What are the Best CES Tools Today? Our Top 9 Choices for Customer Research

What does CES stand for? Customer Effort Score is a metric that measures how much effort a customer puts into interacting with some aspect of your product or service. The higher the CES score, the better customer activation and lifetime value, and the better revenue.

Is there a quick way to find out what your CES score is?

This list contains 9 top CES tools available today that will help you quickly gauge your customer effort score.

Let’s get straight to the point 🚀

💡Would you like to learn more about Customer Effort Score? Here is an article on ➡️Customer Effort Score 101: A Complete Guide 

Survicate

The fact that it came in as number one is no coincidence. The truth is – Survicate has everything you need from a CES tool. From building responsive surveys to distributing and analyzing the results, all from one dashboard.

Survicate can be integrated with various other tools to build a powerful machine for conducting customer research.

Could you send surveys from email? Or, send surveys once you have solved a ticket, resolved a chat, or finished talking to customers? Nothing to worry about with a Zendesk integration with Survicate. 

The surveys can be highly customized and designed the way you like, with no boundaries – whether you use one of our professionally designed templates or make your own. 

See for yourself:

Survicate is valued for:

• Flexibility and highly customization options.
• Expertly designed, responsive survey templates.
• Many integrations with CRMs, email marketing, and other tools, e.g., HubSpot, Intercom.
• Targeting and triggering surveys based on your Google Analytics data.
• Email notifications and Slack alerts about new survey results.
• Custom actions and redirects (e.g., call-to-actions and “thank you” screens).
• Exporting survey results to Google Sheets, Excel, etc.
• Product improvement prioritization.

Pricing

Get ready to dive into the world of customer feedback analysis with Survicate. Sign up for a free account and enjoy a 10-day trial with access to essential features. Don't forget to review our pricing to choose the right plan.

Delighted

Delighted was acquired by Qualtrics when their program matured. Does it change anything? It makes them proud to offer a better experience. We wanted to verify.

What we liked a lot about this tool is the ability to prevent the customers from receiving too many surveys through its "over-surveying” feature. Furthermore, the dashboard is easy to use, and you can manage feedback conveniently.

However, in comparison with the rest of this list, this solution performs not that well, especially when it comes to the survey design. The price is relatively high for the quality. In addition, the chosen plan ties you in for a year without allowing you to make monthly payments. 

Valued for

• Dashboard with easy-to-use sorting capabilities
• Visually appealing reports
• API for automatically triggering surveys based on touchpoints along the customer journey

Pricing

The company offers three paid plans. Premium is the most popular at $224 per month, with a monthly survey limit of 10,000. Premium Plus costs $449 per month (limit to 20,000 surveys). There is a scalable plan for enterprises.

Free plan

✅Yes, Delighted provides a free plan.

Simplesat

The Simplesat survey builder should be sufficient if you need to create an introductory survey without any further modifications. The surveys are well-designed, but their animations aren't exceptional.

Simplesat offers quite a lot of email features. It supports one-off email blasts or automated ongoing emails. You can customize the intro and outro content of your emails. Also, you can send follow-up emails if the customer hasn’t opened the initial message. 

The essential features of Simplesat are great, but the solution falls short regarding more complex interactions. For example, it can be integrated with other solutions, such as Zendesk, but the “collaboration” between these two tools is quite troublesome. 

Valued for

• Rich formatting
• Testimonial widgets to publish survey scores directly on your website
• Managing multiple brands from a single account
• Personalized follow-up emails which you can send automatically

Pricing

The standard plan costs $99 per month but does not include custom branding. The Pro plan costs $249 monthly and comes with custom survey design, multi-brand, and priority support. A free 14-day trial is available.

Free plan

⛔️Simplesat doesn’t provide a free plan.

Qualaroo

The Qualaroo platform aims to help companies collect valuable insights from their users as quickly and seamlessly as possible. As it appears on this list of the best CES tools, it certainly meets expectations. 

The solution is easy to use and gets good reviews regarding its no-code survey builder. Automated language translation works pretty well, so the users don’t need to create separate surveys for each language. 

Are users complaining about anything? According to their comments on G2, the solution should allow for more export options. CSV is the only format available for exporting data at the moment. 

Valued for

• Smart response review that highlights new responses
• Response tagging
• AI-based sentiment analysis engine (that costs extra)
• Automatic language translation

Pricing

Qualaroo plans start from $100 to $360, paid monthly. The price depends on the monthly number of page views and features available. The lowest plan has no advanced question types or targeting options.

The vendor provides an Enterprise plan for large companies or those that need enterprise security. A 15-day free trial or demo upon request is available.

Free plan

⛔️Qualaroo doesn’t provide a free plan.

Surveypal

Surveypal is an AI-generated insights platform for customer service leaders. But, the name should not deceive you – it’s not precisely the survey software itself. And surveys are not its main focus.

