12 Best SMS Survey Software in 2023: A Detailed Comparison

Do you know that 5 billion people across the world send and receive messages? This means that 65% of the world's population uses SMS. This makes SMS surveys a viable choice for brands looking to collect feedback from customers.

SMS survey software and tools are very popular these days, with some amazing options to choose from based on your requirements. But before we explore and analyze different tools, let’s understand why SMS surveys are one of the top choices for businesses to collect Customer Feedback.

• SMS Surveys have Better Reach: 65% of the world population uses SMSes, which makes it a great choice for businesses to reach their majority of customers for collecting feedback.
• SMS Surveys have a Higher Participation Rate: The SMS open rate is 98%, and the text message response rate is 209% higher than other channels. 
• Ensure Continuous Engagement with SMS Surveys: SMS text surveys can be sent at various touchpoints without it getting lost in the spam folder. People check their phones about 80 times a day and are more familiar with chatting, which makes it possible to collect insightful feedback on various instances without overwhelming the survey audiences.

Reach a Wide Audience with SMS Surveys📈

With SMS Surveys, collect feedback in a fast and easy way through Survey Invitations sent via text message.

In this article, we explore some of the top survey tools that you can consider to get started with your SMS Survey program.

Let’s get started.

TL;DR

• SMS surveys are a powerful tool for collecting customer feedback due to their wide reach and high participation rates.

• We've picked out the top text survey tools based on different parameters like their offerings, specialization, review and scores on review sites, pricing, integrations, ease of use, and more. 

• This blog explores the top SMS survey software options for businesses and provides a detailed comparison of their features, pricing, and support. The list includes text message survey tools like Zonka Feedback, Delighted, SurveySparrow, SimpleTexting, SMS-Track, and more. 

• Key factors to consider when choosing SMS survey software include customization, branding, SMS deliverability, and integrations.

• There are various instances where SMS survey software can be used effectively to gauge feedback. Some of these use cases are to collect feedback around customer satisfaction, employee feedback, event feedback, post-purchase feedback, delivery feedback, patient feedback, and more. 

•  Zonka Feedback is a leading SMS survey software that you can use to gauge customer feedback through text messages. You can sign up with the SMS feedback tool to try it for free or schedule a demo to explore how it works and start sending your SMS surveys.  

Choosing a Good SMS Survey Software for Your Business

Choosing any tool for the business requires sufficient analysis of features and compatibility with the existing tools. The new software introduced in the business should have features that satisfy all requirements as well as work well with the existing business ecosystem. The same is true when picking a good SMS Survey Software.

Here are things you can consider while picking an SMS Survey Software:

1. Customizations Available — Are you able to customize the SMS message and Survey? Can you personalize the text message with the customer's name and other details?
2. Branding & White-Labeling — Does the platform allow you to send your brand survey link and white-label your SMS header so your customer identifies that the message and SMS feedback request is coming from your brand?
3. SMS Survey Deliverability — Does the SMS Survey tool ensure good deliverability of SMSes in the specific regions and countries you’re looking for?
4. Integrations — There are mostly two ways that surveys are sent. One during a particular time interval like monthly, quarterly, yearly, or so on. Alternatively, SMS surveys may be sent after an event like a purchase, an appointment, and so on. In these cases, the platform you choose should have the option to send SMSes from the platform itself (as and when you need) as well as integrate with tools you use to trigger SMS surveys automatically.

 Besides the above, which are very relevant to SMS Survey Software, other important factors to consider are:

• Overall customizations

• Reporting & Alerts

• Pricing

Read on to explore more about these tools. Toward the end, we also share a comparison table to help you choose an ideal SMS Survey Software for your business.

1. Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback is a renowned name in the feedback industry owing to its unique and advanced survey features. This intuitive SMS survey software makes feedback collection more efficient for brands since it allows you to create quick SMS surveys using its simple survey builder. Whether you wish to add a 1 to 10 rating scale survey question, a multiple-choice question, an open-ended question, Likert scale survey question, or any other survey question type, you can select from its 25+ question types to get feedback in the most accurate form.

