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Competition is at an all-time high, and retaining consumers has become just as (if not more) important than acquiring them. Acquiring a new customer now is 5–7x more expensive than retaining an existing one.
Keeping that in mind, several mid-market to enterprise brands in DTC/retail, travel, SaaS, and financial services have been using Voice of the Customer (VoC) platforms as they offer actionable insights from real-time feedback to reduce churn, build loyalty, and develop retention strategies. A study by ImpactMyBiz stresses that 86% of the buyers are ready to pay more for a better customer experience.
In this guide, we will explore how Qualtrics and InMoment support customer retention analytics, focusing on AI-enabled tagging, automation, omnichannel VoC, and integrations.
We will also highlight how, as a modern AI-native VoC platform, SentiSum offers a streamlined, more agile option for support-led teams.
Comparing Qualtrics vs InMoment vs SentiSum
Qualtrics: An Overview
Qualtrics is an all-in-one experience management solution, most famous for its VoC analytics that enable organizations to find pain points along the customer journey and maximize customer satisfaction and loyalty while conducting market research.
The platform offers real-time predictive analytics, workflow automation, and role-based dashboards that can identify insights and create efficiencies to enable organizations to act quickly.
Qualtrics Pros
Let’s go over some of the best features of Qualtrics:
Advanced Survey Design and Analytics Engine
Qualtrics provides robust survey creation capabilities with advanced logic, branching, and statistical analysis tools. The platform processes survey data using algorithms to predict churn likelihood and forecast customer satisfaction trends.
Enterprise-Scale Customization Options
The platform allows extensive customization through survey logic, role-based dashboards, and workflow configurations. Enterprise teams can tailor interfaces to meet specific departmental needs and create compliance-friendly surveys for regulated industries.
Established Integration Ecosystem
Qualtrics connects with major CRM platforms like Salesforce, customer support systems, and enterprise analytics tools. These integrations enable data flow between feedback collection and operational systems, supporting closed-loop processes for customer follow-up and case management.
Qualtrics Limitations
What are the limitations of Qualtrics you must know? Let’s take a look:
Steep Learning Curve and Implementation Complexity
Multiple user reviews consistently highlight Qualtrics' complexity for advanced modules, dashboard creation, and administrative tasks.
The platform typically requires dedicated power users and extensive training to achieve full functionality. For busy CX teams needing immediate insights, this learning curve can significantly delay time-to-value.
High Implementation Costs and Price Barriers
User feedback indicates that Qualtrics' pricing is often justified only when organizations fully utilize many advanced features.
For mid-market companies or teams focused specifically on retention analytics, the cost-to-benefit ratio may not align with budget constraints or specific use cases.
Performance and Reporting Limitations
Users also report slow report generation and performance issues when dashboards contain multiple widgets.
Additionally, constraints on side-by-side time comparisons limit the ability to quickly identify trends and patterns that drive customer retention decisions.
InMoment: An Outline
InMoment is a user-friendly, enterprise-grade VoC solution powered by artificial intelligence, offering a variety of tools for data analysis. 66% of customers expect brands to respond and resolve issues in minutes, and InMoment makes that happen.
It is strong in real-time feedback collection from surveys, reviews, social media, contact centers, and more, and produces actionable analytics and journey mapping to perform market research.
InMoment Strengths
InMoment positions itself as a customer intelligence platform that combines feedback collection, operational data, and journey mapping into a unified system.
Multi-Channel Feedback Integration Capabilities
InMoment processes feedback from various sources, including surveys, online reviews, social media, contact center transcripts, and other digital touchpoints. This breadth allows organizations to consolidate disparate feedback streams into a single interface for analysis and reporting purposes.
Real-Time Processing and Alert Systems
The platform processes incoming feedback and can trigger alerts to relevant teams through dashboard notifications. This capability supports faster response times when customer issues are detected across different channels and touchpoints.
