8 Best Voice of Customer Tools (2024 Tech Stack)

We’ve rounded up the top Voice of the Customer tools in 2024 to help you prioritize customer-centricity and ultimately drive revenue.

As PMs and PMMs, it’s a big part of our job to make sure that we’re building the right things for our customers. You know… features and products that our customers genuinely want and will pay for.

Voice of customer(VoC) research is the first step towards ensuring this – by improving your overall customer understanding with systems that help you structure all of your customers’ feedback.

But it’s not exactly an easy or short process. 

That’s where voice of customer software comes in.

By simplifying lengthy customer research processes, VoC software has helped companies like WorldStrides collect up to 6,000 points of customer feedback and connect customer insights to product ideas.

If you’re a PM or PMM looking to prioritize customer-centricity more efficiently, here are 6 hand-picked voice of the customer tools that you should look into in 2024. We’ll also show you 2 free VoC software that you can start using today for free.

• 6 Best voice of customer tools
• 2 Best free voice of customer tools
• VOC tools evaluation checklist
• Frequently asked questions about VOC tools

1. Best for connecting customer insights to product ideas that power your roadmap: Ignition

Customer feedback is essential to product development – but not all feedback is created equal. 

When doing customer research, it’s crucial to analyze your qualitative data as a whole so you don’t end up using insights that inaccurately represent your market.

This is why product and development teams have to be particular about where feedback is coming from. This involves asking whether the feature and product requests being prioritized are from your ICP or customers that form a large share of revenue.

In practice, though, mining VoC this way is easier said than done. To make sure the right customer insights are being prioritized, PMs and PMMs have to: 

• Spend hours sifting through customer data
• Summarize key findings and hunt down insights that are truly valuable
• Try to figure out whether feedback accurately reflects their ICP
• Use customer insights to brainstorm product ideas
• Make sure their product ideas positively impact current deals and revenue goals

To save PMs and PMMs the stress and drive revenue more easily, Ignition automates this entire process. 

First, it integrates with popular conversational intel tools and support ticketing systems (Gong, Intercom, Zendesk) to gather all of your customer data in one place.

Then, Ignition’s AI summarizes all of your customer feedback into consistent themes and product insights in seconds – saving you hours of work.

But the best part? When you connect Ignition to your CRM, it automatically uses these insights to create product ideas and show you which ones will drive revenue and affect current deals.

High-revenue ideas are prioritized by default in your product roadmap, and feature gaps blocking potential deals are added to your idea backlog. 

Ultimately this process saves PMs and PMMs hours of time on customer research. But more importantly, Ignition’s AI and automated workflows help you automatically align your product development and roadmaps with revenue – a method we like to call revenue-based roadmapping. You can then use this roadmap to instantly create a personalized launch plan in Ignition.

If you’re interested to see what this looks like in practice, you can get started automating your VoC tasks today by signing up for a free Ignition account.

(You’ll also get access to our other tools, and be able to automate loads of other product marketing and product management tasks such as competitive research, launch planning, and roadmapping using Ignition.)

Pros 

• Consolidates all of your customer research in one place
• Uses AI to extract valuable insights from all customer feedback points automatically
• Aligns insights from VoC research to product ideas that drive revenue

Cons

• Comes with a lot of features to learn for PMs and PMMs (We recommend starting with one use-case at a time)
• Getting your company to fully adopt Ignition comes with change 
• It may not be the best fit for small teams that only have a few customer feedback points

Features

• Centralize all customer data by integrating conversational intelligence tools, CRM data, and support ticketing systems (like Gong, Intercom, Zendesk, and Salesforce).
• Use AI to quickly summarize and analyze large volumes of customer feedback, identifying consistent themes and extracting valuable product insights.
• Translate these insights into actionable product ideas, prioritize feature requests, and create roadmaps and launch plans aligned with revenue opportunities
• Evaluate how these product ideas could impact your ongoing deals

Pricing

Ignition offers 3 pricing tiers:

• Freemium
• Liftoff - $79/editor/month (billed annually)
• Moonshot - Book a demo for enterprise-grade customization

Customer reviews

Here’s what Jean-Michel Van, a product leader with 15 years of product management experience, has to say about using Ignition:

“Ignition, with "GTM" in its name, lives up to expectations for market-facing activities. The standout feature is the "Ideas/backlog" in the Build section – a versatile backlog allowing easy filtering and display of valuable information. 

Ignition's simple views for presenting ideas by revenue impact, votes, or custom fields provide flexibility. Adding insights is seamless, sourced from various places, and CRM integration streamlines idea prioritization and notification to sales reps upon feature shipment. 

The OKR tracking offers neat execution visibility, while the voice of the customer section, coupled with Copilot, accelerates time to value significantly.”

