Survey tools are the most commonly thought-of type of customer feedback software. However, our decade-plus experience helping enterprises gather customer feedback for product innovation purposes has revealed four key limitations:
Limited collaboration: Surveys prevent customers from co-creating with employees and stakeholders. Once a survey is submitted, customer insights end. This results in missed opportunities to capture critical input during development and implementation, leaving potential improvements unrealized.
Siloed insights: Customer insights are often isolated within various survey tools, web forms, and spreadsheets, as different departments collect and manage feedback data independently. This fragmentation makes it difficult to understand overall customer sentiment, leading to innovation based on incomplete feedback data rather than a comprehensive view of the customer base.
Lack of context: Surveys rarely provide customers with enough context about company priorities to brainstorm meaningful solutions. As a result, companies collect generic feedback rather than actionable ideas.
Low engagement: Surveys often remain open indefinitely, creating little urgency for customers to respond. Many delay, saying they’ll complete the survey “when they have time,” which rarely happens.
Fortunately, other types of customer feedback tools can address these limitations.
In this guide, we explore several options, starting with an in-depth review of how our platform, InnovationCast, helps companies:
Collect customer feedback and centralize it for cross-departmental visibility.
Engage customers post-feedback by giving them visibility into how their input is being addressed and allowing them to refine solutions.
Gather high-quality ideas by providing context on current priorities.
Encourage timely feedback by creating a sense of urgency.
We then review simpler customer feedback software like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and SurveySparrow if you're still interested in a survey tool. (Feel free to skip to the end of the article for those options.)
To learn more about how InnovationCast can help you establish a company-wide customer feedback management system, schedule a free, 25-minute demo.
1. InnovationCast: Software That Manages Customer Feedback From Collection to Implementation
InnovationCast is an innovation management platform that helps companies gather high-quality customer insights and develop them into product or service improvements (or entirely new offerings).
When companies collect customer feedback through InnovationCast, it’s automatically displayed on the user interface for users (employees, stakeholders, customers, etc.) to view upon logging in.
Additionally, customer feedback data gathered outside of InnovationCast (social media, SMS, email surveys, CRM, etc.) can be integrated into the user interface, alongside data from customer-facing teams, such as sales calls and support tickets. (We’ll handle the setup during onboarding.)
This provides companies with a complete view of customer sentiment, ensuring innovation aligns with genuine customer needs and avoiding misdirected projects based on small sample sizes.
Once feedback is submitted, customers can track progress and co-create with teams to refine solutions before implementation.
Features to Capture Customer Feedback & Ideas
InnovationCast offers two ways to collect customer feedback:
Innovation Challenges: Companies can focus on specific areas of the product or service they want to improve and request customer feedback.
Category-based “Always On”: Customers can share insights on product weaknesses, dissatisfaction, and unmet needs that companies may not be aware of.
Innovation Challenges
Innovation Challenges are time-bound requests focused on specific topics. Companies can create challenges around areas of their product or service they want to improve, and InnovationCast notifies all customers (as well as customer-facing teams and other participants) to get involved.
Customers can explore the challenge details, learn about the company’s current priorities (e.g., improving onboarding or addressing specific customer experience issues), and share their thoughts and ideas.
We recommend that all our clients use Innovation Challenges to collect customer feedback over conventional surveys because:
Customers submit high-quality ideas: With the background information provided in the challenge, customers move beyond high-level feedback and propose solutions to problems. Engaging customers in ideation results in a portfolio of high-quality ideas rather than generic feedback.
Customers are emotionally invested in their solution: Involving customers in the problem-solving process gets them invested in the solution, encouraging continuous feedback throughout its development. This ongoing involvement increases the likelihood of developing solutions that meet customer needs.
Customers share feedback quickly: Since challenges have deadlines, customers are urged to submit feedback before they close. Creating this sense of urgency with always-open feedback surveys is difficult.
What differentiates InnovationCast from other customer feedback tools is our guidance for users in creating high-quality challenges. We provide articles, examples, case studies, video tutorials, and an AI co-pilot that reviews their input and offers improvements.
This ensures challenge managers provide just the right amount of information — enough to gather feedback that’s high-quality and non-generic, but not so much that it overwhelms the customer.
These resources are built from our extensive experience as innovation managers, having created thousands of challenges and customer surveys.
Read more: How to Implement an Effective Idea Generation Process in Your Organization
Category-based “Always On”
Category-based "Always On" is a 24/7 call for customer insights that may not align with the company's immediate focus areas. This helps companies uncover new customer experience issues, product weaknesses, and pain points they may not be aware of.
To gather high-quality feedback, companies can use our pre-built customer survey templates, encouraging users to provide detailed information.
Companies can customize these survey templates to collect the specific feedback they need or create their own forms from scratch.
When companies post an “Always On” call for feedback, InnovationCast notifications alert all participants to get involved. Customers and employees can submit real-time feedback directly from their email inboxes or messenger app of choice. There’s no need to embed forms or feedback widgets on your website.
