Best Reviews Management Software in 2024

Reviewing your performance on daily basis is critical to your productivity, and provides a set of invaluable information that cannot be gathered using multiple different tools. To start with, employees appreciate the possibility to be rated to the extent that they would prefer negative feedback to none. Needless to say, you need to stay alert about their mistakes, and to reward good work in order to keep them on board.

At the same time, you get to deepen your relationship with customers, who rarely deny rating the service they liked. Once they start reviewing your work, you get the full picture of how business is doing, and your overall online presence starts expanding. As you see, reviews management tools help you determine how customers rate your business, and they assist you to rate it yourself. But how to do informed comparisons to choose the best reviews management software for enterprises or small/medium businesses? Let this guide help you.

The best way to go is to sign up for at least a few free trials or demo and basic unpaid plans from popular reviews management software providers. With that method, you will have the opportunity to test the important elements and you will get a good comparison of the capabilities of different platforms. The best thing to do is to try tools that currently have the highest SmartScore rankings and Customer Satisfaction Rating in our feedback & reviews management software reviews such as Zoho Support reviews and Uservoice to choose the most appropriate reviews management software. Other popular products in this category include Qualtrics CX, Qualaroo, and Verified Reviews.

Generally speaking, best review management software can be useful to every product/service provider operating in the online market. Therefore, you would qualify as a potential buyer of these programs in any of the following cases:

• Small Businesses. As a starter, you depend on feedback more than any other company that has confirmed its position on the market. These programs can help you manage and grow your online business because you can take advantage of robust generation, contact, and opportunity trackers at a low price (if any).
• Medium Businesses. As your business is growing, you need a platform that can support the growth and to manage your reputation for more complex times to come. These programs support real two-way engagement, both with customers and employees, and take collaboration and customer service off your shoulders leaving you to focus on more important aspects of your business.
• Large Businesses. Review management systems are an invaluable assets for companies with large teams and a vast scope of customers, which facilitate the feedback process to the extent of full automation and minimal risk of human error.

• Zoho Survey: A top-quality member of the Zoho productivity set with wide selection of in-built and interactive charts for advanced reporting. It is an adequate option for all surveys, as you can customize it to suit the needs of your business.
• Uservoice: An outstanding SaaS solution for small business and large companies that gathers information and studies trends, packed with a variety of engaging functions and customer specifications.
• Qualtrix CX: An industry-leading customer experience platform that helps organizations manage, respond, and improve consumer-related activities, such as measuring customer experience, predicting customer needs and trends, and tracking consumer behavior.
• Qualaroo: A customer and user feedback software that allows you to conduct surveys and gain actionable user insights using contextual and professional-looking questions and templates.
• Verified Reviews: A feedback and review platform that gathers reviews across different channels in order to maximize the potential of ecommerce products.

One of the things that makes choosing review management software tools so difficult is the variety of programs that can be used for the purpose. They range all the way from basic tool suites to ultra costly and accurate programs. Features can also be categorization criteria, as certain programs do nothing but conduct surveys, while others are more robust and they allow users to report and discover trends, and even do some custom branding. The basic division criterion is deployment, depending on which you can choose between:

• On-premise review management systems. These are covered with a single license, and are hosted on the client’s local server. They qualify as the most expensive ones, due the fact that they require complex setup and occasionally some hardware installation.
• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) review management systems. These are usually paid per month, and are hosted on the vendor’s server. The business owner is not responsible for installation, updating, and maintenance.
• Cloud-hosted review management systems. Most of these offer free basic plans, and qualify as the most affordable ones due to their universal access and the fact that the client doesn’t need to update them or to pay for maintenance.

Review management software is very different in terms of capabilities, most of the time dictating the gaps between their prices. Having a clear list of expectations will help you discover the program that will suit your company the best, and the starting point is to look for a user friendly tool containing few essential features:

• Review Acquisition. The review management software is supposed to collect reviews using widgets and landing pages, the first being embedded on their website and electronic signature. It should distinguish between positive and negative feedback, and to generate reviews on specifically targeted sites and social networks. Alongside, there should be a clean and intuitive interface which guides users with clear instructions and visible triggers.
• Review Request Campaigns. You should be able to customize the emails, both its content and its timing. Sending should be automated; the same as follow-up and removal, and the system should use APIs to integrate with the rest of your software architecture. Reviews should be reportable and shareable, signed and collected in a single location.
• Monitoring. A good F&R manager will allow you to send and receive alerts upon new reviews, most of them including links for direct responding. At the same time, you can use it for comprehensive monitoring of all employees and separate reviews, the same as following third-party websites that can be relevant to your business.
• Performance Appraisal. The list is non-exhaustive, and the most common features are: 360 Degree feedback; Alerts; Reminders, History Tracking; Ad Hoc Reviewing; Peer Appraisals; Review Cycles; Self-appraisals; Competency comparison; Cascading goals; Comparable performance measures; Custom forms; Custom scales; Goal setting; Individual development plans, etc.
• Survey Tools. Some platforms in this category offer survey tools as the main feature used in gathering consumer feedback. Using highly customizable survey tools, you can create and modify customer surveys, choose from a variety of survey templates, and distribute them to your customers.

