9 Best Voice of Customer (VoC) Tools for CX & Marketing Teams

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the process of gathering and analyzing customers’ thoughts and feelings about your product and their interactions with your business.

Traditionally, feedback has been collected via customer surveys, which have several downsides:

• Timing: Surveys are always collected after the fact, so you can’t address issues before they occur.
• Incomplete data: Not all customers fill out surveys, leaving gaps in your data.
• Skewed responses: Typically, only very happy or very unhappy customers respond, excluding the majority who are somewhat satisfied or dissatisfied.
• Bias and error: Customers may sugarcoat their experience or omit details, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate data.

To solve these issues, more teams are using VoC tools that automatically capture and report on data from interactions on all customer channels.

Not only does this eliminate the need to send out surveys, but it also overcomes the flaws associated with them — like low response rates or biased results that mostly capture extreme experiences — resulting in a greater number of accurate insights.

Yet, with the variety of VoC tools available, it’s important to understand that each serves a unique purpose and may suit different business needs.

For example, call centers need a tool that can monitor conversations and identify key customer concerns, sentiments, and recurring issues.

On the other hand, marketing teams are more often interested in tools with social listening features to analyze customer interactions and understand how customers are engaging with their brand.

We dive into the top eight tools for VoC and categorize these into two main use cases: VoC tools for customer success and VoC tools for product and marketing teams.

Top VoC Platforms for Customer Success Teams

1. Level AI

Provides Actionable VoC Insights Without the Need for Surveys

Unlike traditional VoC solutions, Level AI uses natural language understanding and generative AI to collect and analyze customer feedback directly from interactions. This approach eliminates the need to send post-interaction surveys and offers a better way to capture insights into customer perceptions and behavior.

Level AI is powered by secure, customizable generative AI capabilities and allows you to:

• Review up to 100% of customer interactions across all channels, including phone, email, and chat.
• Detect more nuanced emotions like gratitude, disappointment, and anger to better understand customer experiences, instead of just labeling them as “positive” or “negative.”
• Uncover customer trends and interaction patterns that you didn’t know to look for.
• Visualize customer sentiment and feedback trends with intuitive dashboards and reporting features.

Detect the Meaning and Intent of Every Interaction

Before going further, it’s important to mention that while many VoC tools claim to use AI, they might only be using a rule-based algorithm like keyword matching that relies on basic natural language processing (NLP) to analyze customer interactions.

Such a system detects key moments in conversations, like when a customer uses specific words to express happiness or dissatisfaction, categorizing sentiment as positive or negative.

However, these tools only identify words or phrases based on preset rules, failing to capture the context in which they are expressed. This approach has notable downsides:

1. Merely classifying sentiment as positive or negative fails to adequately label actual emotions, like anger, disappointment, gratitude, or admiration.
2. Manually entering keywords or phrases to accurately capture every variation of what someone might say (e.g., "I don’t like how this fabric feels," "The material isn’t comfortable") requires significant effort.
3. Even with this effort, it's challenging to correctly recognize intent or emotion in every instance, as it’s impossible to account for every conceivable variation of expression.

Level AI uses natural language understanding (NLU) and semantic intelligence to deliver comprehensive speech analytics by identifying the underlying intent of what a customer or agent wants to communicate during an interaction.

This not only eliminates the need for surveys but also enables you to detect a broader range of sentiments and meanings — without entering tens or hundreds of keywords to identify a single intent.

Level AI’s Scenario Engine understands what’s being said by customers and agents to identify a given intent, which it classifies as a scenario in the system.

For example, if a customer mentions difficulties logging in or a connection keeps dropping, the system recognizes that the customer is experiencing “Connection issues” and assigns this scenario accordingly.

The platform comes with a number of typical predefined scenarios out of the box:

You can also define your own business-relevant scenarios:

The Scenario Engine identifies scenarios occurring in a conversation by labeling these instances with conversation tags, such as “Delivery Issues” and “Price Concerns.”

A conversation tag indicates a single scenario or intent, and a conversation can contain multiple such tags, which are searchable and filterable:

The ability to search all conversations in your organization for a single expressed intent allows you to quickly identify recurring issues, uncover hidden trends, and prioritize areas for improvement.

Conversation tags also provide a very useful reporting dimension, letting you generate detailed analytics highlighting the frequency and impact of certain expressed intents against a wide variety of other issues, like customer satisfaction, average resolution time, or agent performance.

This enables you to not only track recurring concerns but also measure how specific interactions influence key business metrics, allowing you to take proactive steps to improve the customer experience and operational efficiency of your contact center.

Gauge Customer Sentiment

Level AI’s recognition of intent and the meaning behind words with near-human accuracy also allows it to detect sentiments expressed in conversations.

The platform goes beyond classifying sentiments as either positive or negative to capture a fuller picture of customer experiences and measure these based on the broadest range of emotions of any product on the market, including:

• Anger
• Disapproval
• Disappointment
• Worry
• Happiness
• Admiration
• Gratitude

Our software also assigns an overall Sentiment Score to a conversation to indicate the overall aggregate of emotions expressed by a customer during a single conversation.

