14 Complaint Management Systems To Watch For

• Issuetrak
• Front
• InvGate Service Desk 
• Case IQ
• Zoho Desk
• isoTracker Complaints Management
• LiveAgent
• Apptivo
• ProProfs Help Desk
• Bitrix24
• Names We Avoided and Why
  • Zendesk Support Suite
  • Jira Service Management
  • Freshservice
  • QualtricsXM

What is a complaint management system?

The Big Mix-Up: CRM versus Complaint Management Software

Complaint management systems help organizations track, organize and resolve ticketed issues based on customer and employee feedback. Useful features of complaint management software typically included a self-help knowledge base, automation task-branching workflows, reporting and analytics, and uptime SLAs.

This is not to be confused with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, which captures customer conversations and data. Popular CRM choices like Salesforce and HubSpot perform a very specific set of tasks for customer relationship building, rather than ticket tracking for problems or issues. Complaint management systems can integrate CRMs into their platforms, and typically do the same and much more than a CRM.

What does Complaint management software do?

• Provides organizations with the necessary tools to track all customer complaints and resolutions.
• Funnels communications through various channels to help businesses communicate effectively with customers and employees.
• Ensures agents meet SLA compliance and handle ticketed issues swiftly with canned responses.
• Fields tickets with substatus rules and automation workflows to the responsible person based on availability, expertise or workload.
• Captures complaints into a centralized system with reporting capabilities for ongoing trend analysis and improvement.
• Provides overall service quality management for improved customer satisfaction.

Features to Look for in a Complaint Management System

Top Complaint Management Software Tools

1. Issuetrak

Best cost-to-feature ratio.

Issuetrak tops Capterra's best complaint management software list this year. This is due in part to how well Issuetrak keeps up with the most-wanted product updates—a direct result of the close relationship we have with our customers. 

On top of our consistent 99% customer satisfaction, Issuetrak’s software product offers competitive live reporting metrics, superior customization options, and personalized setup with dedicated staff assistance that can’t be beat. Issuetrak’s most competitive advantages are the ability to service complaint handling for customer complaints and internal issues, as well as dual deployment options via cloud or on-premises.

Webforms are a frictionless complaint management tool to seamlessly receive honest, complete feedback from customers, employees, or any user (anonymous or not) while getting the specific data points you define. Issuetrak’s webform add-on is simple to use and can be embedded anywhere on your site, from your company website to a standalone web page. Working with our Professional Services team, or using our Managed Services, you can patent-structure the webform with your own selected user-defined fields.

For its cost-to-features, Issuetrak wins out. There are no pricing tiers, meaning you can access all of Issuetrak’s standard features no matter which payment plan you choose. Agent-only plans start at $26 monthly per agent, whereas Agent plans with free users start at $77 monthly per agent.

2. Front

Best runner-up.

Front and center for good reason, this fresh face is taking the complaint management software market by storm. Front summarizes its ability to “route, respond to, and measure all your customer conversations” in its complaint support platform.

Front offers everything you’d expect from a complaints handling system, including template, canned responses, rule-based automation, and analytics for customer tracking and team performance. Seamless CRM integrations and the addition of Zapier make Front a good option for customer complaints management.

Capability-wise, Front is a comparable rival with Issuetrak. However, where Front poses agents limits and gates you from features based on the tier you pay, Issuetrak allows wide-feature access with any of its pricing plans. Moreover, Front offers an attractive starter price package well-suited for entrepreneurs and start-ups, but caution: its higher tiers are less accessible than that of competitors, veering on the pricier side. 

As sticklers for human connection and service, we have to point out that Front lacks a phone number, posing difficulties and potential delays to customer support. Before making your choice to set up with Front, take into account how available their support services will be to assist you with setup or future product guidance. 

3. InvGate Service Desk

Best problem management ITSM tool.

Like Issuetrak, InvGate Service Desk offers both cloud and on-premises hosting, opening the doors for the most gated industries’ IT departments, such as the public sector. Also like Issuetrak, InvGate offers free unlimited end users alongside paid agents, as well as unlimited Watchers and Approvers with specific permissions over tasks.

The doors are not wide open for everyone, though. InvGate is strictly an IT Service Management solution, ideal for your organization’s internal complaints handling. Invgate’s ticket management, knowledge base, strong self-service portal, reporting, SLAs and automation cover all the bases your IT department would need to keep complaint volume low.

Your IT department will also thank you for InvGate’s unique gamification features that help keep ticket resolution moving along and workers on the ball.

While InvGate and Issuetrak are similar in their simplified, easy-to-grasp pricing models, InvGate imposes agent limits per plan. Any business requiring more than 5 agents will find better deals with another complaint management software system.

4. CaseIQ

Best case management for corporate-litigation and HR complaint handling.