These are the main benefits companies experience when using a solid review management software:

• Dynamic Targeting. Syncing goals within the company is essential for following strategic developments, and staying on top of the challenges your industry is about to generate. To start with, you need to synchronize your goals with the ones of your employees. Not reviewing your employees’ work equals to knowing nothing about it, that is exactly where business goals and the goals of the employee can pass one another. Setting goals with the right software will be easy, because no one will deviate from the proper objectives. Eventually, that will increase the transparency between different departments. Asking customers to review your product/service, on the other hand, comes even handier for building trust, and will sooner or later lead to more sales, and a better reputation.
• Reduced Administrative Costs. Making surveys on paper takes time, money, and labor, which is exactly what every company is trying to avoid. Transferring the process online minimizes administrative costs, foremost the time you’d otherwise spend distributing and sharing those surveys. The best part is that you get to store the gathered information, and to reuse it when necessary.
• Administrative Reporting. Another procedure to be severely facilitated is reporting. Once you get to monitor individual results in real time, you get to explore data and to develop smarter solutions for the future. Most review management software are packed with tools cut for the purpose, such as tables, charts, graphs, filters, variables, and net promoter scores.
• Agile Learning. Don’t be diluted by the myth that annual feedback suffices: there is no transparency in it, and neither customers nor employees are likely to become more engaged in future. As a result, a valuable expert who seemed to underperform can seek recognition at the door of your competitor, while your product can end up in some forgotten Google corner because nobody rated it. The golden rule is: Learn from your mistakes!
• Rewarding and Career Development. The reason why your employees are actually on board is that they believe that your company will allow them to develop. The good news for you is that they will give their maximum to make it happen, while your role is to make the impossible to provide them what they need. You need to coach them, and to provide a detailed development plan, which is exactly where your review manager becomes most handy. Besides, a good one will provide invaluable insight on skills, competences, and aspirations according to which you’re supposed to develop their program. Employees need to know what they’ve done, and more importantly, what they need to do to get where they want. If they don’t, you’ve already lost them.
• Data-backed Business Decisions. By implementing a proper review software, you can consolidate all consumer feedback across different channels in a single hub. This gives you a complete picture of how your customers are using your products. Thus, the consumer data gathered from reviews and feedback can help you create better business strategies.

Customer experience plays an important role in the success of a particular brand. And what better way to improve customer experience than taking into account their needs and demand? In a customer-centric economy, reviews and feedback give consumers a powerful voice in the creation of products and marketing strategies. Thus, here are some of the latest trends you need to know about customer feedback and reviews:

• Reviews in the insurance and financial services. The insurance and financial sectors are taking advantage of review platforms to improve their brand exposure and attract more clients. Businesses in the mentioned sector that did so are reported to have gained favorable results. Survey results reveal that there is an increasing number of consumers who leave reviews after having a bank transaction or signing up with an insurance company.
• Customers are leaving shorter reviews. Over the years, the length of reviews that customers leave is becoming shorter, simpler, and more direct to the point. As a matter of fact, in some review platforms, a growing number of customers are more likely to use the like buttons and emoji reactions to express their feelings about a certain brand or product.
• Google and Facebook remain the top platforms for online reviews. Google and Facebook are still the most common review platforms today because of their ease-of-use and accessibility. As a result, specially-designed review sites are seeing less growth.

Below, we compiled some relevant customer feedback statistics to give you a better understanding of where things stand and how you can improve your review gathering methods.

• Only 1 in every 26 customers is likely to give you a negative review. (Customer Experience Magazine)
• 47% of consumers voice their opinions or product and service complaints via social media channels. (Sprout Social)
• 72.2% of reviews are made using desktop or laptop devices. (Pew Research Center)
• 66% of customers trust brands that have more reviews. (Insights Squared)
• 58% of consumers stop using a product or service after one negative experience. (NewVoiceMedia)