSum has been a game changer for Butternut Box. It’s allowed the company to gain a deeper understanding of customer feedback so they can take action, prioritize key metrics, and drive meaningful change across the entire business.” Selene Riontino, Insights Lead at Butternut Box. Find out more here.
Cons
- SentiSum has a niche focus on support and feedback analysis. It won’t help you to analyze other kinds of text.
- SentiSum may be too costly for smaller brands with lower volumes of tickets. Ultimately, it’s built for medium and large businesses.
Pricing
SentiSum offers two flexible pricing plans:
- Starting tier: from $3,000 a month. It’s designed for mid-market companies and analyzes thousands of monthly conversations, historical data from the last 6 months, and much more.
- Enterprise tier: This plan is entirely customizable. Pricing is based on your needs, including your number of users, feedback channels, conversations, and languages.
Book a demo with us to find out how SentiSum can work for your organization.
2. MonkeyLearn: The Best Customer Feedback Tool for Broad, DIY, Text Analytics
Quick summary: MonkeyLearn is a really flexible AI text analysis tool for teams that may want to analyze more than customer feedback. It’s also DIY, meaning you’ll have to train the AI yourself.
MonkeyLearn is a tool that was originally built for analytics of free text in general. You can feed any qualitative text into the software and apply some tags to train their AI to analyze the rest of the dataset.
While MonkeyLearn has a wide potential use, the product is now mainly focused around customer support and feedback analysis. There used to be a free trial you could sign up to, but since MonkeyLearn was acquired by Medallia, the customer experience software brand, this seems to have been removed.
Aside from its flexibility, what makes MonkeyLearn stand out is that it is entirely DIY. This means you initially have to train the tool’s AI yourself, by tagging surveys and support tickets manually. This can be quite time-consuming, and it’s a concrete disadvantage when other tools don't require so much heavy lifting by you or your team.
Related Read: Top 3 MonkeyLearn Alternatives
MonkeyLearn Pros and Cons
Pros
- MonkeyLearn is extremely adaptable. The tool will handle any ticket channel you can throw at it. You can set up the software to identify industry-specific issues, as you’ll be teaching the AI what to look for yourself.
Cons
- MonkeyLearn takes time to set up and doesn’t offer the deepest insights. You need to set up MonkeyLearn before you can use it. Once you’re started, the insights it provides can be quite limited.
Pricing
MonkeyLearn costs $299 a month for 10,000 queries. Contact them for more custom pricing.
3. Idiomatic: The Best for Feedback Insights Tool for Small Survey Sentiment Analysis
Quick summary: Idiomatic is quite similar in functionality to SentiSum.
Idiomatic is a voice of the customer tool that’s designed to be incredibly easy to use. Like SentiSum, it doesn’t require that you train AI before you start analyzing. Instead, Idiomatic aims to make customer feedback analysis as smooth as possible.
The key difference from SentiSum is that Idiomatic doesn’t let you ask any question you might have about your customer insights. Instead, Idiomatic simply summarizes insights into your customer feedback. It means that getting really granular is less easy with Idiomatic, as some users point out.
It’s also worth knowing that Idiomatic was originally built for customer survey feedback analysis. It still performs a lot better in these areas than in analyzing support tickets, for instance.
Idiomatic Pros & Cons
Pros
- Idiomatic is really easy to set up, use, and extract insights from. Thanks to the tool’s AI, Idiomatic makes it easy to quickly get the information you need into what your customers are telling you.
Cons
- Idiomatic is not a fully self-serve software. G2 reviews suggest Idiomatic users feel dependent on the brand’s customer success to customize the dashboard. This can be a little limiting.
Pricing
With Idiomatic, the amount you pay depends on the number of data sources you use, such as help desk tickets, surveys, and comments:
- $399 monthly, per simple data source (such as reviews, social media, or simple surveys)
- $1,999 monthly, per complex data source (such as support tickets or more complex surveys).
4. Brandwatch: The Best Customer Feedback Analysis Software for Social Media
Quick summary: Brandwatch is a suite of tools to help you manage your social media—and for that, it’s great. It won’t let you track customer survey feedback however.
Brandwatch is a well-established brand offering tools to help you manage your social media. Across its suite, it offers a range of functionality, including tools to manage influencer relationships, track conversations about your brand, and consolidate your messages into a single inbox.
“Listen” is Brandwatch’s social media feedback and sentiment analysis tool. It helps you to track topics and analyze what customers are saying directly to you, but it also enables you to monitor brand mentions and public reviews too. As such, it’s a robust and holistic social media tool.