Features:

• Skip logic and hide logic to customize the survey’s question flow

• Personalize surveys with the white label feature

• Deep integrations and automation features

• 100+ readymade templates to send surveys in minutes

• Easy and effiient feedback management with real-time notifications and automated workflows to quickly close the feedback loop
• Intelligent reporting and analytics to create reports like CES, CSAT, NPS, etc.
• Integrations: Slack, Mailchimp, Google Sheets, Pipedrive, Airtable, Front, Shopify, Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom, Freshdesk, APIs, and Webhooks
• Support Options Available: Live chat, phone email, and knowledge base

Rating Score

Ease of Use: 9.6/10

Quality of Support: 9.7/10

Ease of Setup: 8.6/10

Free Trial

Available, free trial for 7 days.

Cost

$24/month - Essential Plan

$79/month - Professional Plan

$169/month - Growth Plan

$429/month - Enterprise Plan

2. Delighted

Delighted SMS survey software is another good and one of the most user-friendly options if you're looking to collect customer feedback with SMS surveys within minutes without requiring you to have good technical knowledge. It is a simple software suitable for businesses of all sizes. This text survye software has a feature of smart scheduling that helps you to schedule your survey SMS in such a way that they receive the text survey invitation during the day time only.

Features

• Send surveys both on flip phones as well as smartphones with 100% text without requiring any data plan
• Code-free customization
• Easily customize the questions and language of the survey
• Autopilot feature that automatically surveys your customers by sending them SMS surveys within a regular interval of time 
• Send survey text messages at various events of the customers’ journey like a check-out, a delivery, or a support interaction
• Localizing or Lookup your phone number feature to make numbers appear to be from respondent's region
• Integrations: Shopify, Salesforce, Slack Zapier, Chatdesk, Zendesk, Webhooks, Intercom
• Support Options Available: Live Chat, Email, and Knowledge Base

Rating Score

Ease of Use: 9.7/10

Quality of Support: 9.6/10

Ease of Setup: 9.6/10

Free Trial

Available

Cost

$0/month - Free Version

$224/month - Premium Plan

Customized - Premium Plus Plan

3. Sender

Sender is a powerful email & SMS marketing automation solution that allows you to create and schedule SMS campaigns for your audience, which you can use not only for customer surveys but also for effective marketing. Trusted by over 150,000 users, this SMS feedback tool promises best-in-class SMS deliverability and cost-effective pricing plans. 

As one of the popular text message survey tools, this platform comes with a plethora of features to make your text surveys more effective.

Features

• Powerful segmentation capabilities for targeted marketing, time-sensitive offers, and detailed SMS campaign metrics
• SMS marketing automation and email marketing capabilities to automate omnichannel marketing efforts and ensures feedback is heard
• Wide variety of SMS templates
• Fully TCPA-compliant provider with no spam risk campaigns

• Integrations: Integrates with all major CMS platforms, CRM, and eCommerce platforms like WordPress, PrestaShop, Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, and more. 

• Support Options Available: Live Chat, Email, and Knowledge Base

Rating Score

Ease of Use: 8.9/10
Quality of Support: 9.3/10
Ease of Setup: 9.3/10

Free Trial

Free plan available for up to 2500 subscribers.

Cost

Free forever plan without SMS credits

Paid plans start at $8 per month

4. piHappiness

piHappiness helps you build powerful and flexible online surveys within no time. It’s a digital tool that would enable you to design, conduct, and evaluate online surveys.

You will be able to analyze your customer satisfaction with piHappiness survey app. Further, you can customize your survey by designing your personalized survey and encouraging and outmatching satisfaction during rising expectations with their deftly designed feedback platform. 

Features

• Text message survey tool that helps you increase your reachability by reaching out to the maximum audience

• Multiple survey channels like Email, Personal Links, SMS, Weblinks, Offline Mode, QR code, Social Media, Website

• Text message survey tool that triggers to schedule the surveys to be sent towards different touchpoints or events in the customer journey like post-purchase, bill payments, delivery, etc. at several intervals like every month, quarter, or even annually.

• Closing the loop of feedback effectively as it enables you to receive custom alerts plus notifications

• Advanced reporting capabilities to get effective customer feedback reports and team performance reports

• Support Options Available: Live chat, phone email, and knowledge base

Rating Score

Usage comfort: 9.1/10

Support efficiency: 9.4/10

Setup feasibility: 8/10

Free Trial

Available, free trial for 7 days.

Cost

49$/month - Standard Plan

99$/month - Premier Plan

199$/month - Professional Plan

399$/month - Enterprise Plan

599$/month - Elite Plan

5. QuestionPro

Claiming to be the leader in SMS text message survey tools, QuestionPro helps you to create and send text surveys, collect real-time data, and analyze them effectively. It provides 350+ survey templates with 40+ standard question types. Its advanced survey logic and branching help you to provide your customers with a smooth survey experience with advanced logic like skip logic, text piping, survey looping, and branching.

