Customer feedback is the backbone of any successful business. With the ever-increasing competition, businesses are striving to provide the best customer experience to stand out from their competitors with customer feedback as one of the key drivers behind it. Customer engagement plays an important role here to build a relationship between the customer and the brand.

Customers today have become more demanding than ever. They expect brands to provide top-notch customer service and personalized experiences. This is why businesses need to focus on customer engagement to build long-lasting relationships with their customers. Engaging with customers and giving importance to customer feedback and opinion helps brands to understand their needs, preferences, and pain points.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement typically refers to the interactions that take place between a customer and a business. It involves building a relationship with customers that goes beyond just selling them a product or service. Customer engagement is about creating a connection with customers and making them feel valued and heard.

Customer engagement can take many forms, including social media interactions, email marketing, loyalty programs, and customer feedback surveys and portals. In this article, we will discuss what customer engagement is and why it is crucial for businesses. We'll also discuss in detail a few tools and software you can use to improve the customer engagement process in your business!

The Importance of Customer Engagement

• Increases customer loyalty: When customers feel engaged, they are more likely to remain loyal to a business.

• Improves customer retention: Engaged customers are less likely to switch to a competitor.

• Increases customer lifetime value: Engaged customers tend to spend more money and make more purchases over time.

• Boosts word-of-mouth marketing: Engaged customers are more likely to recommend a business to others.

• Provides valuable feedback: Engaged customers are more likely to provide feedback, which can help a business improve its products and services.

Choosing the Right Customer Engagement Tool

When selecting a customer engagement tool, it’s important to consider the following:

• Features: Choose a tool with features that align with your business needs and goals.

• Pricing: Look for a tool that fits your budget and offers a return on investment.

• User experience: Ensure that the tool is user-friendly and easy to navigate for both your team and customers.

• Integration: Consider whether the tool integrates with your existing systems and software.

• Customer support: Look for a tool with strong customer support and resources.

List of Top 10 Customer Engagement Tools

Our team has spent countless hours researching and testing different tools that you can use to improve customer engagement. With an emphasis on user-friendliness, affordability, and effectiveness, these tools are sure to boost your customer engagement game. Stay tuned for our comprehensive list!

FeedBear: A Modern, Minimal, and Capable Customer Engagement Tool

FeedBear is a modern and affordable customer feedback tool designed to help teams listen to their customers and drive user engagement. Our platform offers a fast and easy-to-use tool that can help your team stay organized, collaborate effectively, and keep your customers engaged.

Idea Board

FeedBear lets you create unlimited idea boards for feedback, ideas, and feature requests (but also bug reports and virtually anything you want).

• It centralizes feedback from both team and customers.

• It allows comments and voting on ideas and can be kept internal or public.

• Similar ideas are automatically surfaced and suggested to users as they attempt to post a new one, minimizing duplication.

• Aligns product development with customer needs, increasing satisfaction, and reducing churn.

• Facilitates collaboration between product, support, and customer success teams to enhance the product and meet customer requirements.

• Ideas can be merged and reorganized, edited, moved, and deleted so your team members are in complete control.

Visual Product Roadmap

FeedBear provides you the ability to create and manage a visual product roadmap.

• Customizable columns and statuses help you communicate exactly what you want - you’re in control.

• Tracking of planned, in-progress, and completed tasks ensures team alignment toward common goals and a simple way to communicate your progress with customers.

Engage Your Customers

FeedBear allows you to share your roadmap with customers and demonstrate that you are listening to their feedback. This way, you can promote a sense of community and loyalty among your customers that reduces churn and improves customer retention. Use comments and discussions to get to the real problems and needs your customers have.

Announce New Features and Releases

With FeedBear’s built-in changelog, you can keep customers informed of new features and releases. You can close the feedback loop and generate excitement for new features. Make sure new features don’t get unnoticed and get real usage from customers, helping you retain customers and increase their overall satisfaction with your product.

Integrate with Your Favorite Tools

FeedBear seamlessly integrates with popular tools like Trello, Jira, Intercom, Slack, and Zapier. You can incorporate FeedBear into your existing workflow and ensure everything is working together smoothly.

Simple and Customizable Design

FeedBear’s simple and customizable design makes it easy to get started with little to no learning curve. You can publish your roadmap from your own domain, on your website, or inside your application.

Affordable

FeedBear offers simple pricing plans that include your whole team.

The Startup plan starts at just $49 per month for up to 3 team members.

