Regardless of the clear value of customer feedback, few businesses have people with the skills and the time to analyse it, draw conclusions, initiate action and monitor the results. Even huge corporations with data scientists invest in a Voice of the Customer platform to do the grunt work, be unbiased and demonstrate a return on investment.
Leaders in SMEs and smaller corporates might feel they miss out as they need a lighter solution to the same bottleneck. But dozens of businesses from established names to start-ups support this market, they just don’t have the same marketing reach. So, Delta Swan sought a way of bridging the gap to help SMEs find the right tool for them.
By interviewing and assessing the capabilities of ten vendors, we built a consistent, detailed comparison of each. The reviews cover the steps to use feedback from gathering insights to celebrating success, technology, implementation, support through growth and pricing. Any SME or small corporate can use the reviews to short-list vendors with the skills that match their needs, and our white paper helps determine those needs.
All the vendors take their clients through an improvement journey analysing data and presenting insights through dashboards. They each use their expertise to help clients make the most of feedback. As the table shows at the highest level their capabilities are seem similar, but the devil is in the detail. Considering just the inner loop – resolving individual customer issues – we found different approaches.
- Five vendors provide in platform case management and integration to case management systems. Hello Customer, Limetropy, OPINATOR, sandsiv+ and XI platform.
- One vendor gives clients the opportunity to direct each piece of feedback to the right team through collaborative tools such as Slack or Survicate
- Three others offer dashboard monitoring and feedback closure: LoopVOC, OMBEA and Wootric.
- MyCustomerLens has the functionality to reply to feedback received in surveys but goes no further. Is this a weakness? I believe not. Its clients’ employees have one-to-one relationships with customers, a software platform could get in the way.
So, before you even shortlist the vendors, map out the customer journey and supporting processes, then pick out the vendors that best fit and ask them to show you their capabilities. For more detail, visit this link.