This score is measured on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being strongly negative and 10 being strongly positive. This single value captures both the overall intensity and “direction” of all sentiments expressed and gives you a clear, at-a-glance indication of how the customer experienced a conversation.

When calculating the score, the system assigns a greater weighting to sentiments occurring at or near the end of conversation than occurring before, as such emotions are likely to reflect the customer’s final attitudes and feelings about both the resolution provided and your brand.

Similar to conversation tags, Level AI highlights the moments when it detects sentiment during an interaction using sentiment tags.

These tags show how sentiments change throughout a conversation and, just as with conversation tags, can be searched and filtered to create curated lists of interactions where a certain emotion occurred.

They can also be integrated into Level AI’s reporting to allow you to identify the most common sentiments expressed, analyze which agents handle negative sentiments the best, and evaluate which coaching interventions have improved overall sentiment.

Both sentiment score and sentiment tags allow you to instantly assess customer sentiment without having to listen through calls, and provide a full picture of customer emotions that CSAT scores miss.

Find Emerging Trends with Advanced Reporting

Level AI’s AI-powered analytics lets you pull in data from disparate sources across your organization to unveil trending issues in your customer conversation data.

This goes beyond the preset reports and limited dashboards of some tools, allowing you to customize metrics, filter data, and drill down into specific areas of interest to uncover deeper insights that align with your unique business objectives.

Thanks to its deep understanding of human speech, Level AI’s VoC Insights provides not only standard VoC metrics like CSAT, NPS, and CES; it also uncovers trends and patterns in conversational data about what your customers are saying or how they’re behaving.

This might involve identifying subtle customer pain points that could lead to churn. Manual reviews might occasionally catch individual complaints, but analyzing all customer interactions with Level AI’s conversational intelligence may reveal recurring patterns that can be easily missed.

For instance, if customers frequently mention being put on hold for minor inquiries that could be resolved via self-service options, such patterns might be found and highlighted. These insights ultimately allow you to optimize support workflows, reduce wait times, and improve customer satisfaction.

Level AI offers comprehensive, zero-setup dashboards for analyzing customer interactions. These reports are clickable and allow you to view conversations related to specific topics and to track trending customer concerns to take timely action.

Such reports also allow you to zoom the time scale (daily, weekly, or monthly) and filter by specific complaint categories. You can also view the percentage of negative customer conversations and on which channels these occurred.

Level AI’s Query Builder allows you to build tailored reports by selecting data sources that are both internal to the platform and external, such as from your current CRM, knowledge base, ticketing system, survey tool, and more.

You can specify reporting dimensions based on specific metrics (e.g., average handling time), date ranges, and custom filters:

Combining all of your data about customer interactions into a central dashboard helps organizations find the answers to compelling questions, such as:

• What topics are most commonly linked to low customer satisfaction ratings?
• What kinds of interactions are agents more prone to transferring to another department or escalating for additional evaluation?
• Can the sentiment conveyed during an interaction forecast the chances of a customer providing positive feedback?
• Which agent responses show the strongest correlation with changes in customer satisfaction metrics?

Improve the Customer Experience with Proactive Intervention & Agent Coaching

Knowing what your customers are saying and feeling about your product or service enables you to intervene promptly and effectively, resolving issues before they escalate, personalizing the customer experience, and proactively addressing concerns to strengthen relationships.

Level AI offers purpose-built tools and dashboards for initiating coaching sessions with agents, providing feedback, or assigning tasks to improve performance and develop skills.

Once you develop a coaching plan, you can contact agents through the platform to:

• Provide specific feedback and guidance.
• Create relevant and effective training tasks to improve CX.
• Reinforce winning behaviors.
• Rapidly course-correct where necessary.

Level AI’s features include tools for coaching agents, such as Real-Time Manager Assist, a live call monitoring tool (and feature of our Agent Copilot) that provides timely insights on agent-customer conversations.

This dashboard displays real-time metrics for active calls (e.g., call duration, sentiment score, likelihood to convert) and integrates directly with Level AI’s coaching tools, allowing you to add agents to coaching sessions.

You can communicate with agents during calls using Real-Time Manager Assist’s call whisper functionality.

Ready to try Level AI’s Voice of Customer tools? Book a call with our team today to discover how we can help improve your organization’s customer satisfaction and agent performance.

Below, we present alternative tools for gathering and analyzing VoC data.

2. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a customer experience management platform that captures and analyzes VoC data to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Customers can generate insights from interactions and organize data into customizable dashboards and reports.

The platform excels in capturing customer feedback across multiple touchpoints, including surveys, social media, and customer interactions.

Qualtrics' key VoC features include:

• Omnichannel feedback collection: Gathers insights from interactions across all customer support channels to create a holistic view of the customer experience.
• Advanced text and sentiment analysis: Automatically analyzes open-ended responses and customer emotions to uncover deeper insights.
• Automated action planning: Triggers workflows based on customer feedback to ensure timely follow-ups and issue resolution.

Because Qualtrics is an enterprise platform, they currently only offer custom pricing plans, which are available upon request.

3. Verint

Verint is a CX automation platform that allows companies to increase customer engagement, optimize workforce performance, and improve business processes through advanced analytics and automation.

