16 Unique Retently Features - Things That Only This CX Service Can Do

Potential customers often ask us — “what makes Retently better than the competition?”.

That’s something we think about a lot. After all, answering this question well leads to acquiring new business, while responding poorly sends potential customers fleeing for whichever competitor they’re comparing us to.

Comparing Retently to the competition is quite a challenge. Retently is a Customer Experience Management Platform – covering NPS, CSAT, CES, STAR surveys and customer feedback – and, as such, there are just too many things to consider. So instead of filling out those classic “us VS them” comparison tables, we decided to go for something different and showcase some of Retently’s unique features and functionalities.

If you’re wondering why we’ve listed only 14 points, it’s not because we have just 14 unique features. This article covers features that only Retently has at the time of writing. We also wanted to keep this post fairly short, so we only focused on major things rather than exploring every minor detail.

This article covers a list of unique features offered by Retently, compared to other established competitors in the SMB and mid-market, such as InMoment Wootric, Promoter.io, Delighted, AskNicely, and SatisMeter. There are more services, new products, and companies launching every month we might not be aware of.

SIDENOTE.

There’s a good chance that competing services will try to catch up, so all statements in this article are unlikely to hold true forever. But we’ll make sure to update it accordingly should anything change.

1. Everything is linked to survey campaigns

Retently’s campaign is a unique feature. With most competitor tools, you can only set up the surveys and send them out either one time or on a recurring basis. 

Retently, on the other hand, allows you to set up one-time, recurring regular and transactional campaigns, where a predefined set of surveys is sent to a specific customer segment.

This lets you run independent survey campaigns per product, service, or customer segment (group customers by various criteria – revenue, geography, lifecycle, etc.) and get an NPS, CSAT or CES score. 

Each campaign comes with its own options for:

Survey template

All you have to do is create, clone, or adjust an existing template for each campaign and use them when needed.

Audience

Each campaign comes with a preset filter that targets all customers in your Retently account, but you can apply additional filters to narrow down your audience.

Schedule

Your surveys will be sent automatically according to the schedule. Choose whether you want your customers to receive the survey on business days only or any weekday. Set a timeframe limit for your surveys.

Next, set a schedule for new customers to be automatically surveyed, as well as the regularity of recurring surveys. You can also disable the recurring surveys option.

Another handy feature is the daily survey limit which allows you to split your customer list and send a limited number of surveys daily, giving you enough time to engage with your respondents.

Optionally, you can have your CX survey resent to people who did not open the last survey or opened but did not respond. You can choose the same survey template or select a different one.

Alerts

When creating a new alert, you will be asked to choose one or more event types you want to be notified about, notifications frequency (immediately, daily, or weekly digest), and the notifications channel (email or Slack).

Autoreplies

You can create a set of email auto-replies meant to engage with customers that did not leave any text feedback, left a Detractor score, or simply ask your Promoters for a review on Trustpilot and spread word-of-mouth.

Read more about Campaigns in our dedicated knowledge base section.

2. Advanced survey template editor

Retently allows you to customize pretty much everything in your survey template:

• Change the background color
• Upload and adjust your logo, its size, and position
• Edit all texts’ font family, size, styling, and colors
• Adjust the shape, style, and color of all buttons
• Add additional text blocks and custom links

This applies to the Rating question, Open-ended question, Thank you page and the Unsubscribe page.

We’ve already provided default texts for the template, but every piece of the survey can be adapted to your unique case.

What’s more impressive is that the Open-ended question and Thank you page can be different for Promoters, Passives, and Detractors, allowing for a personalized approach and a better segmentation of the provided feedback.

The Thank you page follows the same editing logic. The difference here is that you can also add a CTA (call to action) link.

Get more ideas and NPS survey templates in this article.

3. Survey personalization using merge fields (variables)

In their attempt to draft a successful survey campaign, businesses often overlook the survey subject line, and the context personalization can provide. In this respect, Retently allows making use of merge fields in the survey’s subject line and the content itself for a significantly increased open and response rate. 