Features

• Visual dashboard that enables you to filter the survey responses on the basis of multiple attributes

• Advanced reporting allows you to access reports like real-time survey reports, GAP Analysis, Trend Analysis, and TURF Analysis

• Download your reports in formats like Excel, Powerpoint, CSV raw data, and PDF format

• 2 factor-authentication, a security feature to eliminate false respondents

• Integrations: Intercom, Slack, Zoho, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Zapier and more

• Support Options Available: Live Chat, Live Chat, Online

Rating Score

Ease of Use: 8.7/10

Quality of Support: 9.0/10

Ease of Setup: 9.1/10

Free Trial

Available, Free 10-day trial.

Cost

$0/month - Essentials (Free Version)

$85/month - Advanced

Customized - Enterprise

6. SurveySparrow

SurveySparrow is another great software that helps you create engaging surveys for gathering customer feedback and sending them to your customers via text messages. It enables you to create conversational and engaging survey forms that can bring high response rates to your surveys. You can customize your surveys with different designs and themes. You can white-label your surveys and add your own branding and style to the surveys and the survey URLs. Its customization helps you to make the surveys clear, crisp, and to the point.

Features

• Choose your survey audience from any list or share them directly

• SurveySparrow’s reporting module helps to analyze the survey data received and track the survey performance easily

• Schedule survey reports of survey data to be sent to you at regular intervals automatically

• Apply filters on your survey responses and compare your responses with the Compare Feature of the tool

• Mobile-first surveys and can be easily accessed and responded to through mobile phone

• Integrations: Intercom, Slack, Segment, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Zapier, and more

• Support Options Available: Live Chat, Email, Phone, Knowledge Base

Rating Score

Ease of Use: 9.3/10

Quality of Support: 9.3/10

Ease of Setup: 9.2/10

Free Trial

Available, 14-day Free Trial.

Cost

$149/month - Business

$249/month - NPS

$449/month - Enterprise

Customized - Elite

Not sure if SurveySparrow is the right SMS survey software for you? Check out some of the top SurveySparrow alternatives that offer even more advanced features to create and send your text surveys vis SMS. 

7. SurveyMonkey

Survey Monkey is yet another popular survey software that provides you with a fast and easy way to connect with people on their phones by sending them mobile surveys on the go via SMS. It enables you to send time-sensitive text surveys at an ideal time to gather more accurate responses, be it on-premises or post-event.

Features

• Set triggers to send post-event surveys like dining, employee onboarding, or ask health survey questions pre or post-doctor visit, discharge from the hospital, or a customer support interaction

• Easily upload phone numbers from a CSV file, Sync with Active Directory, or manually

• Surveys are optimized for mobile devices to make them easy to open and take the survey through mobile phones

• Integrations: Salesforce, Slack, Promoter API, Zapier, Segment

• Support Options Available: Live Chat, Email, Phone, Knowledge Base

Rating Score

Ease of Use: 9.2/10

Quality of Support: 8.6/10

Ease of Setup: 9.0/10

Free Trial

Not Available, only free basic plans are available without much features

Cost

Starting Price - $25/month/user

Business Plans - Team Advantage, Team Premier and Enterprise.

Personal Plans - Standard Monthly, Advantage Annual, and Premier Annual

You can also look for SurveyMonkey alternatives like Zonka Feedback to send out effective text surveys at a much more competitive pricing.

8. GetFeedback

GetFeedback is another text survey tool that helps you capture real-time quality feedback from your customers by sending them survey invitations through SMS. The Automation in this tool enables the surveys to be sent to the customers automatically after an interaction to prompt real-time feedback.

• SMS survey software to create sleek surveys with white-labeling

• Compare the survey response rates

• Multiple channels for sending surveys like email

• Integration: Salesforce 

• Support Options Available: Online, Live Chat

Rating Score

Ease of Use: 9.2/10

Quality of Support: 9.0/10

Ease of Setup: 9.3/10

Free Trial

Available

Cost

There are three plans namely Direct, Digital, and Complete Plan; but prices are not Provided by the vendor.

GetFeedback looking too complex and expensive for your text messaging survey needs? Look at some of the best GetFeedback alternatives we have covered to find a simpler and more affordable platform.