You won't find templates or an advanced survey builder there. Instead, it enables you to create basic CES surveys but pays more attention to data analytics. It lets companies manage customer feedback, eliminate random ticket reviews, and discover opportunities to improve customer experience.

Sometimes, the tools encounter lags and technical difficulties that slow down the feedback collection process. The amount of data available for analysis is also quite limited. 

Valued for

• Intuitive and easy-to-use interface
• The support team that guides users through the process
• Analytics feed, emerging trends, sentiment analysis

Pricing

Two plans are available: Measure for $19 and Analyze for $29 per month per agent. The first provides an intelligent metric report that helps you evaluate your customer experience performance. The Analyze plan provides an AI engine to analyze your data. A 30-day free trial is available. Surveypal offers a demo upon request. 

Free plan

⛔️Surveypal doesn’t provide a free plan.

Retently

What should be noted about Retently? First, the interface is highly customizable, and there are many features to streamline the survey creation process as much as possible. 

Moreover, the tool gives benchmarks and allows you to compare your results with others from your industry, giving you a better overview of where your CES metrics stand among the competition. 

The survey builder is intuitive and should not cause significant problems, even if you’ve never created a CES survey before. 

In contrast, the integrations with other tools aren't working as they should. In addition, some bugs have an impact on the overall tool performance. It might also be challenging to navigate the reports (especially for new users). 

Valued for

• AI-powered automated feedback tagging 
• Kiosk surveys on mobile devices 
• Follow-up questions based on the respondent's answers 
• Advanced reports and trend spotting

Pricing

Retently provides four plans – from $25 (per month, paid yearly) to $749 (per month) for enterprise complex plans. Plans vary depending on the number of surveys and campaigns. There is a 7-day free trial available. 

Free plan

⛔️Retently doesn’t provide a free plan.

Hotjar

Hotjar is mainly known for its heat maps and user behavior visualization. Still, not all know that it also provides the solution for capturing customer feedback through the survey – Hotjar Ask.

Hotjar surveys are pretty easy to set up and can be implemented without much effort. The survey creation process is simple, but it’s worth noting that the lowest plans don’t let you customize the surveys excessively. 

It is also quite challenging to create conditional logic for survey questions there, which might limit your abilities in some ways. 

Valued for

• Sorting survey results by participant sentiment
• Interactive layout and navigation
• Question bank and pre-built survey templates

Pricing

There are three paid plan options available on Hotjar Ask. Prices start at $59 per month, depending on the number of responses and features available. For example, a monthly business plan for analyzing survey performance costs $79 per month. Scale plans are also available. For 15 days, Hotjar Ask is free to try.

Free plan

✅Yes, Hotjar Ask provides a free plan.

Qualtrics

A Qualtrics survey is an advanced solution that can be used by companies that need to conduct extensive customer research. The system is flexible and can be customized to meet your needs. Even so, it's not a solution for everyone.

Unfortunately, it might be pretty hard to implement, especially for beginners. The survey creation process is not straightforward enough and can cause some trouble.

As far as enabling users is concerned, the tool has some limitations, and understanding the permissions and roles can sometimes be a bit complicated. Anyway, it’s a pretty good solution for conducting CES surveys, especially if you have developers on hand.

Valued for

• Survey testing
• Plug-ins and survey automation
• A built-in prediction engine and statistical analysis
• Customized survey design recommendations

Pricing

This vendor does not provide pricing on their website or anywhere publicly. 

Free plan

⛔️Qualtrics doesn’t offer a free plan.

NiceReply

Nicereply is an easy survey solution that helps to deliver surveys automatically without much effort. The survey builder is intuitive, easy to use, and convenient for beginners.

The Nicereply survey design is not particularly appealing, but all surveys work well regardless of screen size. In addition, the tool provides valuable filters for more efficient result segmenting.

As an additional feature, NiceReply allows team members to check and view each other's scores. Such motivation can help to improve their overall performance.

Valued for

• Intuitive survey dashboard
• Advanced filtering by categories
• Combining different survey distribution methods
• Measuring team and agent performance

Pricing

There are four types of plans available. They charge between $49 and $299 per month. Based on the chosen plan, responses are limited to a number between 100 and 2,500 per month. For 14 days, you can test the product for free. It is available upon request if you want to see a demo.

Free plan

⛔️Nicereply doesn’t provide a free plan.

So, what's the choice?

Having so many CES tool options in the market doesn't make the situation any easier. But the goal is to help you even a little bit. So, as a summary, stick to a few points. Choose a CES tool that:

• provides many well-designed survey templates
• lets you for your branding
• no limits you with survey types
• offers good value for the price
• integrates well with other tools

You know what? It seems that there is no better choice than Survicate. Sign up in seconds and start creating surveys that your customers do love. So simple, so fast. Also, you can foster your decision making by checking our newest ranking of best website satisfaction tools.