Journey Analytics and Mapping Features
InMoment provides customer journey visualization tools that help organizations identify specific points where customer satisfaction changes. These mapping capabilities can support root cause analysis and process improvement initiatives.
Enterprise-Scale Data Processing
The platform handles large volumes of feedback data across multiple channels, making it suitable for organizations with extensive customer interaction points and high feedback volumes.
Limitations of InMoment
Here are some common drawbacks of InMoment:
High Costs and Poor Value Perception
User reviews consistently indicate that InMoment is expensive for smaller teams, with pricing perceived as poor value at certain levels.
Mid-market companies focused on retention analytics may find that the cost structure doesn't align with budget constraints or specific use case requirements.
Reporting Limitations and Technical Complexity
Users also report constraints in reporting and filtering capabilities, plus customization requirements that demand technical expertise.
Busy CX teams needing rapid insights may find these limitations slow down decision-making and require additional technical resources.
Performance and Reliability Concerns
Multiple user reviews cite slower performance and occasional system unreliability issues. Retention-focused teams that need consistent, real-time access to customer sentiment data may experience disruptions that impact critical business responses.
Service Delivery and Support Challenges
Customer feedback highlights difficulties getting promised support and service delivery concerns, reflected in low customer satisfaction scores.
What Makes SentiSum the Best Qualtrics and InMoment Alternative
SentiSum differentiates itself by being the AI-native Voice of Customer platform, lightweight, and purpose-built for real-time retention analytics.
While Qualtrics and InMoment lean heavily on surveys, SentiSum thrives on the unstructured feedback data that most CX teams already have: tickets, chats, and NPS comments.
Here are the core features:
Kyo: Your Customer Second Brain
SentiSum's standout feature is Kyo, the Intelligent AI Assistant that acts as your "Customer Second Brain." Unlike traditional dashboards that require manual exploration, Kyo provides conversational summaries and personalized pattern recognition.
Simply ask Kyo, "What's driving customer complaints this week?" and receive immediate, written explanations with context and recommended actions. It learns your role and becomes smarter the more you use it, whether you're in customer success, marketing, or product management.
This way, unlike traditional dashboards that require manual exploration, Kyo provides conversational summaries and proactive insights.
AI-Native Feedback Intelligence
SentiSum analyzes conversations and feedback automatically using natural language processing, eliminating the need for manual survey design, tagging, or export processes.
It powers real-time conversation summarization and anomaly detection, surfacing issues like "shipping delays" or "login errors" immediately without any setup overhead.
Mastering Unstructured Data Through Intelligent Automation
Most feedback today is captured in support tickets, live chats, or emails. SentiSum excels in converting unstructured data to structured, actionable information through its multi-language support and contextual tagging capabilities, helping identify areas explaining why customers churn and what drives retention.
Automated AI Tagging
Every piece of feedback instantaneously began to be tagged, or categorized, into themes like "pricing issues, "deleted orders", or "service problems", meaning that the manual tagging was now redundant and universally reliable across firms.
Custom Dashboards & Modular System
Each user can create function-tailored views using modular 'cards' focused on KPIs, themes, or issue tracking. Live dashboards reflect how your customers actually talk, not generic sentiment models—delivered within days, not months of setup.
Quick, Easy, and Scalable
SentiSum's integration with Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Intercom, and other systems means teams can start generating insights on the go.
Unlike legacy VoC platforms that require extensive training, Kyo learns from your interactions and provides personalized insights based on your role. This makes SentiSum well-suited for support-led CX programs where speed and agility are essential.
Speech Analytics & Voice Intelligence
SentiSum's platform extends beyond text analysis to include voice call analysis, real-time transcription, voice sentiment detection, and agent performance insights.
This comprehensive approach to customer communication analysis sets it apart from text-only VoC platforms.
Check out our recent YouTube videos to get a better idea of how we can help you.
Use Cases: Which Tool to Choose, and When?
Here’s our recommendation on which tool you can choose depending on your workflow:
When Should You Choose Qualtrics?