2. Best for recorded sales calls: Gong

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If you’re looking for a voice of the customer tool that helps you extract insights from recorded sales calls, Gong is one of the best options to consider. As a conversation intelligence software, the platform can help product teams get a holistic picture of customer feedback. 

Gong does this by capturing and summarizing customer interactions from live video calls, phone calls, emails, and more to help teams make more data-driven decisions.

The platform can also help build an understanding of coaching opportunities for team members regarding critical sales behaviors and deal-closing skills.

Pros

• Multiple integrations with other software like Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, and Ignition at no added cost
• Automatic recording, transcription, and summarization of a large number of customer interactions
• Personalized AI-driven guidance on coaching opportunities for sales reps, forecasting accuracy, and which deals to prioritize 

Cons

• Some users have reported a tough onboarding process
• Expensive as a standalone software
• Mobile experience and search functionality are reported to be confusing

Features

• Capture customer interactions from a wide variety of touchpoints
• AI conversational analysis that processes key topics, top questions, action items, and relationship dynamics
• Personalized guidance on deal execution, rep performance, and coaching opportunities

Pricing

Gong is priced per recorded user and also has a platform fee.

You can get an accurate pricing estimate here.

Customer reviews

Here’s what Jen L., a VP of Client Success & Sales Ops, has to say about using Gong:

“What do you like best about Gong?

Amazing tool that helps an entire org, not just the sales team. Product teams, marketing teams, sales teams, sales leaders, sales operations, delivery teams, etc. Everyone can use this tool to better align on client needs, deliverables, timelines, wish lists, etc. Implementation was quick and easy, its highly intuitive, the product team is extremely responsive and creates new features quickly. Its quickly becoming a go to tool!

What do you dislike about Gong?

Wish the reporting functionality was a bit more robust, with in platform report building capabilities. Its solid, but I find I always need a bit more.

What problems is Gong solving and how is that benefiting you?

Company wide learning, client product needs, client briefings, sales tool.”

3. Best for gathering insights from customer support: Intercom

Combining an AI chatbot, help desk, and customer support system into one platform, Intercom is an excellent tool for gathering customer support feedback.

By integrating all customer support channels into one system, Intercom makes it easy for teams to take a data-driven approach to improving customer service. 

Intercom’s data and analytic tools can help PMs and PMMs gain insights from customer support interactions about what is and isn’t working for their customer experience. By integrating with Ignition, your CRM, internal databases, and reporting tools, these customer insights can be more easily implemented into product roadmaps and development processes.

Pros

• AI chatbots respond instantly to most questions – only the most complex queries transition to support tickets.
• Data and analytics tools provide insights into customer interaction patterns.
• Ability to create Help Center articles and Product tours

Cons

• Users have reported confusing and expensive pricing.
• While multiple integrations exist, HubSpot currently doesn’t have an integration available.
• Routing and automation processes for support tickets can sometimes be unnecessarily complicated.

Features

• On-brand customer messaging - Personalized business messenger and support automation for your product, app, or website.
• Customized chatbots - No-code chatbots that collect and prioritize customer feedback
• Data and analytics - Analyze and gain insights into customer feedback patterns
• Product Tours and Help Center - Guide users through onboarding and common support requests 

Pricing

Intercom offers 3 pricing plans:

• Essential - $39/seat/month
• Advanced - $99/seat/month
• Expert - $139/seat/month

For more details, check out Intercom’s pricing page.

Customer reviews

Here’s what Megan H., who works at a mid-market company, has to say about using Intercom:

“What do you like best about Intercom?

Absolutely brilliant tool to be able to connect with customers. We are able to easily set up different banners, notifications and surveys/polls within the platform and have them go live instantly. Not only is it brilliant for our CS team but our Marketing team are able to get lots of value out of it for connecting with the customer to promote events, promotions, or collect feedback.

What do you dislike about Intercom?

There isn't anything major but a minor gripe is the search functionality when refining audience, sometimes 'job title' doesn't seem to show all the results for example.

What problems is Intercom solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are able to access all of our customers with a few clicks of a button, able to get quick feedback, answers to questions or promote specific events/campaigns.”

4. Best for surveys: SurveyMonkey

An industry leader in survey software, SurveyMonkey offers a great solution for quickly capturing, understanding, and incorporating customer feedback into product decisions. 

The platform offers a range of specialized VoC templates for customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, customer service, and other surveys. The analysis features make it easy to summarize insights from survey results. Multiple integrations are available with analytics platforms, CRMs, and collaboration tools to integrate client feedback more easily into product decisions.

Pros

• Industry leader in survey software
• Multiple survey templates are available
• Can help product teams quickly get an idea about their customer experience

Cons 

• Relying heavily (or only) on surveys may lead to inaccurate customer data that doesn’t correctly represent your ICP.
• Survey results aren’t analyzed with the effects of product ideas on revenue in mind.
• The VoC templates may be too simplistic for those wanting a deeper understanding of their customers.