9. SimpleTexting

SimpleTexting is exclusively a Text Message Service app designed to send bulk text messages of alerts and surveys. It allows you to easily create text surveys and collect feedback data with those text surveys. You can easily send mobile surveys to groups of people, collect customers’ responses or votes and tally results, and follow up with the respondents.

Features

• Collect customer or employee feedback through simple surveys sent through text messaging only

• Specialized messaging software with text message surveys as its core offering

• Integrations: Salesforce, Zapier, Mailchimp, Hubspot, Slack, Shopify

• Support Options Available: Live Chat, Webinars, Knowledge Base

Rating Score

Ease of Use: 9.3/10

Quality of Support: 9.5/10

Ease of Setup: 9.1/10

Free Trial

Available, 14-day Free Trial

Cost

(Price depends on the number of messages you get ranging from 500 to 50000.)

500 credits - $25/month

50000 credits - $625/month

10. TextMagic

TextMagic is another easy-to-use SMS Survey tool that helps you improve your Customer Experience and get valuable feedback from any audience. With TextMagic, you can schedule and send SMS Surveys to be sent automatically to your customers at the time you decide. SMS Survey Analytics will help you carefully analyze the feedback data or export the replies and TextMagic Dashboard helps to check the deliverability, responses, and performance of the surveys.

Features

• Six predefined survey templates for various purposes

• Enables you to personalize your surveys by adding merge fields

• Generate automatic replies based on essential keywords in the customers’ responses

• Preview tool helps to test the survey you created by taking and filling your own surveys first

• Integrations: Zapier, APIs

• Support Options Available: Customer Care

Rating Score

Ease of Use: 9.6/10

Quality of Support: 9.1/10

Ease of Setup: 9.2/10

Free Trial

Available

Cost

$0.04 per text

11.  SMS-Track

SMS-Track is a 2-way SMS Survey tool that focuses on SMS Communication and helps you perform surveys and polls and get a good response rate. The company claims the response rate of its surveys to be 90% or even more. The tool allows you to integrate text surveys with web surveys. It helps to monitor the customers’ responses in real time and revert to your customers within seconds.

Features

• Predefined graphs to present your survey results

• Easily create your own feedback reports and also export the feedback data to your own data analysis software

• Schedule your SMS surveys to be sent as per your requirements of time

• Integrations: R, sTaTa, SAS and APIs

• Support Options Available: Live Chat, email, and Contact form

Rating Score

Not Provided

Free Trial

Available

Cost

Customized

12. SurveyMill

SurveyMill is a UK-based SMS Survey Software that helps in creating and sending fast and effective SMS Surveys. With this tool, you can send up to 13 questions per survey, which is fair enough for an SMS Survey. You can put any type of question including yes-no type questions, ratings, and plain text.

Features

• View response statistics for every question

• Opt-out feature lets your customers opt out of your surveys

• Anytime download survey reports in Excel format and analyze them for other references

• Advanced credit facilities

• Dedicated shortcode when you move to a credit account

• Auto top-up feature to keep running smoothly and never run out of credit and also share your top-up balance

• Integrations: No Integrations listed

• Support Options Available: Email, Contact Form, Customer Support: 9:30 am to 5:00 pm UK Time

Rating Score

Overall Reviews: 4.2/5

Free Trial

Available

Cost

4.5p per message, per contact. Can be as low as 2p depending on the volume.

SMS Survey Tools Comparison 

Here is a comparison of all the text survey tools that we have listed above. Below, you can find all the tools in a tabulated format and compare them with each other based on parameters like pricing, whether they have a free plan, their customer service and support, the overall score they've received, and their ease of work.  

Use Cases of Text Survey Software

To put it into simple words, every business or creative writing essay service that collects customer feedback can use text survey software to capture a high volume of meaningful feedback. Here are some use cases to help you understand how an SMS survey platform can benefit your brand:

1. Customer Satisfaction Feedback

You can create short text message surveys that aim at capturing feedback across the primary CX metrics:

• CSAT: The Customer Satisfaction Score or CSAT, is a global metric that represents your customers’ satisfaction level. It is measured using a CSAT survey which is usually a 5-scale survey that prompts customers to rate how satisfied they are with your brand or service. The Customer Satisfaction Survey Template can have one or more questions, including an open-ended question to let customers share the reason for their score.
• NPS: NPS or the Net Promoter Score is the standard metric to measure customer loyalty. It is measured using an NPS survey prompt that prompts customers to rate their likeliness of doing business again or recommending the brand to others on a scale of 0 to 10. You can also add an open or closed-ended question to your text survey to understand the reason for the score you received.

