Scientists don’t rely on their reading glasses to study microorganisms; they use a microscope. 🔬
Similarly, customer insight tools are microscopes for companies to analyze and understand the complex behavior of customers online.
Case in point: When did you last buy a product online without research? Can’t remember, right?
You would’ve spent time checking the company website, reading online reviews, scrolling social media platforms and posts from the brand, and asking your friends before making the purchase.
This multi-channel consumer journey makes it challenging for companies to decipher what their customers want.
Customer insight tools collect data from different sources and empower companies to analyze customer psychology, social conversations, user behavior, and online buying behavior to ensure maximum customer satisfaction
Plus, customer data is both qualitative and quantitative. It is a mix of internal and external data collected from:
- Reviews
- Online surveys
- Website visitor dataÂ
- Consumer trends and market trendsÂ
- Purchase activity
- Interviews
- Social media
The list goes on and on, just like the list of the best consumer insights software.
To help you decode your customer’s behavior and collect actionable insights from this data, we’ve listed the key features to look for in customer insight software and the 10 best consumer insights software with their features, cons, and features.Â
Bonus tip: There’s a clear winner.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Should You Look for in a Customer Insights Tool?
- Customizable surveys: The consumer intelligence acceleration platform should allow you to add conditional logic and customize the survey based on specific questions to get responses throughout the customer journeyÂ
- User-friendly interface: Pay attention to the user interface for customer intelligence software solutions. Pick a tool that has intuitive dashboards with easy navigation optionsÂ
- Visual feedback: The best customer insight tools provide a visual feedback mechanism to view the responses in an easy-to-understand formatÂ
- Customization and flexibility: If you cannot customize a customer insights tool according to your industry, product, customer segments, and KPIs, you’ll struggle to get a holistic understanding of customer preferences
- Scalability:Â As your business grows, so will the customer data. If the software slows down or reaches its limit while handling the data, it will slow down your business. Focus on the scalability of the software so that your business operations are not hampered in the future
- Security: Choose a consumer intelligence platform that adheres to the security standards, employs data encryption and access control, and is compliant with industry-specific and geographic data protection regulations
- Third-party integrations: The consumer insights platform should integrate with your existing tech stack, including CRM, customer success software, customer service tools, and project management platform
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe 10 Best Customer Insights Tools
1. ClickUp
ClickUp is a beginner-friendly project management software for creating wikis, tracking tasks, creating dashboards, managing customers, and designing forms to collect responses.
If you’re looking to gain insights into your customer needs and running short on time, ClickUp Forms allows you to gather feedback and convert it into trackable tasks.
Apply conditional logic to responses to sort the data or segment audiences according to a specific criterion. This simplifies the intake process and provides your team with only relevant information.
ClickUp offers pre-built form templates like product feedback templates, survey templates, and creative request templates so that you don’t have to create these forms from scratch.
If you’re not ready to invest in an advanced consumer intelligence platform, ClickUp is the best solution.
As someone just starting out with customer insights strategy, ClickUp gives you a great headstart. Here’s how.
ClickUp best features
- Use ClickUp Forms to collect responses and customer feedback in a standardized format
- Convert responses into trackable tasks that plug in directly into your workflowsÂ
- As the best customer insights tool, ClickUp allows you to add conditional logic to online surveys and ClickUp Forms dynamically update information based on responses, making it easier to capture customer feedbackÂ
- After collecting responses, tag issues and dependencies to bring them to your team’s attentionÂ
- Flag top task priorities as urgent, high, normal, and low so that your customer service department knows what to do and whenÂ
- Use the customer profile template to streamline customer interactions and feedback and organize this information for future referenceÂ
- The ClickUp CRM supercharges the data collection process with its 50+ powerful dashboard widgets
- Planning an outreach for customers who share their feedback? Integrate your email tool with ClickUp CRM. Collect responses, track them, and manage customer relationships with an effective CRM strategyÂ
ClickUp limitations
- Steep learning curve for first-time usersÂ
- ClickUp AI is available only on paid plansÂ
ClickUp pricing
- Free Forever
- Unlimited: $7/month per user
- Business: $12/month per user
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
ClickUp AI is available on all paid plans for $5 per member per month.
