How Much Does a Salesforce Feedback Management License Cost? [+ Alternatives]

Have a sales team? They’re almost certainly getting useful product feedback and feature requests.

And if they are using Salesforce’s CRM, that feedback is probably locked up on some customer notes page. Ideally, you’d be able to pull it out into a system where you can use it to inform your product roadmap.

Salesforce has recently launched a set of cloud-based feedback management tools to help you collect customer feedback. But it’s expensive—and has a very limited use case.

Here, we’ll take you through what the software costs and what you get for the price. Then we’ll present some alternatives so you can make sure you find the functionality you need.

Salesforce feedback management pricing

The feedback management pricing plans start at $300 for a thousand survey responses. That gets you just the surveys and some basic analytics and dashboards. Your customers can take the surveys on the web or in a mobile app.

To get 100,000 surveys, post-chat surveys, merge fields, data mapper analytics (where customers’ data are attached to their profile), and customer lifecycle analytics, you’d have to upgrade to the next level, which is $12,000 per month or $144,000 per year. This gets you access for five customer lifecycle analytics users.

Finally, to get unlimited Salesforce surveys and also add on the customer lifecycle maps feature, you’re looking at $42,000 per month or $504,000 per year. This gets you access for five customer lifecycle analytics users.

Features: What do you get for that price?

So what can you actually do with the feedback management system?

The survey response pack is very basic—you just get a survey building and sending tool. It also includes templates. You can send the surveys through many different channels, including email, SMS, tablet, and on your website.

Once you step up to the monthly plans, the value you’re getting is that your survey responses can be integrated with your other customer data in the SFDC ecosystem. So you can have their survey feedback built into the other information you have about them.

The other big value add is that you can automate surveys after the person has just had an interaction with your sales team. That lets you get customer experience feedback in real-time at a particular point in the customer journey and then analyze and track feedback at those different points in the life cycle.

Every license also gets you access to the customer support community, webinars, events, and other resources.

What Salesforce’s feedback management system is missing?

So what’s missing from the Salesforce feedback management system?

Quite a bit—especially given the very big price tag.

You can’t collect non-survey feedback

Sure, surveys are useful. And the ability to automatically send a survey after your sales rep finishes a call is nice.

But what about all the valuable feedback that you can’t collect via surveys? Customer call Feedback? Email feedback? Feedback from your voting board tool?

If you’re just interested in collecting NPS or CSAT scores, great—Salesforce can work. But it’s not going to work with other ways of collecting feedback. It’s a survey tool, but not really a complete customer feedback management tool.

You can’t easily track feature requests

For customer success and product teams, some of the most interesting and important pieces of feedback to collect are feature requests. You want to know what changes to the software customers are looking for.

Salesforce’s feedback management system doesn’t let you easily collect that.

For one thing, customers might not be thinking about new features immediately after a sales call or whenever they receive a survey. You need a way to let them share their feature request when it’s good for them, and Salesforce’s surveys don’t allow for that.

The other thing is that the survey model doesn’t connect easily to a feature request tracking system. A good system will collect each customer’s requests and aggregate them so you can see how many customers ask for the same feature. In the Salesforce model, you’d get a feature request in an open-ended question response. You can’t easily aggregate those open-ended survey questions together, which means you’re limited in how you can count votes for features.

To be able to have that functionality, you would need to take survey responses that have feature requests in them and send them to a different feature request tracking app.

***Read more: *How to Track Customer Feedback and Feature Requests in Salesforce

The data is siloed

As with any type of data, feedback data is most useful when it’s centralized.

Salesforce does a good job of centralizing its surveys with other Salesforce customer data.

The problem is that it doesn’t do a great job of centralizing data from other feedback sources:

• It’s not easy to bring in feedback from Intercom, Help Scout, or Zendesk

• It’s not easy to combine with feedback that comes in via email

• It’s not easy to integrate with feedback from customer calls or focus groups

• It’s not easy to put together with feedback you receive from your social media accounts

• It can’t easily connect to feedback you get from Slack

Salesforce is a big platform, but it’s rarely the only tool or venue for customer feedback.

Unfortunately, it’s not built to play nice with those other feedback sources.

You’re limited in how you can respond to feedback

Salesforce is a customer relationship management tool, and offers a suite of features to help you manage your customer communications.

So perhaps it’s ironic that the software doesn’t let you easily respond to customer feedback that you receive through surveys.

Yes, you can find people who give you low scores on their customer satisfaction survey and then you can reach out to them manually. So it can help you prioritize who you reach out to.

But it’s not easy to close the feedback loop—to follow up with a customer when you build a feature that they asked for. You can’t easily go back through survey responses to find similar feature requests, and then send personalized response emails to let customers know you listened to them and build what they asked for.

It seems like a big oversight, especially since closing the loop is such an effective way to increase retention and boost sales. Other product feedback software tools (including Savio) let you close the feedback loop in just a few clicks.

Better value alternatives to Salesforce feedback management

Salesforce’s feedback management is really just a survey tool with merge fields, customer lifecycle analytics, and a way to map responses into Salesforce customer profiles.

That may be useful, but it certainly doesn’t cover the full range of customer feedback management use cases. And actually, considering the investment, the solution feels extremely limited.

Instead, there are a number of alternatives you can use.

• Here is a list of great software for sending NPS surveys to customers, including Delighted, Retently, and Nice Reply.

• Here is a big list of more general survey software that is more flexible than SFDC, including Survicate, Refiner, and Survey Sparrow. You can also look for a number of other options on AppExchange.

• Here is a list of more targeted product feedback management tools like Savio.

Each of the tools in those lists provides better value than Salesforce’s feedback management solution.

Why Savio is better than Salesforce Feedback Management

Our favourite tool is—and please try not to gasp in surprise—Savio. Here’s why it’s more effective than Salesforce for virtually every use-case:

• It truly centralizes your feedback. Savio isn’t a survey tool; instead, it specializes in logging all your customer feedback into one centralized place. You can get that feedback from surveys, but you can also get it from other sources, like Slack, email, intercom, customer conversations, your feature voting board, and many more. You can even log feedback programmatically with the API.

• Segmentation and prioritization. Savio makes it easy to lump requests for similar features together, so you can see what’s popular. Then, you can slice and dice your data by customer attributes to prioritize the features your most valuable customers want, your churned customers wanted, your prospects want, and more.

• You can still use your Salesforce customer data. Want to make the best use of your Salesforce customer database? Great—do that through our Salesforce integration. You can bring all that data over to Savio, letting you see MRR, plan, and other critical data. You can also easily track expansion revenue from Salesforce for your feature requests.

• Close the loop. You can close the loop in Savio in just a few clicks.

• Share the data. Want your customer success team to see the data from Sales? Or your Product team? Or customer support? Savio makes it easy to share your customer feedback among all your teams.

• Better value. Our tool not only works better than Salesforce’s for most feedback use cases, but it’s also significantly less expensive. If you aren’t an enterprise or don’t have a six-figure budget for survey software, Savio’s pricing may be a better fit for you.

Savio’s easy to use and your customer-facing teams can use it with the tools they’re already using without changing their workflow.

Note: Savio helps B2B SaaS Customer Success, Product, and Sales teams organize and prioritize product feedback and feature requests. Learn more about Savio here.

Want to take it for a spin?

Try Savio for free →

Last Updated: 2023-04-27

Want more articles like this?

Product Leaders from Slack, Zapier, and Appcues read our newsletter to delight customers, lower churn, and grow revenue.

Send me more articles like this

Unsubscribe anytime.