Like all tools, there is a downside. With Brandwatch, you won’t be able to manage other feedback channels, such as voice messages or emails. It means you’ll end up needing a separate tool to track insights that come through these channels.
Brandwatch Pros and Cons
Pros
- Brandwatch brings together everything you need for social media management and analysis. It’s a powerful tool that integrates all of your social media interactions and channels.
Cons
- Brandwatch is expensive, and it may be too much to pay when you’ll need an additional feedback analysis tool for other channels. As Brandwatch doesn’t handle every single feedback channel, you’ll need an additional tool for a complete view.
5. SurveyMonkey: The Best Customer Feedback Analysis Tool for Complete Beginners
Quick summary: SurveyMonkey is a widely used surveying tool. If you’re just getting started with customer feedback analysis, this solid option will help you create surveys and access basic insights.
SurveyMonkey is a tool designed to help brands build, distribute, and analyze custom surveys.
As such, it’s both more and less than a standard customer feedback analysis tool. On the one hand, it’ll help you to manage the entire process of collecting survey feedback. However, as it’s not a dedicated analysis tool, it won’t give the depth of insights of other tools on this list.
For many smaller teams that are just kicking off their feedback programs, this will often be more than enough. SurveyMonkey’s NPS and CSAT survey templates, for instance, make it really easy to get started with collecting feedback. Then, the tool’s AI will analyze response topics and categorize responses with basic sentiment analysis.
That said, if you’re after more granular insights—and analysis of other channels—it’s best to look elsewhere.
SurveyMonkey Pros and Cons
Pros
- SurveyMonkey is designed as a straightforward, customizable survey tool. Build, manage, and analyze your surveys in a single software.
Cons
- SurveyMonkey won’t be robust enough for larger datasets and more sophisticated analysis. If you’re looking for deeper analyses, or insights from social media feedback, you’ll need a different tool.
Pricing
SurveyMonkey has a free plan in which you can only ask 10 survey questions, with a single user. Then, there are three paid plans:
- Team Advantage: Priced from $25 per user per month
- Team Premier: From $75 per user per month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
6. SupportLogic: The Best B2B Customer Feedback Analytics Tool
Quick summary: SupportLogic is a customer feedback tool that’s designed specifically for B2B organizations. Its automations make it an impressive software for this niche audience.
SupportLogic is a customer feedback analytics software that’s dedicated to serving B2B clients. It provides AI analysis of feedback from across a range of channels. But it won’t be appropriate for B2C organizations at all.
SupportLogic’s features were designed with B2B needs in mind. For instance, it has tools to analyze the risk of customer churn, or the risk of support ticket escalation. Plus, its AI was specifically trained on B2B conversations.
The software’s ultimate goal is to equip teams to take action based on customer feedback insights. As such, the emphasis is not so much on detailed, granular analysis—meaning you won’t be able to dig deep into the feedback data itself.
SupportLogic Pros & Cons
Pros
- SupportLogic encourages proactive action of customer feedback. The software notifies you about negative customer sentiment, so you can intervene immediately.
Cons
- SupportLogic won’t equip you with the deepest insights. The tool isn’t built to enable you to deep-dive into the nitty gritty of customer opinion.
Pricing
SupportLogic does not publicly share its pricing. Speak to them directly for more information.
7. CustomerGauge: The Feedback Analysis Tool for B2B Net Promoter Programs
Quick summary: CustomerGauge is B2B-focused Net Promoter Tool. The analytics are incredible. They help you transform NPS feedback from customer accounts into clear insights for sales and account teams to use to drive retention and upsells.
CustomerGauge is a customer feedback analysis tool that’s used by B2B enterprise account teams. It goes without saying that B2C brands won’t be well-served by this solution—nor will anyone looking for granular insights on customer support conversations.
CustomerGauge's analysis goes a step further than other B2B feedback software by connecting account feedback data directly to revenue. What this means in practice is that it uses customer insights to help you identify opportunities for reducing churn, upselling customers, and generating referrals.
The customer success team at CustomerGauge are extremely good at helping companies start and expand Net Promoter Programs. Their in-depth Academy helps customers connect the dots between their NPS and revenue outcomes, so experience teams can finally help frontline teams drive more profit.
CustomerGauge Pros & Cons
Pros
- CustomerGauge uniquely links customer feedback directly to revenue metrics. It’s a really valuable tool to help you understand how customer sentiment affects your bottom line.
Cons
- CustomerGauge is heavily reliant on NPS as a central metric for customer satisfaction. If you want broader insights from a larger range of channels, this might be limiting.
Pricing
CustomerGauge pricing is not publicly available.