The Business plan starts at $99 per month for bigger teams, with unlimited team members.

You can enjoy a wide range of features and benefits, all integrations, at an incredibly low price point.

What users love about FeedBear:

• Idea submission and voting: Users can easily share their ideas and suggestions, and others can vote for their favorites.

• Prioritization insights: FeedBear provides a clear understanding of what should be prioritized.

• Customer updates: It offers a platform to keep customers informed about ongoing updates.

• Automatic status updates: FeedBear sends updates as progress is made on product development or user requests.

• User-friendly interface: The simple and intuitive UI sets FeedBear apart, making it easy to use.

• Frictionless feedback: Users can submit ideas without the need for an email, reducing barriers to providing feedback.

• Efficient feedback management: FeedBear enables quick collection and management of feedback.

• Rapid feature development: Users can swiftly build new features based on the feedback they receive.

In summary, FeedBear is a user-friendly and effective tool for managing team workflows. Its modern design brings a fresh approach to organizing and collaborating seamlessly. By keeping customers informed and engaged, FeedBear ensures a smooth experience. Try FeedBear today to witness its powerful capabilities firsthand.

Craft.io

Craft.io is a product management platform that offers different roadmap formats and can be customized for specific audiences. The platform includes a dynamic roadmap tool that helps product managers communicate their plans and make better decisions.

Core Features

• Strategy: Helps teams define product vision and goals, and align product strategy with business goals and customer needs.
• Feedback: Allows teams to collect and manage feedback from customers and stakeholders, categorize and prioritize feedback, and track feedback over time.
• Feature Definition: Helps teams define and manage product features, create feature cards, define feature requirements, and manage feature status.
• Prioritization: Helps teams prioritize features based on business value and customer needs, score features based on their business value and customer impact, and make data-driven decisions about which features to build next.
• Capacity Planning: Helps teams manage resources and plan sprints, estimate feature effort, plan sprints, and manage team capacity.
• Roadmap: Helps teams visualize their product roadmap and communicate it to stakeholders, create a product roadmap, define roadmap items, and share the roadmap with stakeholders.
• Execution: Helps teams manage the development process and track progress, create tasks, track progress, and manage releases.

Pricing

Craft.io provides three pricing plans namely Essential, Pro, and Enterprise.

The Essential plan costs $39/user/month when billed annually, while the monthly billing of the same plan costs $49/user/month.

The Pro plan, on the other hand, is priced at $69/user/month when billed annually and $89/user/month when billed monthly.

The Enterprise plan’s pricing is customized, including additional features like dedicated support, custom integrations, and more. For more details, kindly visit their website.

Roadmunk

Roadmunk is a product roadmap software that enables product teams across various organizations to create and share visually-appealing roadmaps that align with their product strategy. You can choose between a timeline or swimlane visualization to present your ideas and plans.

Core Features

• Roadmapping: Choose between a timeline or swimlane visualization. Create multiple roadmap views from one data set. Export shareable roadmaps to URL, PNG, and HTML. This feature helps teams visualize their product roadmap and communicate it to stakeholders.
• Feedback: Capture customer feedback, prioritize product ideas, and use roadmaps to communicate your strategy. This feature allows teams to collect feedback from customers and stakeholders, prioritize feedback, and use roadmaps to communicate their strategy. This feature helps teams stay connected to their customers and stakeholders and ensures that they are building products that meet their needs.
• Jira Roadmap integration: Connect your high-level strategy with daily planning by syncing your data using Jira integration. This feature helps teams stay aligned with their stakeholders and ensures that everyone is working towards the same goals.
• Item Relationships: Link items by date and visualize them on your roadmaps, providing full visibility of item relationships and restrictions. Blocking dependencies allow you to create a relationship in which something must happen before or after a specific Item.

Pricing

Roadmunk offers four pricing plans that cater to different levels of business needs.

The Starter plan is perfect for those who are just starting and comes at a price of $19/month when billed annually. This plan includes unlimited roadmaps, which is a great value for money.

For businesses that require more features, the Business plan is priced at $49/month when billed annually. It offers additional features such as custom branding, custom fields, and more. This plan is ideal for businesses that want to showcase their brand and customize their roadmap fields.

The Professional plan is priced at $99/month when billed annually and caters to businesses that require advanced features such as custom integrations, advanced analytics, and more. This plan is perfect for businesses that require detailed analytics and integrations with third-party tools.

