On the lookout for a new customer experience management solution? You might be considering SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics. In this article, we’ll compare Qualtrics vs. SurveyMonkey, including:
- An introduction to these solutions and their features
- The pros and cons of each
- Alternatives you should consider for customer experience management
SurveyMonkey vs. Qualtrics: An introduction
Qualtrics is a robust experience management platform that helps enterprise brands capture, synthesize, and understand data for every experience. It offers sophisticated survey logic and in-depth analytics for customer, employee, and other trends. SurveyMonkey is a survey creation and distribution platform known for its user-friendly interface and accessibility, making it a popular choice for businesses of any size.
What is Qualtrics?
Qualtrics is a powerful customer experience management platform tailored to enterprise. It helps businesses capture and understand the experiences of their customers, employees, brands, and products. On its XM Platform, Qualtrics’ three products are:
- XM for Customer Experience
- XM for Employee Experience
- XM for Strategy & Research
More than a simple survey tool, Qualtrics helps customers collect feedback, analyze data, and take action to improve those experiences. This gives enterprise businesses deep data and insight across every facet of the customer experience, including step-by-step data about the customer journey, abandonment rates on product pages, customer satisfaction, location data, call center data, product research, employee experience data, website UX, pricing research, and more.
Qualtrics serves as a centralized hub for collecting feedback across multiple channels like surveys, social media, websites, call centers, and beyond. From there, Qualtrics helps users analyze this data, uncover trends, and gain actionable insights through its advanced analytics and reporting tools. This helps businesses make proactive decisions to enhance customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and overall brand perception.
Qualtrics acts as a catalyst for creating a culture of continuous improvement, where every interaction becomes an opportunity to learn and grow. It's a platform that lets businesses not just listen to their stakeholders but to truly understand their perspectives, ultimately leading to more impactful experiences.
Qualtrics’ Customer Experience solution is rated in the top 5 of G2’s Experience Management category. Users praise its flexible research capabilities, extensive integrations, and powerful analytics and reporting.
Qualtrics: Features overview
Sophisticated survey capabilities
- Build surveys with a wide range of question types to capture the feedback you need
- Advanced skip, branching, and display logic create personalized experiences based on responses
- Highly customizable surveys that include multimedia support showcase your brand
- Supports many survey formats, including website surveys, SMS surveys, in-app surveys, and beyond
Powerful analytics and reporting
- Generate reports with customizable visualizations, filters, and cross-tabulations to analyze data from any angle
- Built-in text analysis processes open-ended responses to identify sentiment and key themes
- Predictive analytics can forecast future trends and support data-driven decision making
- Advanced statistical analysis tools help pinpoint trends, correlations, and significant findings
Holistic experience management
- Going beyond customer experience management, Qualtrics gathers feedback from multiple additional sources including employees and non-customers
- Visualize and analyze customer journeys from pre- to post-sale to identify pain points
- Track employee satisfaction and engagement to create a positive work environment
- Monitor brand perception, awareness, and loyalty
Automations and integrations
- Set up real-time alerts based on specific feedback thresholds to address critical issues
- Build workflows that handle large volumes of data and high respondent counts with ease
- Qualtrics offers a wide range of integrations with top CRM, marketing automation, and business intelligence tools to streamline workflows
Qualtrics: The downsides
Overly complex interface
- Qualtrics' extensive feature set creates a steep learning curve for some users, requiring additional training or support to get up to speed
- Users find the platform complex and overwhelming, particularly for those without a survey design or data analysis background
- Deriving value and getting to the “so what” with data you collect can be a manual effort, as you’ll have to build workflows and connections to drive improvement and earned growth
- Users often spend a lot of time on platform administration
Not built to respond
- Outside of its call center product, Qualtrics does not include functionality to respond to customer feedback
- All direct customer followup to survey responses must happen outside of Qualtrics
Not focused on customer experience
- Qualtrics is designed to measure every experience, not the customer experience
- Less actionable than solutions like AskNicely that focus entirely on deriving insight from CX
- Turning the data you collect into exceptional customer experiences that drive growth and profitability is your responsibility to piece together
High cost for full CXM features
- Qualtrics is an enterprise-grade product with enterprise-grade pricing that some businesses find expensive
- Comparative features to other CXM products on the market can be more costly
- Relevant CXM features, including NPS surveys, frontline location management, and feedback sentiment analysis, are spread across multiple products in Qualtrics, making them more expensive
Qualtrics pros & cons
Pros
- Build flexible, customizable surveys with advanced features including skip logic, branching, piping, randomization
- Powerful analytics and reporting, including statistical analysis, trend analysis, and text analytics
- Scalable platform that can support high numbers of respondents
- Robust integrations library connects your CX data with other important systems
Cons
- Not as easy to set up or as user-friendly as other options
- Its’ higher cost can be prohibitive for smaller or mid-market companies
- Overwhelming options for customization and significant platform administration time
- Focused more on collecting broad experience data than giving you actionable recommendations for improving customer experience
What is SurveyMonkey?