Features to Facilitate Co-Creation Between Customers, Employees & Stakeholders
As mentioned earlier, whenever user feedback is submitted — whether through challenges, “Always On,” or external channels — it appears on the activity feed.
Customers can view the concepts developed in response to their feedback, vote on them, and collaborate with employees and stakeholders to refine them before implementation.
Customer-facing teams such as customer support, success, and marketing can get involved by providing data like support calls, in-app analytics, and CRM notes to corroborate or challenge customer feedback. In our experience, this is essential because customers sometimes struggle to articulate their thoughts, and this data can clarify common complaints.
In contrast to this collaborative process, traditional feedback surveys don’t engage customers after ideas are collected, potentially overlooking valuable insights that could shape the final concept.
Read more: How to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace
Reporting Features to Track Customer Feedback & Innovation Projects
Using InnovationCast’s portfolio and reporting features, companies can sort customer complaints, unmet needs, and recommendations by frequency and importance. This makes it easier to identify and address the most common and pressing issues.
Top management can track feedback that’s currently being validated and implemented, identify the responsible teams, monitor progress, and oversee budgets. (More on how we support feedback implementation below.)
Companies can also measure the financial impact of their efforts by importing data from tools like Tableau, Google Charts, and Microsoft Power BI into the InnovationCast data analysis dashboard.
They can track metrics such as:
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer loyalty
Revenue generated
Customer churn
Sales figures
Usability improvements
And more
Top management can visualize user experience feedback, efforts to address it, and financial metrics all within a single tool, eliminating the need to switch between multiple data visualization tools.
Read more: How to Measure Innovation: Essential KPIs & Best Practices
How We Support the Implementation of Customer Feedback
Customer feedback management goes beyond collection. Companies need systems to develop, refine, validate, and implement ideas that address customer pain points. Without these systems, feedback fails to translate into tangible product or service improvements.
With this in mind, we designed InnovationCast with structured workflows to guide the next steps after feedback collection. These workflows include using scoring systems to evaluate ideas, prioritization techniques to identify high-impact opportunities, mapping assumptions, and running experiments to validate impact.
We built these automation workflows based on our decade of experience in product innovation, learning what works best. We also incorporated principles from Lean Startup, Customer Development, Jobs to be Done, and other proven methodologies.
These workflows also adapt based on the type of idea. Launching a new product requires different evaluation, validation, and implementation steps than continuous improvement ideas. That’s why InnovationCast offers customizable workflows tailored to the unique needs of each type of idea.
Features Encouraging Customers to Share High-Quality Feedback
We’ve found that organizations with the most engaged customer bases typically offer rewards for quality participation. Rewards are essential because customers invest significant time in sharing feedback, brainstorming ideas, and co-creating with employees and stakeholders.
To help companies boost response rates, we integrated a badges and rewards system into InnovationCast. Companies can reward participation in two ways:
Monetary rewards: Companies can reward respondents with cash prizes, PTO, vacations, gift cards, discounts, or other incentives for tasks such as submitting an idea chosen for implementation, evaluating ideas, or running experiments to validate an idea’s potential.
Non-monetary rewards: Companies can also reward users with non-monetary incentives, such as career advancements, innovation sabbaticals, training, or mentoring. For customers, rewards could include early access to new products, priority support, public recognition, or similar perks.
What Clients Say About InnovationCast
Here’s what InnovationCast clients say about our platform:
Get Started
InnovationCast has established customer feedback management systems for DHL, Visa, Novo Nordisk, and many other companies, within four weeks.
Discover how we can do the same for you by scheduling a free demo.
2. Brightidea
Brightidea offers an innovation management platform that allows companies to collect customer feedback through an open call for ideas or time-bound challenges.
Companies can track the most common feedback or complaints, helping them prioritize what to address first. Most importantly, Brightidea includes workflows that guide companies in turning feedback into tangible improvements, ensuring it doesn't just sit unused.
Key Features
The platform includes several features:
Idea Box — Customer feedback tools where users can submit feedback and ideas, which managers can organize by category and level of importance.
Program — Managers can create Innovation Challenges, host hackathons, run internal competitions, and explore innovative opportunities.
Lab — A dashboard for innovation teams to evaluate, nurture, and validate ideas before execution.
Transformation — Tools to manage innovation projects, assign tasks, gather customer feedback, and support ideas through every stage of their lifecycle.
Ecosystem — Facilitates connections with external resources, such as startups or investors.
3. Qmarkets
Qmarkets is an enterprise innovation management platform that helps companies collect, manage, and implement large volumes of customer feedback.
It offers self-service features to configure feedback workflows tailored to unique business needs. Additionally, Qmarkets provides guidance during onboarding to help users fully leverage the platform’s capabilities.
Key Features
Qmarkets includes five core features designed to optimize feedback management:
Q-ideate — A central dashboard where customers and stakeholders can submit feedback and managers can organize, review, and move submissions forward.
Q-optimize — Managers can create goal-oriented feedback campaigns, such as product improvement challenges. Customers can vote and comment on ideas, while managers evaluate submissions using predefined criteria.