If you are a large organization and require a customizable and predictive customer experience management approach, and you want some type of sophisticated predictive retention modeling approach.
- Survey Centered Programs: If your retention strategy is dependent upon structured surveys, like NPS or CSAT, or structured employee engagement surveys, the flexible nature of Qualtrics is product-agnostic.
- Complex Industries: Regardless of what your program looks like, if you operate in a heavily regulated industry (e.g., healthcare, finance, or the government), Qualtrics is much more compliance-friendly and customizable than other software.
- Enterprise Integrations: If your company is already utilizing Salesforce, SAP, or another large-scale CRM environment, Qualtrics will provide deep integration into those applications that other products will not provide.
- Predictive Retention Modeling: If you want sophisticated predictive churn modeling and want to target “at-risk” consumers preemptively, Qualtrics provides the data and statistical analytical structure to do so.
When Should You Choose InMoment?
InMoment is ideal for organizations that want to link in-the-moment feedback to live customer journeys and have the ability to take action on feedback immediately.
- Hospitality and Travel Brands: Hotels, airlines, and restaurants that require live alerts to service failures to salvage the moment and their consumers' experience should use InMoment.
- Retail: Omnichannel retail brands with reviews, survey feedback, and in-store sentiment will benefit from InMoments' ability to combine these touchpoints.
- Customer Journey Mapping: Brands that want to face the churn exactly when they experience churn in the customer lifecycle, whether onboarding, checkout, or support, InMoment's journey analytics will be helpful.
- Operational Accountability: Teams that require not just insights but also workflow tools that allow for the case to be tracked until it is resolved can tailor InMoment to their specific needs.
When Should You Choose SentiSum?
- For Leadership & Teams: When leaders need to make sense of AI-driven insights from unstructured feedback—quickly, simply, and without the heavy overhead of traditional Voice of Customer (VoC) programs—they choose SentiSum.
- For Support-Led Teams: Handling thousands of tickets, chats, or emails every month? SentiSum delivers retention analytics straight from raw data—no surveys required—while streamlining feedback collection.
- For Fast-Moving DTC & SaaS Brands: Looking for rapid insights into churn drivers like failed payments or onboarding friction? Our real-time dashboards give you answers when you need them most.
- For Firms Seeking Automation: Tired of manual tagging, survey design, and lengthy setup? SentiSum removes the busywork with AI-powered automation, letting your team focus on action—not admin.
- For Mid-Market Firms: Want to scale VoC insights without complicating the process? SentiSum integrates directly with Zendesk, Gorgias, or Intercom, delivering fast time-to-value without the months-long setup of legacy VoC solutions.
SentiSum has been designed from the ground up as retention-first VoC insights analytics. There is no heavy survey program, as we extract meaning from unstructured feedback that your customers are providing through support tickets, support chats, task chats, and NPS responses.
Hopin’s experience
When Hopin, an events tech platform, had no way to get visibility into customer challenges with a manual tagging process, SentiSum transformed their process.
Once integrated with Zendesk, they had deep insight and sentiment context rapidly, to the extent that product teams could now slice ‘Views’ and self-serve insight for roadmap development. As their Customer Operations Manager, Gareth Elsby shared, “passing it upstream to product stopped all of those ad-hoc requests and then some.
Here’s the detailed case study on how Hopin is encouraging wider teams to self-serve insights from customer support data.
Final Note
Qualtrics delivers a comprehensive survey platform and scalable analysis, which works well for research-oriented CX programs. InMoment, on the other hand, excels at real-time, multi-channel feedback synthesis and is best suited for a larger-scale, alert-based retention workflow.
That being said, SentiSum provides a modern, AI-native VOC platform that supercharges your workflow to uncover consumers' insights by targeting retention triggers with minimal deployment friction, outperforming most agile, support-led teams that look to monitor customer feedback in real-time.
If you want to experience the same, book a demo now.