Features 

• Create voice of customer surveys using a range of templates or your own questions
• Collect results in one centralized location and analyze them for insights
• Integrate data with multiple other tools and software to make data more actionable 

Pricing 

SurveyMonkey offers multiple pricing plans for individuals and teams:

• Freemium
• Individualssome text
  • Standard Monthly - $99/month
  • Advantage Annual –  $468/year (billed annually)
  • Premier Annual – $1428/year (billed annually)
• Teamssome text
  • Team Advantage – $25/month per user, starting at 3 users (billed annually)
  • Team Premier – $75/month per user, starting at 3 users (billed annually)
  • Enterprise – contact sales for pricing

For more details, check out SurveyMonkey’s pricing page here.

Customer reviews

Here’s what Gaëtan, VP PMO and Delivery in a German company, has to say about using SurveyMonkey:

“Overall I could save a lot of time using Survey Monkey to build high performing surveys about Customer satisfaction. The results provided on the Reporting dashboards were clear and I could find easily how to improve my customers satisfaction. But this tool requires to spend a significant budget.”

Pros:

“The AI-based helper is really a plus when it comes to building precise and insightful survey questions: a lot of time saved and high quality results.”

Cons:

“The price of the plans, it's quite a budget if you are not a pure player but use Survey Monkey from time to time to get insights of Customer satisfaction.”

5. Best for customer reviews: G2 

G2 is a well-known customer review website that is specifically great for SaaS companies. If you’re looking for a website more geared to your industry, Trustpilot and Amazon are also good options to consider. 

Mining customer reviews for voice of the customer is a great and easy way to understand customer pain points, common issues with your product, and feature requests – along with the tone and language your audience uses to communicate these things. It’s also important to keep track of customer reviews in your industry so you can stay ahead of the game with respect to what your customers are truly looking for. 

G2 and other customer review sites simplify the process of staying updated on customer feedback with a range of filters, summaries, pros and cons lists, and details on pricing and features. 

But if you don’t have the time to hunt down reviews that contain valuable insight, try using Ignition’s free AI Sales Battlecard Generator. This tool integrates with G2 and other review sites to instantly extract insights and create battlecards for your own company and competitors based on their product reviews. We recommend signing up for a free Ignition account and connecting your CRM for the best results – our AI works best when it’s powered and trained by your own data.

Pros 

• Free version available
• Authentic reviews by real users
• Filters, pros and cons lists, summaries, and comparisons can help to get a quick overview of common customer sentiments and the position of the product in the industry

Cons

• It may take too much time to hunt down valuable insights from customer reviews without the help of additional software
• Users report that there is an occasional inconsistency in review quality
• The onboarding process can get overwhelming for new users

Features 

• Post reviews of products with the option to record a video interview
• Verify product reviews and check how active the reviewer is on the platform
• Businesses can request honest reviews from customers
• Advanced customization options, review promotion, and analytics are available on paid plans

Pricing 

G2 is available for free and also has paid plans for business users. You’ll have to contact sales for pricing.

Customer reviews

Here’s what Lee S., who works at a small business, has to say about using G2:

What do you like best about G2.com?

The AI-assisted search for products on their page make it easy to locate the item piquing one's curiosity. As both a reviewer AND user of the platform, I personally appreciate the reviews go through an evaluation process before being published, which is one of the major reasons they can market themselves as "the largest and most trusted software marketplace." I do not know what criteria the editors use to determine what reviews are accepted/published, but they also "do not, under any circumstances, edit the content of any review." As a contributor, this is imperative to sustain the authenticity of the respective writer's content (ergo, I assume the material is either accepted as submitted or outright rejected).

There are a considerable amount of items listed with G2.com to survey and it is always beneficial to read about the experiences of others. While it may be fun being the first to try a package, rarely does that make anyone in the business world comfortable. The reality is people check with others and those parties to whom we pay the most attention are those who more closely align with ourselves in business size, budgets, and need. G2 makes it easy to see which reviewers represent large organizations vs. small, so each reader can take those characteristics into account with the product analysis.

For those looking for "executive summary" quick-hit style, G2 offers breakdowns of "Highest-Rated Features" and "Lowest-Rated Features" (mileage may vary on the statistical relevance, however). Reseachers looking for graphical interpretation of ratings can also get those via G2 with its "Top Industries Represented" and "User Ratings" (including comparison with averages) sections.

G2 also makes it easy to find competing vendors and make comparisons, although doing so requires more critical analysis than merely looking at rating scores in the standard silos (e.g., "meets requirements, ease of use," etc.).

I also like how each reviewer's submission is labeled when appropriate with tags like "review source: Seller invite" so the reader can appreciate the catalyst for the write-up in the first place.