Survey variables stand for particular customer attributes, such as the defaults “first name” or “company name”, as well as complex data, such as account manager or region, which can be added when importing customers from a CSV file or synchronizing them by means of our integrations or API.

Variables can be included pretty much in any text input area of the survey template – the subject line, the additional text blocks, the rating, and open-ended questions, as well as the Thank You screen. Before delivery, our system will replace the variables in the survey template with real data, which may differ for each customer or audience segment. 

But what if the customer doesn’t have any data in the property used as a variable? As a rule, the variable will be replaced with empty data; and here’s where fallbacks will turn helpful – a default value displayed if a customer doesn’t have a specific property. 

4. Multi-language surveys

Retently’s unique survey template editor also allows a perfect multi-language setup.

Most survey services come with a preset of translations, which are not adapted for each industry, or sometimes can be far from written by natives.

Retently doesn’t have a multi-language selector. Instead, you can fully customize your NPS survey texts and translate them into any language you need.

Read more about multi-language surveys in our knowledge base.

5. Keep track and A/B test surveys with Outbox

To easily keep track of all the surveys sent to your customers, Retently came up with an Outbox section which, by means of a set of useful filters, allows for advanced data segmentation, meant to improve the survey campaigns along the way.

That brings in several benefits targeting increased survey engagement, namely:

The delivery stats section provides granular details about the survey response rate, when it was sent, opened, or responded down to the minute, and how many customers bounced or opted out of your surveys. These will allow for more data-driven decision-making.

The Outbox is also an effective tool to A/B test your survey samples over time. By looking into the delivery stats, you can track which templates were most appealing and apply the insights in future campaigns.

If used properly, the Outbox can also help improve the response rate. For example, you can manually select some or all filtered surveys and resend a one-time email survey in the campaign they’ve been sent initially.

6. Survey queue management

To streamline survey management, Retently introduced a Queue page that lists all email surveys triggered by specific events but not sent due to a pre-set delay. 

The purpose of the Queue page is rather simple – to provide a straightforward way to view, navigate, and filter upcoming surveys. It also allows users to send surveys ahead of the expected time or cancel them instead without going through individual campaigns’ settings.

7. Feedback management

Since collecting customer feedback is the main surveying goal, the feedback management capabilities could not be overlooked. Retently came up with advanced collaboration, visualization, segmentation, and analysis of the received customer feedback. 

In this context, consider managing your feedback in your Slack instance. Our Slack integration allows receiving, tracking, and responding to customer feedback in real-time, right within Slack. Teams can easily prioritize tasks and take action to resolve the most pressing issues. For example, you can mark a specific feedback and assign it to any of your team members within Retently for follow-up. This way, you can respond to customer needs more efficiently, improve collaboration between teams, and deliver better customer experiences.

8. Automated email cleanup

Retently has a built-in email cleaning feature. Before any surveys are delivered, your recipients’ emails will be automatically checked for deliverability to ensure a greater campaign response rate. Also, you’ll be substantially reducing your bounce rate and making sure you’ll receive more relevant actionable feedback.

9. Antivirus detection

To avoid random scores posted by antivirus systems in their search for harmful content, Retently implemented an algorithm to ensure data accuracy.

Our antivirus detection automatically blocks the scores submitted by well-known systems such as Symantec, Microsoft Outlook Protection, Mimecast, MessageLabs, Barracuda Email Security Service, etc. 

However, as they might also evolve and other similar systems be launched in the future, there is another check in place that monitors antivirus-like patterns and logs them.

Once a score potentially left by a generic antivirus is detected, it is displayed in the feedback widget with a warning (!) sign. At this point, it is up to you to delete or just ignore it from your rating calculation. 

10. Data segmentation and export in all plans

With Retently, you can easily segment your audience with any of our plans. Competitors require you to get their premium plans to enjoy this feature.

Exporting data (like users, feedback, and scores) is also available in all Retently plans – so everyone can access and export their data at no additional cost.