For businesses that require a dedicated support team and custom security features,

the Enterprise plan

ProductPlan

ProductPlan is a platform that helps teams to assess opportunities, build a winning strategy, and deliver it using one simple platform. It's a product roadmap software that includes integration with Jira for keeping your team in sync.

Core Features

• Collaboration: Easily collaborate, share, and transfer an unlimited number of roadmaps between users.

• Security: SOC 2 certification and advanced security features ensure your data is safe.

• Unlimited Viewers: Unlimited free viewer accounts to give stakeholders an easy way to view and provide feedback on your roadmap.

• Sync Objectives: Automate the flow of data across your most essential tools by syncing objectives between your project management platform and your roadmap.

• Embed Your Product Strategy: Embed your product strategy wherever stakeholders live and work.

Pricing

ProductPlan provides three pricing plans, including Basic, Professional, and Enterprise.

The Basic plan costs $39/editor/month when billed annually, and it includes unlimited roadmaps and unlimited viewers.

The Professional plan is priced at $69/editor/month and offers extra features like custom branding, custom fields, and more.

The Enterprise plan's cost is custom, and it includes additional features such as dedicated support, custom security, and more. For more information regarding the pricing plans, please visit their website.

Productboard

Productboard is software that creates customizable roadmaps for your product. It aligns everyone around your product roadmap and outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of a product over time. It integrates with tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, Jira, Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse.io), Microsoft Teams, and open APIs.

Core Features

• Build Roadmaps: Connect your backlog with always up-to-date and easy-to-share roadmaps. This feature helps teams stay organized and focused on building the right features for their product.

• Prioritize Features: Know what to build next based on user insights and company priorities. This feature helps teams stay focused on building the right features for their product.

• Centralize Feedback: Capture and collect all your customer feedback in one place. This feature helps teams stay connected to their customers and ensures that they are building products that meet their needs.

• Validate Ideas: Validate your ideas with user feedback and data. This feature helps teams stay informed and make data-driven decisions about their product.

Pricing

Productboard provides customers with four pricing plans to choose from including Essentials, Pro, Scale, and Enterprise.

The Essentials plan is available for just $20 per month per maker when billed annually.

The Pro plan costs $80 per month per maker when billed annually. On the other hand, the Scale plan comes with custom pricing that is dependent on the specific needs of the customer.

Finally, the Enterprise plan is also priced with custom pricing that can be tailored to meet the unique requirements of each individual client.

Aha! Ideas

Aha! Ideas is a cloud-based software that assists in setting strategies, capturing feedback, prioritizing features, and creating visual roadmaps. It enables feedback collection from multiple sources and converting them into actionable plans. It also allows prioritizing features based on value and effort, creating roadmaps for diverse audiences, and tracking progress across teams.

Core Features

• Ideas portals for collecting ideas from various sources and enabling users to submit, vote, and comment on them.

• In-app feedback widget for capturing ideas while customers are using your product.

• Custom scorecards for assigning scores to ideas based on value, effort, or risk.

• Custom fields for adding additional information to ideas such as tags, categories, or statuses.

• Custom workflows for defining the stages that ideas go through from submission to implementation.

• Empathy sessions for inviting users to share their feedback live via video or audio calls.

• Reports and charts for visualizing and analyzing data from ideas such as votes, comments, scores, or statuses.

• Product roadmaps for linking ideas to product strategy and showing how they align with goals and initiatives.Integrations for connecting ideas with other tools such as Jira, Trello, GitHub, or Slack.

Pricing

Aha! Ideas offers a comprehensive idea management software that allows you to crowdsource feedback, engage your community, and analyze trends. The Essentials plan starts at $39 per user per month, with a minimum of three paid users. This plan includes unlimited portals for crowdsourcing feedback.

The Advanced plan is priced at $59 per user per month, also with a minimum of three paid users. In addition to the features provided in the Essentials plan, this plan offers advanced analytics, custom fields, integrations, and more.

Aha! Roadmaps is a complete product management suite that includes Ideas Essentials for crowdsourcing feedback. The Starter plan for Roadmaps starts at $59 per user per month, while the Premium plan is priced at $99 per user per month. The Enterprise plan is priced at $124 per user per month, and the Enterprise+ plan is priced at $149 per user per month.

ProdPad

ProdPad is a product management software that assists in managing ideas, feedback, and roadmaps, which are linked to outcomes. It provides a common ground to unite teams and streamline product creation. ProdPad's product roadmap enables businesses to communicate their future direction and the projects they are working on.