Do you want to build a survey? SurveyMonkey can help. (And you probably already thought of their name before the answer!)
SurveyMonkey is often described as "the world's most popular free online survey tool," and for good reason. It's a platform for survey and feedback management that makes survey creation and data collection accessible to everyone, from individuals to large enterprises. It includes survey building, distribution, and analysis tools.
SurveyMonkey’s survey creation tool provides a user-friendly interface that allows anyone, regardless of technical skill, to quickly build and send out surveys. This ease of use, especially when combined with SurveyMonkey’s affordability, is a major draw. The company offers pricing tiers ranging from a free plan with basic features to enterprise plans for large corporations.
SurveyMonkey is incredibly quick to set up. With its intuitive interface and pre-built templates, you can create and launch an NPS survey (or any survey!) in minutes. This speed and efficiency make it a common choice for CX and operations professionals who want to take a quick pulse on their customers.
SurveyMonkey is rated top 5 in the Survey Software category on G2. While it doesn’t appear in G2’s Customer Experience category, reviewers praise the tool for its ease of use, customization options, and data analysis capabilities within customer experience use cases.
SurveyMonkey: Features overview
User-friendly interface
- SurveyMonkey’s drag-and-drop interface makes creating surveys easy
- Surveys offer simple customization with your branding, logos, and color schemes
- Use a wide range of question types including multiple choice, open-ended, ranking scales, star ratings, image upload, and more
Data collection and analysis
- Share surveys across multiple distribution channels including email, social media, website embeds, and QR codes
- Monitor response rates in real time and send automated reminders to boost participation
- Visualize your findings with easy-to-understand charts and graphs
- Export your data in various formats (CSV, Excel, PDF, SPSS) for further analysis and reporting (note that this is not available on SurveyMonkey’s free solution)
Pre-built templates and survey building AI
- Use pre-built templates for NPS, CSAT, CES, purchase feedback, and other CX surveys
- Tap SurveyMonkey’s AI-powered insights to improve survey design, identify bias, and optimize questions for better responses
Integrations
- SurveyMonkey integrates with hundreds of market-leading tools that support automatic survey triggers and alerts so teams can take action
SurveyMonkey: The downsides
It’s a survey builder, not a customer experience management platform
- SurveyMonkey can build a CX survey, but it can’t be used to respond to feedback, transform your CX operations, deliver better service, or drive earned growth
- Knowing your NPS score is great, but what do you actually need to do to improve and grow?
- Does not include proactive alerting or broader team visibility
Lacks response management
- When customer feedback comes in, you cannot act on that data from SurveyMonkey’s platform
- Integrations are required to alert team members of feedback that requires a response, which would have to be set up and maintained manually
- No ability to provide personalized followup to respondents
Manual data analysis required
- Does not suggest actions for CX improvement based on survey results
- Managing responses across locations would require highly manual survey setup
- Limited capabilities to analyze text-based responses to identify trends
- Will require your team’s time to analyze survey response data manually
Limited automation
- SurveyMonkey’s lower pricing tiers appear to limit your ability to automate actions based on feedback
- Some popular integrations (Salesforce, Marketo, Tableau, etc.) are limited to the Enterprise tier
- Automations including team alerts, response routing, and survey triggers must be configured manually
SurveyMonkey pros & cons
Pros
- Easy to use for the general public - no statistics degree required
- Affordable for businesses of all sizes, with many pricing tiers (including a free tier with basic features)
- Pre-built templates for a range of CX use cases
- Highly versatile, offering options for many survey types and purposes
Cons
- Lacks advanced features like complex survey logic, branching, and advanced analytics
- Customization and branding capabilities are traded for simplicity
- Critical security features like IT administration, SSO, user controls and permissions, HIPAA compliance, etc. are exclusive to enterprise customers
- Some users report slow or unhelpful customer support experiences in reviews
AskNicely: A better alternative for customer experience management
Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey are great for collecting data, but if you want to actually understand your customer experience, drive growth, and provide better service to every customer, you should consider AskNicely. AskNicely is the only customer experience management platform designed to proactively address customer experience challenges caused by inconsistent service delivery.