Businesses rely on Verint to identify CX blind spots and potential bottlenecks in the customer journey. This platform offers real-time insights related to customer issues, AI-powered predictive modeling for customer behaviors, and a digital listening engine that detects and resolves customer concerns.

Verint includes VoC features for:

• Triggering real-time automated alerts based on specific customer feedback, conversations, and sentiment.
• Creating dashboards and reports to easily visualize business-specific metrics and KPIs for your organization.
• Collecting feedback data from various digital channels, including surveys, social media, contact center interactions, email, and live chat.

Verint’s pricing plans are custom and available upon request.

4. Gong

Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that captures and analyzes customer interactions across various channels to provide AI-driven insights for improving sales performance and customer engagement.

Notable Gong features include:

• Gong AI: Automatically captures, transcribes, and analyzes customer interactions across multiple channels to uncover actionable insights for CX and sales teams.
• Gong Insights: Pairs critical customer data from Gong with other relevant metrics (e.g., CRM data) to gauge team performance and make better business decisions.
• Gong Engage: Leverages customer interaction data to help customer success teams create personalized outreach messages and automate workflows directly within their CRM.

Gong doesn’t disclose pricing, as each plan is tailored to an organization’s specific needs. Contact a sales rep for more information.

5. Medallia

Medallia is an enterprise VoC platform that helps organizations build customer-centric programs through feedback management and data collection. The platform combines in-app, SMS, and traditional survey methodologies to capture customer expectations across all touchpoints.

Key features of Medallia include:

• Advanced text analytics and machine learning to process customer feedback at scale.
• Customizable NPS tracking and segmentation tools.
• Real-time CES monitoring for tracking customer retention.
• Pre-built survey templates and questionnaires for various use cases.
• Robust functionality for managing focus groups and market research initiatives.
• Mobile apps for collecting feedback on the go.
• Integration capabilities with existing SaaS platforms.

For specific pricing details, organizations must contact Medallia's sales team directly.

Top VoC Software for Marketing Teams

1. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a consumer intelligence platform that enables marketing teams to collect and analyze conversations about their brand or product using advanced social listening and analytics capabilities.

For marketing teams looking to gather customer feedback, Brandwatch provides:

• Comprehensive data coverage: Access to the world's largest archive of consumer opinions, with 1.4+ trillion posts dating back to 2008 and 496 million new posts added daily.
• Generative AI assistant: Brandwatch’s Iris finds customer conversations, collects feedback, and transforms data into human-readable insights instantly.
• Advanced reporting and visualization: Customizable dashboards with over 50 live visualizations, automated HTML or PDF reports, and the ability to share customer insights within your organization.

Brandwatch's pricing isn’t available online. Contact their sales team for more information on custom pricing plans.

2. Meltwater

Meltwater is a media intelligence and social listening platform that helps marketing teams monitor and analyze online conversations about their brand and industry. It enables you to gather unbiased customer feedback and transform it into actionable insights to improve the customer journey.

The software provides features for:

• Real-time social data analysis: Processes data from over 100 million online sources, including social media, blogs, forums, and review sites, to deliver up-to-the-minute consumer insights.
• Brand monitoring: Tracks brand mentions across various channels and reports on the quality and quantity of brand-related conversations.
• Sentiment analysis: Determines whether brand mentions are positive, negative, or neutral to help marketing teams gauge public perception.

All product packages are customized; request a demo from Meltwater's sales team to learn more.

3. Brand24

Brand24 is a social media monitoring and analytics tool that tracks brand mentions and customer sentiment across different channels. It helps agencies, marketers, and PR professionals monitor digital channels, gather feedback, and make data-driven decisions.

Key Brand24 features include:

• Topic analysis: Quickly identifies and analyzes topics being discussed by the target audience, including sentiment, reach, and share of voice.
• Anomaly detection: Detects unusual spikes or drops in mention volume, allowing users to respond quickly to potential issues or emerging trends.
• AI-powered brand reports: Offers personalized AI insights and suggestions for brand growth, including detailed reports with charts, metrics, trend analysis, and strategic recommendations.

Brand24 offers four pricing plans for customers, including:

• Individual: $119/month (billed annually)
• Team: $159/month (billed annually)
• Pro: $239/month (billed annually)
• Enterprise: $399/month (billed annually)

4. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is an enterprise-level social listening and analytics platform that provides valuable insights into customer conversations and brand perception.

It helps marketers transform these insights into actionable items to identify emerging trends, track brand sentiment, and benchmark against competitors.

The platform provides:

• Real-time social listening and monitoring across multiple online channels to track and respond to customer conversations as they happen.
• Visual analysis capabilities that can detect brand logos, scenes, and objects in visual content shared online, offering additional insights beyond text-based data.
• Advanced customer analytics that consolidates feedback from 300+ sources, including reviews, surveys, support tickets, and social media.

Talkwalker doesn’t disclose pricing, offering only customized pricing plans.

Interested in adding Voice of the Customer tools to your process? Book a call with Level AI today to learn how we can help increase your brand’s customer satisfaction scores and call center performance.