Core Features

• Manage your roadmap, ideas, and feedback in a single platform with Roadmaps.

• Integrate with over 1000 apps, and platforms, including popular tools like Slack, Jira and AzureDevops to streamline your workflow and ensure team efficiency.

• Use the Product Requirements Document (PRD) template to explain the purpose, requirements, specifications and release of a product or feature you want to build.

• Learn how to build a product strategy in 5 lessons with the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) e-course.

Pricing

ProdPad has two pricing plans available for its users: Feedback Essentials and Feedback Advanced.

The Feedback Essentials plan costs $24 per editor per month when billed annually. This plan comes with all the core features of ProdPad along with a single customer feedback portal and widget, feedback email dropbox, unlimited feedback capture, segmentation by customer, company, persona, source, and many other features.

The Feedback Advanced plan is priced at $36 per editor per month when billed annually. This plan includes all the features of Feedback Essentials and additional features such as AI-powered similarity-matching surface themes.

Savio

Savio is a customer feedback platform that allows businesses to track feature requests, integrate with multiple platforms, and centralize all requests. It connects to all major customer support and communication platforms and provides a list view of every feedback and vote.

Core Features

• Feedback Management: Collect feedback from multiple sources in the form of submitted tickets and view them in a list view.

• Feedback Integrations: Comes with several integrations like Slack, Salesforce, JIRA, etc. for feedback collection.

• Idea Management: Share ideas with the community through a voting board to get validation.

• Product Roadmapping: Create roadmaps based on parameters like most voted requests or feature requests sorted by MRR.

• Release Planning: Send personalized emails for each feature shipped and reach out to everyone who requested the feature.

Pricing

For SMBs, the pricing begins at $49 per month and includes 3 admin users. This package allows usage for 1 product only and provides all the core features. However, it lacks some critical integrations such as the tracking feature requests from Zendesk, Hubspot integration, and Salesforce integration.

The Growth package starts at $99 per month and allows adding up to 10 internal users and enables feature requests from Zendesk and Hubspot.

The Scaling plan is their unlimited package priced at $299 per month. It has no limit on the number of internal users and projects it can be used for. Also, it connects to Salesforce CRM, which is not available in their other packages.

Hellonext

Hellonext is a customer feedback tool with a centralized feedback board for collecting feedback in one location. It offers a roadmap feature for integrating customer ideas, which can be shared publicly or kept private. The platform includes a change log function for announcing product updates and other features such as the ability to view, comment, and upvote ideas and feedback. Hellonext also has a knowledge base feature for increasing self-service and is slowly moving towards building product management features.

Core Features

• Feedback Boards: Collect user feedback through private or public feedback boards.

• Product Roadmap: Share product roadmap based on user feedback.

• Changelog: Notify users of new product updates with changelog.

• Knowledge Base: Help users and teams understand features with help center.

• Analytics: Gain insights into user needs through feedback analysis.

• Editor and Text Composer: Includes features such as @mention, copy/pasting images, post tagging, and automatic styling.

• Customizations: Customize favicon, links, brand colors, email notifications, and more.

• Webhooks Support: Support for webhooks.

• Integrations: Integrations available for JIRA, Slack, Zendesk, Clickup, Zapier, Azure, Linear, Fullstory, Fathom Analytics, G.A, and other apps.

Pricing

Hellonext offers a freemium account but with a few limitations. The roadmap is non-customizable, and you can only have two feedback boards.

The Take Flight package costs $49 per month and includes 3 admins, 10 feedback boards, a customizable roadmap, and changelog scheduling.

The Fly High package costs $99 and provides unlimited integrations. The package also includes 10 admins and unlimited feedback boards.

The Enterprise package is customized for clients with specific needs. The pricing is discussed on a case-by-case basis.

Conclusion

After reviewing several customer engagement tools, it’s safe to say that FeedBear is one of the best options available in the market.

With its affordable price, user-friendly interface, and impressive features, FeedBear is a great choice for businesses looking to streamline their customer feedback process. The centralized idea board, customizable public roadmap, and changelog make it easy to keep track of customer requests and prioritize the most important features.

Also, the clean and modern design of the tool makes it easy to navigate and use, even for those who are not tech-savvy. And the ability to close the loop with customers ensures that their feedback is heard and acted upon, leading to better customer satisfaction and retention.

While there may be other customer engagement tools available in the market, FeedBear stands out for its combination of affordability, functionality, and ease of use. If you’re looking for a tool to collaborate with your customers and build the right features, give FeedBear a try.