AskNicely is rated in the top 3 of G2’s Experience Management category, receiving high marks from customers for ease of use, ease of setup, quality of support, and more. Reviewers praise our actionable customer insights, customization and flexibility, and positive impact on customer satisfaction on our easy-to-use platform.
Knowing your NPS, CSAT, or 5-star scores is only the first step - what do you actually need to do to act, improve, and grow? That’s where AskNicely can help.
Take quick, meaningful action
When your customer shares their feedback, you need to act quickly. Do more than get a pulse on your customers: turn negative experiences into positive resolutions before they hit public channels to build repeat business and champions.
- Automatically identify feedback that requires response and assign it to the right team for resolution with automated workflows
- Real-time feedback monitoring, internal collaboration, and response templates help address every situation
- Track SLA compliance directly in AskNicely
“By using [AskNicely], we can ensure that member satisfaction is maintained at 100%, which is incredibly helpful. We may easily get in touch with any member to learn about their issues based on their concerns that they expressed through AskNicely Wonderful application for monitoring member fulfillment and satisfaction.” - Sunny P., Senior Engagement Manager, G2 Review
Unlock CX excellence with frontline activation
What’s the real secret to improving CX? It’s activating your frontline! Inspire and motivate your team with customer feedback to increase efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- Keep every member of the team - from executives to frontline staff - in the know with unlimited user accounts
- Surface positive feedback to team members to create meaningful feedback loops and reward based on performance
- AskNicely TV provides a real-time scoreboard for CX teams that provides insights into customer satisfaction and shows areas for improvement
“My frontline staff have a vested interest in AskNicely Surveys and take it personally if our score is not a 10. It has changed the attitude of the Frontline Staff to be more positive.” Tony Latham, Service Manager, Honda New Zealand
Transform customer experience across every location
AskNicely helps multi-location services businesses drive earned growth and profitability. Our platform is designed to help you understand your customers’ experiences at every location and increase service consistency and quality everywhere.
- Analyze customer feedback by location and receive automatic recommendations for improvement
- Automatically assign issues or feedback responses to the right team member
- Robust performance metrics highlight inconsistent service quality across every location in real time
- Segment your data by location, team, individual, or customer demographics and compare via cross tabs to uncover statistically significant trends
- Keep CX top-of-mind for everyone with report cards, personalized dashboards, coaching playbooks, and digests tailored to every member of your company
"AskNicely changed our coaching conversations. We now have regular examples of excellent customer service to coach from, and our team leads actually compete to get to the top of the AskNicely leaderboard” - Wayne Pointon, Global General Manager, Service Delivery, DebitSuccess
Turn feedback into earned growth
AskNicely puts customer feedback to work for you. Close the loop by turning customer feedback into public reviews to drive revenue. It’s built into our platform!
- Don’t just collect data - take action to improve customer satisfaction, then turn promoters into public advocates across every location
- Automatically identify satisfied customers based on internal CX benchmarks, then automatically send review requests
- Boost review scores and review volumes on Google, Facebook, Yelp, or any other review site that’s important to your business
- Use the testimonials widget to automatically publish real reviews to your own website
“Customer experience feedback allows us to specifically target our continuous improvement efforts AND it provides us with great testimonials for marketing our products! Great value for our company.” Eric V., G2 Review
To learn more about why AskNicely is the best customer experience management platform, get a demo today.
