Review platform review

It’s difficult asking for customers to leave reviews or testimonials but there are a breadth of platforms out there designed to make this task slightly easier. In this article we'll explore a few of them to help you find the right one for your business.

In addition to highlighting their core features we’ll also look at which of these platforms do the best job of encouraging customers to leave reviews on public platforms like Google and Facebook. After all, your future customers will check out the reviews you have there as an early part of figuring out if they want to work with you.

As a little bonus, we’ll also try and analyse which platforms do the best job of giving you a dashboard that measures customer feedback, so you can see whether your business is improving or worsening in the experience it gives customers.

In many cases, we’ve used these platforms ourselves. Where we haven’t, we’ve used reviews, feedback and the company’s marketing to analyse the potential of that business.

To help narrow the field (there are over 300+ websites and platforms that gather feedback) we’re focusing on those where a survey (of any kind) is completed by a customer and they leave a rating for the service experience. Sorry HappyOrNot but we won’t include buttons at the airport! Only because you can’t use this feedback in marketing, and we won’t include paper surveys as this can’t be shown to future customers to grow your business.

So, to recap, we're focusing on digital feedback gathering where the responses can be measured and used to get more customers.

Without further delay, here’s our review platform review.

Ask Nicely

One of two New Zealand companies featuring on this list Ask Nicely is the highest rated customer feedback software on G2 Crowd and has expanded across the globe as a leading way of gathering an NPS® score from customers. It uses surveys and a 1-10 scoring system to create an NPS® score for businesses to measure, analyse and monitor over time. Backed by some serious venture capital interest Ask Nicely is growing rapidly into a dominant platform in this space.

Ask Nicely scores highly for having an easy to view dashboard, called TV NPS® which, on their website, shows scores by country and over time. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume this could be tailored to track the results from individual stores or customer service agents if needed, although country tracking looks to be a Custom Plan feature.

There are a raft of integrations, including with leading marketing platforms such as HubSpot and Salesforce (on custom plans), which is handy if you're looking to feed customer feedback back into your CRM system. Ask Nicely’s pricing is hidden behind a request form but G2 Crowd breaks the platform’s pricing into two tiers; Professional and Custom - there doesn’t seem to be a free version.

The professional plan includes a license for 10 users, 5,000 surveys, workflows, dashboard, app and more while the Custom Plans programme gives you more users, more surveys and a Salesforce NPS® module too.

This is a great platform for anyone wanting to gather customer feedback and an NPS® score, but it doesn't seem to offer much help in getting you more online reviews - which is important as places like Google Reviews, Facebook Recommendations and even Tripadvisor are the sorts of places potential customers go to decide whether you should get their money.

Also, you may have noticed us lathering the ® logo on anything mentioning NPS®, well that’s because NPS® and Net Promoter Score® are both registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Sametrix Systems Inc. and Fred Reichheld (that should stop us getting sued). The score is a really simple one; you subtract the % of your detractors (scores below 6) from the % of your promoters (scores of 9 & 10) and divide that by the total responses then multiply by 100.

Questions have been raised as to whether this goes far enough to give a real sense of whether customers had a positive or negative experience, and it doesn’t really give you a chance to turn someone into a promoter who was a detractor - but we digress, let’s get back to platforms!

Hotjar

Mainly known as a website heatmapping tool it uses a snippet of code to monitor where people spend time, and take action on your website. Most people don’t know, however, that it also offers feedback polls, which are a fun way of gathering online feedback. It also includes an NPS® feedback tool, which means it can be used to ask people on your website for them to give you a score.

Unlike Ask Nicely Hotjar offers a free version of its software, although the NPS® score feature seems to be on paid plans only. There doesn’t seem to be a scoring dashboard, although I must caveat that with the fact that we’ve only used the free version. It also doesn’t look like you can have multiple surveys with multiple sources tracked to see where your scores are coming from, simply the score from that survey.

The above seems to be where Ask Nicely nudges out Hotjar when it comes to customer feedback monitoring. However, if you also want to see how people interact with your website or software and care less about them giving you direct feedback then Hotjar may be better for you.

Hotjar’s pricing swings from free on its Basic plan all the way up to custom pricing if your website receives more than 2,000,000 page views a day. The top public pricing we could see was $989 USD a month for 800,000 page views a day. At that level you’re getting unlimited users, unlimited reports and 365-day data storage, so pretty good!

Delighted

Despite being around since 2013 Delighted has seen a more recent run of promotion which sees it appearing almost everywhere. Part of that is likely due to its acquisition in 2018 by Qualtrics, which in itself is a division of SAP.

According to G2 Crowd Delighted’s pricing goes from $25 USD a month to send a survey to 100 people per month to $49 USD a month to send to 750 people, $99 USD to send to 2,500, $149 USD to send to 5,000 then $249 USD a month to send to 10,000. All have discounts available if you pay for an annual subscription instead of paying monthly.

It’s consistently rated one of the easiest to use platforms available and the pricing makes it very cheap in comparison to others. Delighted plays well with others, with integrations designed for Zendesk, Stripe, Salesforce and HubSpot.

Delighted also uses an NPS® scoring system and you can deliver your surveys through email, SMS on your website or via a link (like Ask Nicely). It does ensure people don’t get too many surveys, which is a pretty cool feature. It also features a dashboard, much like Ask Nicely.

Review Tui

We’re going to do our best to not blow our own trumpet, which won’t be too difficult as all the above are very big companies who have been doing this for longer than 5 minutes. They also have offices in far-flung places like Portland and Palo Alto. We’re from New Plymouth (Google it, you still won’t find where it is).

We’re similar to Delighted in that we offer a free version of the platform, albeit on a trial basis (but with options to extend your trial to result in never paying for the software). Limited to one survey and one source our Basic plan is $49 NZD a month. You get a dashboard though, and you can add a review site or two for customers to leave a review on once they’ve given you their feedback.

Our Professional plan ($99 NZD a month) gives you up to 5 surveys each with 5 custom links, so you can track where your best reviews come from. You have unlimited users on any of these plans and you can gather as many responses as you like. We also have a Pro+ plan which extends the number of surveys to 10, and each can have 10 custom links. This is priced at $199 NZD a month.

We’re one of the few to not use NPS®, mostly because we think it’s a dead metric. Instead, we use a unique scoring system, which gives each response its own unique weighting to reflect the value of the individual's feedback, rather than the score itself. Our scoring system adapts over time to offer more accurate values and can be made even more accurate as you provide the system with more data points through integrations. 

This system also gears the reviewee up for the next step in our process, which is to leave a review on a popular third-party platform. 

So despite being new, we’re doing things a little differently. We’ve studied the almost 20-year-old NPS® way of doing things and we think we’ve found a better model, more suited to how people review and rate companies they work with. It’s a digital spin on a traditional methodology.

We’re not saying we’re better than any of the others. How could we when we’re a fraction of their size? All we’re saying is that we think scoring whether someone would recommend you to a friend is less important than having them recommend you to thousands of people they’ve never met.

If you agree and want to be part of the new age of customer feedback, sign up by clicking the link below.