Using issue assignment, auditable histories, and automation alerts, organizations can collect incident data to manage complaints and create smarter risk strategies. While possible to use CaseIQ for customer complaints, we would not recommend it for this scope. CaseIQ’s true forte lies in its incident management for internal issues, like corporate fraud, corporate security, or HR violations. 

The best of the basics are included, like omnichannel reporting, configurable fields, templates and rules, automation workflows, permissions access, notifications, and intuitive live reporting. Customizable case management forms, similar to Issuetrak’s Webforms, ensure your operation collects the needed data to be highly responsive to cases.

CaseIQ seems to offer the full package—but at what cost? Hidden pricing may delay some in their shopping journey, and stave off others who are wary of pricing traps. The only way to glimpse beyond CaseIQ’s pricing wall is to connect with sales on a demo.

If you are that far in your journey, then CaseIQ seems a safe option for internal complaint and litigation management.

5. Zoho Desk

Closest customer-facing alternative to Zendesk.

Zoho Desk’s customer feedback system offers multi-channel support, reporting and analytics, collaboration tools, round-robin and rule-based routing, tags, private comments, agent collision alerts, and integrations with Zendesk and Slack—in other words, all the same functions as its competitors.

Its “Zia” AI capabilities alone closely compare that of Zendesk AI, gauging customer sentiment and bot-to-human handoff. Prices are less dramatic than Zendesk, too. However, most organizations will find they’ll need Enterprise tier functions not offered in lower priced tiers. 

Lower price points bar you from basics like load balancing, agent collision, omnichannel support, templates, advanced dashboards and scheduled reports. Lower tiers also heavily restrict analytics, customization and automation, including custom reports, dashboards and fields, automated rules, SLAs and process management.

Zoho Forms offer frontline data collection and integrate with different apps. Beware the cost, though: Zoho Forms has a separate scheme, with pricing tiers to limit users, submissions per month, and storage. Issuetrak’s Webform price is comparable to Zoho’s Enterprise, starting at $1000 with a $500 annual hosting fee, but with zero user or submission limitations. Consider the number of submissions you expect to receive before committing to the monthly subscription of Zoho forms.

Zoho Desk is better suited for customer complaints rather than internal tracking, whereas Issuetrak fluently handles both. If you’re an enterprise with a budget for the highest tier, Zoho offers a lot of potential.

6. isoTracker Solutions

Best for audit management and adherence to CAPA and ISO standards.

Best known for its document control, audit management, non-conformance management, and built-in corrective action (CAPA) features, isoTracker is designed for industries with legal-level compliance needs. isoTracker’s best assets include its document control, audit management, and complaints management, each sold separately. 

This is a no fuss system, with a basic interface that says as much. However, it is also reliable and uniquely controls for compliance with regulatory ISO and FDA requirements, which is why it earns its way into this list. 

You are on your own, however, unless you’re willing to spend extra for training and/or all the features isoTracker has to offer.

7. LiveAgent

Best option with integrated call center.

LiveAgent has proved its worth since being founded in 2006. Its software offers everything you’d expect from a customer complaints system, including chat integrations, push notifications, templates, and a user-friendly interface. The review management process is very focused on customer feedback, ensuring customer satisfaction. LiveAgent’s integrated call center is a standout feature not offered by other complaint management systems.

Like many of the pricing models in this list, LiveAgent restricts access to a number of salient features based on your pricing tier. Its prices are competitive at $9-$49, as long as you are willing to sacrifice several functions while your business scales in growth. Per tier, LiveAgent puts caps on paid seats, email accounts, chat buttons, call center support, departments, automation rules and SLAs, reports, and training.

8. Apptivo

Best field service management software.

Very similar to how customers use Issuetrak for property management, Apptivo’s field service software is specific to work orders, repairs, and installations. For its specialization, Apptivo is becoming one of the frontrunners for complaints management systems amongst construction contractors. 

Email and SMS triggers, approval workflows, dashboard, and automatic reporting guarantee support desk success. Unfortunately, their pricing model creates blockades for SMBs. Each of their 4 pricing tiers limits the number of apps, custom fields, workflows, custom dashboard, and available support, making it difficult and costly to scale your complaints management operations.

Interestingly, Apptivo compares itself to a number of CRMs including Zoho and Salesforce. However, it is a very reliable niche complaint management system well suited to property management, travel, retail and manufacturing industries.

9. ProProfs

Best free plan for freelancers.

ProProfs is one of the only solutions to provide a phone number, if you’d like to get in touch with their team for support (aside from Issuetrak, which provides phone and omnichannel support for its customers.) A dedicated onboarding manager and 15-day money-back guarantee is also proof of ProProfs' dedication to supporting its customers.