Q-trend — A tool for monitoring trends related to customer needs and market developments. Customers and stakeholders can contribute articles or insights, and managers can analyze trends and make data-driven decisions to improve their products or services.
Q-scout — A global network for sourcing innovative solutions. Organizations can host external feedback challenges or hackathons to gather ideas directly from customers, startups, and other external innovators.
Q-impact — A project management tool for turning feedback into actionable outcomes. Teams can create workflows for refining ideas, involve collaborators in implementation, and track the progress and success of customer-driven initiatives.
4. Wazoku
Wazoku is an end-to-end innovation management platform that specializes in collecting and managing customer feedback. During onboarding, Wazoku discusses pricing, works closely with clients to identify areas for improvement, refines feedback strategies, and customizes the platform to meet business needs.
Unlike some solutions, Wazoku doesn’t allow direct user modifications; instead, the Wazoku team handles workflow adjustments and customizations upon request.
Key Features
Wazoku’s tools are designed to transform customer feedback into actionable insights:
Internal Innovation — Engage customers in innovation by running in-app online surveys, launching challenges, and rewarding contributions.
Co-creation — Invite customers, employees, and stakeholders to comment on or rate ideas, creating a collaborative environment to gather and refine feedback.
Open Innovation — A public hub where innovators worldwide share ideas and resources. This functionality enables organizations to draw inspiration and solutions from an external network to address customer challenges.
Tech Scouting — Discover new technologies and partnerships with startups that align with customer needs.
Insights & Pulse Surveys — Design and distribute custom surveys to collect targeted feedback on specific areas like NPS, customer satisfaction, or product development.
Connected Communities — Organize customer feedback by demographics and user behaviors for better management and feedback analysis.
Reporting Features — Measure engagement, feedback quality, and the success of customer-focused innovation initiatives.
Enterprise Security — Protect sensitive customer data with robust security measures.
Wazoku is a feature-rich solution for managing customer feedback, but its implementation may take longer, as it's primarily designed for enterprises. However, its comprehensive training resources help teams unlock the platform's full potential more easily.
5. HYPE Innovation
HYPE Innovation offers consulting services and software solutions to help organizations collect, manage, and act on customer feedback as part of their innovation strategies. During onboarding, their consultants work with clients to identify challenges, create tailored workflows, and customize the platform to align with specific goals.
The HYPE platform is designed to foster a robust feedback ecosystem, enabling teams to manage projects, collaborate, and gather customer input effectively.
Key Features
HYPE’s platform includes four core modules to support feedback-driven innovation:
Strategy — Identifies areas where customers face challenges and creates a roadmap for evaluating, validating, and implementing ideas.
Ideation — Provides tools to run strategic campaigns, get feedback on the customer journey and pain points, and evaluate submissions for feasibility and impact.
Partnering — Helps discover external opportunities, such as partnerships or collaborations, to address customer needs and expand innovation efforts.
Projects — Allows teams to develop workflows for managing feedback portfolios, prioritizing actionable ideas, and refining customer insights. While workflows can be easily modified, the platform doesn’t support multiple simultaneous workflows, requiring adjustments for each project.
In addition to the HYPE Enterprise Suite, they offer Viima, an idea management platform focused on collecting feedback and reviewing ideas for potential implementation.
Best Customer Feedback Tools: 8 Simpler Alternatives
Slack is a well-known SaaS instant messaging platform many companies use to communicate internally. We've learned that a simple and affordable way to source customer feedback is to invite them to join an external Slack channel and ask them to share thoughts, videos, screenshots, etc.
SurveyMonkey is a user-friendly survey platform that enables users to create customizable surveys (either from scratch or using pre-built survey templates) and send them to customers via email or web form. Then, users can use the analytics features to understand what customer experience issues are frequently popping up.
Typeform is another intuitive customer survey platform companies can use to source customer feedback. What sets Typeform apart from other survey platforms is that they ask customers questions one at a time, which reduces survey fatigue and improves completion rates.
SurveySparrow is an AI-powered survey platform enabling companies to collect customer feedback across various touchpoints (social media, SMS, email surveys, mobile apps, heatmaps, etc.), implement improvements, and conduct sentiment analysis to understand whether changes work.
Jira is an issue and project tracking software that enables companies to surface any problems customers have with their products or services. Then, they can use Jira's advanced features to create tasks and assign them to members.
HubSpot is a customer relationship management platform that enables businesses to track customer interactions and manage contacts. On the free plan, HubSpot has built-in survey tools with various question types that companies can use to gather customer feedback and centralize them within a single dashboard.
Survicate is a user feedback platform that small businesses and enterprises can use to gather customer feedback through feedback widgets, email surveys, in-product surveys, follow-up surveys, pop-up surveys, and more.
Qualaroo is a customer data collection tool companies use to nudge users for real-time feedback, segment customers into different groups, and create surveys for different segments. Companies can create user testing surveys, customer retention surveys, link surveys, and exit-intent surveys.
Collect, Manage, and Implement Customer Feedback with InnovationCast
Schedule a quick demo to learn more about how InnovationCast supports thorough customer experience management.
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