2. Customer Service Feedback

With a text survey app or software, you can collect customer service surveys and measure feedback on two aspects:

• Customer Effort Score: The Customer Effort Score or CES is the measure of your customers’ effort in doing business with you. For example, if a customer reached out to your support service to seek assistance, a CES survey helps understand if it was easy for them to contact you and get a resolution.
• While the CES question consists of a scale, you can always add a second question to understand from your customer what liked or disliked about the service.
• Agent Performance: Agent performance SMS surveys are designed to understand how well your support executives perform. The feedback can be collected around different qualities a customer support agent must have, like knowledge, willingness to help, communication, friendliness, etc., to measure agent performance.

3. Online Purchase Experience Feedback 

eCommerce brands can collect feedback at various touchpoints using text surveys using targeted eCommerce surveys. For example, you can automate a customer satisfaction survey after purchase. This means that a survey would be triggered automatically to collect feedback from customers after they make a transaction with your brand.

Similarly, you can send these surveys at other touchpoints to your target audience, like customer service calls or chats, post-product delivery, etc. All you need is an AI-based text message survey software that allows automating SMS surveys.

4. Capture Event Feedback

SMS survey software can be used to send email lead capture surveys multiple times before, during, and after the event. For example, in a painting workshop, text message surveys can be sent before the workshop to know what participants are expecting. During the event or workshop, text surveys can help understand if everything is on point and improve in real-time.

After the workshop, SMS surveys can be used to capture the overall satisfaction levels of participants including their comments so that feedback can help in improving future workshops in alignment with the audience’s expectations.

5. Patient Feedback

SMS surveys are very useful in collecting post-consultation and post-treatment feedback. With these surveys as text message, you can reach your patients after different interactions to gauge their experience effectively and promptly. 

For example, a patient satisfaction survey can be set to be triggered automatically after an inpatient is discharged. Similarly, patients can share their doctor’s score after the consultation or diagnosis.

Other than that, you can also use SMS feedback tools to send health monitoring surveys, post appointment surveys for outpatients, pos-discharge surveys, and even gauge patient net promoter score. 

6. Employee Feedback

In a working environment, feedback is necessary at various points in an employee lifecycle like interviews, onboarding, appraisals, promotions, team allocation, etc. Other feedback like office feedback, manager feedback, team feedback, workplace feedback, etc., is critical too. You can send surveys vis text message to employees during these events and are preferred since email surveys can sometimes get lost among dozens of emails employees receive every day.

7. Hospitality Feedback

In hotels, restaurants, and tourism service businesses, SMS text surveys can be sent to capture quick feedback. For example, SMS survey software can trigger guest satisfaction surveys after their stay. In restaurants, guests can share feedback via SMS surveys after dining in with the restaurant dine-in feedback form. The idea is to make feedback sharing easy so your businesses can get feedback consistently and more frequently.

8. Delivery Feedback

The online orders process includes registering a mobile number, and most of the online orders are made through phones only. Whether ordering a pizza or purchasing a dress for a party, a phone number is mandatory to provide. Therefore, SMS becomes a channel that you can use anytime to provide information about the customers’ orders.

You can provide delivery status like ‘Packed,’ ‘Out for Delivery,’ or ‘Delivered’ through SMS. Similarly, you can use this channel to send short surveys to the customers to obtain Delivery Feedback.

You can easily use any text message survey tools to collect feedback for product delivery, restaurant or food delivery, and delivery of couriers or packages. 

The reason why you can use these text surveys for to gauge delivery feedback is because SMS survey software can be easily integrated with your POS or delivery platform, you can schedule your surveys, and even track them enhance their effectiveness. 

Conclusion

To conclude, the landscape of survey software has evolved significantly, and in 2023, SMS survey tools have emerged as powerful assets for businesses seeking efficient and insightful feedback collection. The comprehensive comparison presented in this blog highlights the top 12 SMS survey software tools available, offering a valuable resource for organizations aiming to make informed choices.

Zonka Feedback can be a great choice for businesses looking to trigger text surveys to target audiences on their mobile devices. It can gather useful information through SMSes and help measure customer satisfaction to enhance the overall customer experience. 

You can also enjoy the 7-day free trial of Zonka Feedback to explore the features that this SMS survey software has to offer and make an informed decision.