Standout features include unlimited ticketing and ticket histories, no attachment limits, and AI-powered analytics. Although ProProfs does not offer on-premises hosting, their IBM cloud hosting offers the best of security. Unique from its competitors, ProProfs enables customers to rate tickets, chats, and help articles for clear CSAT score tracking.

ProProfs offers many fundamentals in their free plan, making it ideal for starter and freelance business models. However, additional costs for vitals like advanced integrations, advanced reporting, white labeling, and customer support suite features could impinge on business growth.

• Basic integrations include Survey Maker and offline chat messages, while extra advanced integrations include Knowledge Base, Chat, Salesforce, MS Dynamics, etc. 
• Basic reporting includes ticket volume trend and agent performance evaluation, while advanced reports add on first response time, custom field reports, child ticketing reporting, and ticket satisfaction.

10. Bitrix24

Best for SMB sales teams.

Bitrix24 toes the line between a CRM and a complaint management system. We include it here because Bitrix24 uniquely leverages customer complaints and feedback to upsell or cross-sell products.

Standout features include CRM functionality for tracking customer interactions, built-in collaboration tools like video call conferencing and chat, and project management features. It offers a fairly robust lead management and sales automation capability, making it very suitable for sales teams in small or medium businesses. 

The pricing scheme is unique, charging per organization rather than per agent. However, each tier imposes user limits, and becomes increasingly expensive for larger companies requiring hundreds or thousands of users. The $499 monthly plan is limited to 250 users, scaling upward in price via a pay-per-agent batch model; therefore, large-scale enterprises will likely find a more suitable price tag elsewhere.

While more aligned with a typical CRM, Bitrix24 earns its way onto our list for its customizable workflow automation for efficient complaint resolution and comprehensive task management features.

Names That Didn’t Make the Top 10 And Why

Some well-established solutions have seen a downturn in reviews and satisfaction amongst their customers. We couldn’t exclude these big names from our list, or the latest information on their performance as complaint management software.

Jira Service Management

Why didn’t Jira cut it for us this time? Jira Service Management is better suited as an ITSM or Bug Tracking software for developers for development and business teams.

To handle more versatility than just managing customer-facing complaints, Jira encourages you to buy several more of their product offerings, piling up your tech stack bills overnight. What’s more, agent limits, storage limits, restrictive SLAs, and limited support are just a few more ways Jira discreetly pushes you into higher price points.

Zendesk Support Suite 

Zendesk boasts the normal features of most complaint management systems, including routing, AI and automations, reporting and analytics, complaint tracking, integrated customer surveys, escalation and prioritization workflows, integrations, SLAs and OLAs, and a native omnichannel experience. However, it’s difficult to justify paying for Zendesk’s steep prices when its competitors are cheaper yet equally robust.

While Zendesk may have a deeper well of integrations than most, a number of the complaint management platforms mentioned above also offer the same or better features. Given the current global economic recession, even large corporate companies are budget-conscious, and Zendesk’s price tag is simply too high not to offer something that blows everyone out of the water. 

Zendesk’s own service generates a number of complaints, too—begging the question: how can your platform help organizations provide the best customer experience, when your own customer service can’t do the same? After a frontline of bots and several tutorial videos on how to reach support, we understand why Zendesk’s customers might be frustrated with lackluster customer service.

Freshservice

Freshservice, one of many Freshworks franchises, offers typical IT service management features. However, declining customer satisfaction ratings over the last few years is distressing for Freshworks fans.

A dense thicket of spam complaints, buggy software, and terrible service make us wary of adding Freshservice to our list of capable complaint management software solutions. A mounting tech stack doesn’t help, where you may require multiple Freshworks products to handle all the operations of your support desk.

Qualtrics XM

Best AI-leveraged analytics for improved experience management.

Qualtrics XM is not a ticketing system, which is why it doesn’t make it to the top of our list. Rather, three product categories qualify their expertise in Experience Management (XM): customer interactions (Customer Frontlines), employee engagement (People Teams), and product management (Strategy & Research). 

Qualtrics XM monitors customer complaints end to end and offers a robust knowledge management system. Its data-centric approach may impress call centers wishing to improve their support metrics, with features like AI-powered reporting tools targeted at improving your customer support team’s performance. While AI (despite its infancy) is an asset to any software system, it’s unclear how much Qualtrics XM balances AI-dependency with human discernment, so as to avoid the stale sterility AI so often has.

Pricing is not straightforward and is only available upon request. This delays shoppers on the move and just adds to Qualtrics' overall lack of clarity.

Qualtrics’ strong focus on market research and predictive customer behaviors makes it an excellent analytical tool for strategic decision-making. However, Qualtrics leaves you stuck in data charts and doesn’t offer any clear fundamental ticketing features of complaint management service desk software. Therefore, Qualtrics seems an excellent supplement to any existing complaint management system—especially one that lacks decent reporting, such as HappyFox.

Issuetrak Software for Complaint Management

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