Top Five Free Customer Feedback Tools for Small Businesses

Good customer feedback tools are essential for building loyalty to any small business. They let you keep your finger on the pulse of your business. They provide invaluable insight for marketing, product development and much more. But if you’re like me, you need to shop around and use as many free tools as you can. Here are my current top five favorites. 

Free Customer Feedback Tool Five: DialogCentral

DialogCentral is a free app for your iPad or iPhone. It uses geolocation to let customers give feedback on their small businesses. First you register the location of your small business. Then you ink any feedback that gets posted to that location to your business. Finally, the feedback goes to you via email. You’re right to point out that this is primarily a brick and mortar business tool. But because it’s so easy to use (a lot like tagging someone on Facebook) it’s a really good one. This free customer feedback tool also gives you access to the contact information that the feedback-providing customers use.

Free Customer Feedback Tool Four: Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction is another Facebook-y sort of app that lets you post, interact with customers and create discussion forums. Your virtual community does require some moderation but it is easy to use. The feedback results are searchable and sortable. And the best part to me is that the dashboard analytics provide you with the ability to measure progress. You can get your customers into your feedback community by placing Get Satisfaction widgets into your website, or through an actual Facebook app. So far the mobile app is only offered for use with iPhone.

Free Customer Feedback Tool Three: IdeaScale

IdeaScale is a free customer feedback tool that gives you a comprehensive platform customer interactions. This tool lets you build your brand using input from customers. A great new take on crowdsourcing, your customers contribute ideas and vote on them. This way you see which ideas your customers think are great. The app cranks up the social portions of your customer community with badges and leaderboards. One of my favorite things about this tool is its compatibility with Google Analytics and its Facebook app.

Free Customer Feedback Tool Two: UserVoice

UserVoice is fantastic for getting your customers to brainstorm about new features for your small business. That’s because every one of your customer users gets a set number of votes. This forces them to think about which ideas they really like the best. This way, they preserve their votes for what’s most important to them. And of course that lets you focus your marketing. This is an awesome customer feedback tool that lets you handle your feedback in a dynamic way.

Free Customer Feedback Tool One: Gripe

Gripe is a very cool social platform designed to get you the most out of your customer feedback. It is easily integrated with both Facebook and Twitter so you can get more customers involved and perpetuate your ideas outside your immediate community. Your customers can actually create a feedback space for a company if it’s not already there, so make sure when you go to sign up that you look for your company! Get going on resolving the gripes of your customers and working the positive feedback into your existing strategies.

Well, there you have it, my top five free customer feedback tools—today! I can’t wait to see what else we small business owners can use in a year from now.