What do you dislike about G2.com?

Mileage may vary with respect to the review content, especially since the main questions of "What do you like best about x" and "what do you dislike about x" are subject to the writer's interpretation (are they referring to the company, the service/support, and/or the specific product?). Some reviews that were accepted by the editors I personally would have rejected for not really offering much insight and appeared to be submitted without much content.

Discussions for several products appear stale with few answers posted, so not sure how relevant this section may be compared with posts on Reddit, for example.

6. Best for social listening: Mention

Mention is a social listening and monitoring tool that can be used to monitor the web, analyze online conversations, and manage social media. 

The platform lets you track over a billion data sources across the web, including social media channels, to understand your brand’s reputation better and conduct in-depth sentiment analysis.

Mention provides real-time alerts and allows you to schedule detailed reports for different stakeholders and create instant visualizations of tracked topics.

Pros 

• Comprehensive tracking is available across multiple web sources, including social media
• Gives you real-time alerts anytime you get mentioned on social media
• Robust visualization abilities for tracked topics in the form of charts, maps, and key numbers

Cons

• The platform doesn’t capture historical data after the creation of a Boolean search
• It can be difficult to refine a search without assistance from a Mention representative
• Pricing may not always be affordable for smaller organizations

Features 

• Monitor keywords and pages and get real-time alerts anytime your tracked topics are mentioned
• Analyze reach, volume, sentiment, location, sources, and more, and create charts and maps
• Engage with customers from one combined social inbox, create content, and collaborate more efficiently with an approval workflow and content library

Pricing 

Mention offers 4 pricing plans:

• Solo – $41/month (billed annually)
• Pro – $83/month (billed annually)
• ProPlus – $149/month (billed annually)
• Company Plan – contact sales for pricing

Customer reviews

Here’s what Agatka J., a marketing specialist at an enterprise, has to say about using Mention:

What do you like best about Mention?

Mention allows us to create alerts and allow us to perform searches with our filters. We can easily monitor the profiles of our brand. With the searched keywords we can easily review and digest the email list. Their dashboards and is very simple to use and we do not have to learn many skills to use their dashboards. There are exceptional packages for the filters and Boolean search. It has a simple interface and is very easy to navigate.

What do you dislike about Mention?

Mention does not have an affordable price always and it is not cheap for every business and organization. email website directly from the platform. There is no macOS app available for their features. There must be more social media platforms available for their features. They must add more profiles to monitor

Best free VoC tools

Ignition’s AI transcript summarizer

Our free AI transcript summarizer can be used to summarize transcripts from your customer and product research calls. Use it to extract:

• Critical points of customer feedback
• Feature requests
• Product strengths and weaknesses
• Value/problems expressed

Reddit

For spying on public forums, Reddit is one of the best free research tools out there. Large communities of your ICP are posting daily on Reddit about their pain points, interests, frustrations – making it an excellent place to learn about your audience (or potential customers) in an authentic way. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started:

• Use site operators to narrow down your search. For example, if you were trying to find common pain points for product managers you could search this on Google: site:https://www.reddit.com/productmanagement/ ”frustrated”
• Find the most popular posts in communities of your ICP by setting your filters to “sort by top”.
• Use subreddit stats to find common keywords that the community is using.

VOC tools evaluation checklist

• Does it integrate with your other tools and data sources?
• Does it give you admin permissions?
• If it uses AI: Have you tested the AI output to make sure its accurate?
• How many different types of customer data is the tool giving you access to?

Frequently asked questions about VOC tools

What is the Voice of the Customer Method? 

The Voice of the Customer (VoC) method is a structured approach used by product marketers and managers to gather and understand what customers truly want and need. It involves collecting feedback directly from customers through surveys, interviews, reviews, and other channels. By analyzing this feedback, businesses can identify trends, preferences, and pain points of their target audience. This insight helps in shaping product development, improving customer experiences, and ultimately, boosting satisfaction and loyalty. Essentially, VoC ensures that products and services align closely with what customers expect and value most.

What is an example of voice of customer analysis?

An example of Voice of Customer (VoC) analysis could be a software company gathering user feedback through online surveys and one-on-one interviews. They ask specific questions about usability, feature preferences, and overall satisfaction with the product. By carefully analyzing this feedback, the company discovers that users find a particular feature confusing and desire more integration with other tools they use daily. With these insights, the company can prioritize updates and improvements that directly address these issues, enhancing user experience and satisfaction.

Ready to use customer-centricity to drive revenue?

It's time to start aligning your voice of customer research with high-revenue opportunities. Ignition helps PMs and PMMs prioritize customer-centricity with revenue in mind – so that they can build the right things for their market and hit their KPIs with ease.

Get started by signing up for a free Ignition account today.