11. Industry benchmarks

Retently has a built-in benchmark feature that allows you to compare your NPS score and trends with the average score for your industry. This way, you get to save time and effort since you have all needed data right on the dashboard. You no longer need to do lengthy Google searches and deal with paywalls to find what you need.

The benchmarks are calculated by doing an anonymous average, and we only cover industries where we have over ten clients to ensure the data is relevant and actionable. Currently, Retently offers incorporated NPS benchmarks for the following industries: SaaS, Ecommerce, Financial Services, Enterprise Software, Digital Marketing, Consulting, Insurance, Healthcare, Logistics & Transportation, Construction, etc.

12. No data retention limits

Unless you cancel your Retently subscription, your data is always here – to access historical customer feedback, NPS scores and compare trends and progress.

Keep a longer history of your customer interactions, and don’t worry about data becoming unavailable after a while, or the need to upgrade to a higher plan.

13. Automation playbooks

Retently allows you to easily automate various processes and run custom scenarios using the incorporated Zapier integration and webhooks.

Retently helps you create automation scenarios based on the “if this, then that” principle.

A few common and highly useful scenarios are:

• Automatically start a conversation with a Detractor
• Automatically send a message to people who did not leave text feedback
• Delete hard bounced contacts from your list
• Export account NPS data to Salesforce or any other CRM
• Run a webhook and send your NPS score and feedback to a 3rd party service or application

Zapier, Make & Alloy Automation:

Zapier is an integration service that connects different applications (over 6,000 apps at the time of this writing). Connect Retently to your Zapier account and sync new contacts, send transactional NPS surveys, export customer feedback, and manage your team’s tasks.

The Zapier integration is not unique to Retently. Most established competitors feature one or maybe two possible Zapier triggers or actions. However, the amount of potential automation scenarios using Zapier with Retently is overwhelming due to many supported triggers and actions.

Make & Alloy are also sought-for integrations that allow you to bring together various systems and platforms to create a seamless customer experience. The integrations enable companies to streamline their customer engagement and support processes, automate workflows for quick execution of repetitive tasks, and connect with customers across channels. Hence, you can efficiently adjust customer interactions and journeys, tailoring them to specific business goals, and thus provide faster and more consistent service delivery. 

Check our Zapier integration page here.

14. Account CX

Retently goes beyond tracking customer experience metrics on a contact level. With Retently, you have the flexibility to monitor CX metrics at an account (company) level. When you send out surveys, our system automatically generates a list of accounts, allowing you to see the number of contacts associated with each account in Retently. Additionally, you have the option to manually add new companies and view CX metrics for each. 

The best part is that this valuable information can be seamlessly exported through our native integrations or API to other services for in-depth analysis.

15. Automated feedback classification & analytics

Retently offers unique analytics features, providing you with an insightful overview of the text feedback you’ve received. Our AI-powered algorithm automatically detects and classifies topics and performs sentiment analysis.

With this automated topic detection and sentiment analysis, you can quickly grasp which areas of your offerings resonate positively with your audience and which aspects require improvement before it’s too late. It simplifies the process of making data-driven decisions and offers a comprehensive understanding of your customer feedback.

16. Product UI/UX

Retently features a visually-pleasing UI that ensures running NPS surveys and campaigns doesn’t feel like a chore. Most of our customers have told us, on multiple occasions, how much they love the clean design and the streamlined user experience.

Retently features a slick, easy-to-use, and highly intuitive interface. All the data and information are in one place, thus being easily accessible. Data visualization is simple to follow and understand. The menus and tooltips are self-explanatory, allowing for no time wasted. Pretty much no onboarding is needed (not even for new, unfamiliar users).

That’s obviously not everything…

Retently has many more unique features and capabilities.

Most of our customers love our product design, its cleanliness, and the user experience.

Our customer support team efforts are highly appreciated, this being the second reason respondents score a 9 or a 10 in our own NPS surveys.  

If you ever need any help or have a question for us, we’re right there for you – our support team works round-the-clock to offer you the best customer experience.

Don’t miss out on the many benefits of using Retently and experiencing a new level of customer engagement. Get started today with a 7-day free trial and take your CX to the next level.