ClickUp ratings and reviews
2. Meltwater
Meltwater is an AI-enabled customer insights tool and social media monitoring platform to monitor and analyze online media coverage, market trends, social media conversations, and other digital media content.
Beyond social media listening, Meltwater uses predictive analytics to help companies improve their customer experience and build a data-driven consumer insights strategy. It tracks keywords, social data, and online conversations and presents all the data in an easy-to-understand format.
Product teams use this data to improve their offerings, marketing plans, and positioning, analyze competitors, and gauge consumer sentiment.
Meltwater best features
- Monitors a broad range of media sources, including news articles, real-time social data, blogs, and forums to track mentions of brands, competitors, and industry
- Uncovers actionable insights across the brand lifecycle with audience insights, brand equity tracking, customer experience analysis, audience segmentation, and trend forecasting
- Sentimental analysis categorizes mentions as positive, negative, or neutral giving a quick overview of how a brand is perceived online
Meltwater limitations
- Expensive for smaller businesses
- The learning curve is quite steep, especially for those who are unfamiliar with social media monitoring tools
Meltwater pricing
- Custom pricingÂ
Meltwater ratings and reviews
- G2: 4/5 (1,544 reviews)
- Capterra: 4/5 (88 reviews)
3. Google Analytics
Google Analytics gives you a deeper understanding of the customer journey, audience sentiment on search engines and Google Trends, and how they behave across different platforms and devices.
Whether you’re using the free consumer intelligence platform or its paid version, the user-friendly dashboard is easy to navigate, even for first-time users.
GA offers options to drill down so that you have page-level data such as bounce rate or time they spent on the page.
Google Analytics best features
- Tracks the number of visitors to your website, including the new and returning ones
- Allows designing custom dashboards to track the most relevant metrics
- Monitors traffic, user behavior, and performance using real-time reports
Google Analytics limitations
- It’s challenging to contact the customer support team in case you get stuck
- Filtering out bot traffic is challenging as Google Analytics sometimes identifies them as real user traffic
Google Analytics pricing
- Free
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Google Analytics ratings and reviews
- G2:Â 4.5/5 (6,235 reviews)
- Capterra: 4.7/5 (7,703 reviews)
4. Euromonitor
Euromonitor uses on-the-ground research and machine learning to provide strategic intelligence on companies, economies, and consumers worldwide. This consumer intelligence platform provides SKU-level (individual product level) data to turn information into revenue.
Euromonitor tracks 1,500 online retailers in 40 countries to provide daily updates on pricing and discounts, assortment of products and sizes, and critical attributes to give you a competitive edge.
Euromonitor best features
- In-depth industry reports uncover potential opportunities and threats across different industries
- Daily consumer insights and analysis of e-commerce trendsÂ
- Statistical dashboards make sense of the data points gatheredÂ
Euromonitor limitations
- Limited scope on industries it covers and lack of information on small companies
- Reports can be vagueÂ
Euromonitor pricing
- Custom pricing
Euromonitor ratings and reviews
- G2: 4/5 (14 reviews)
5. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is an enterprise customer intelligence platform that provides historical and real-time consumer data for your company to dip into.
Using the consumer intelligence platform’s predictive analytics, companies gain insights from unstructured data to understand and predict consumer needs.
While traditional market research has limitations, Brandwatch’s audience analytics reveals qualitative insights at scale and discovers consumer and market trends so that you can adapt to change quickly.
Brandwatch best features
- Choose from 50+ visualizations to analyze vast data setsÂ
- Machine learning automatically segments data to fit your needsÂ
- Share valuable insights via Brandwatch API, Excel, or PDF and set up email alerts for key stakeholdersÂ
Brandwatch limitations
- Insights and reporting are bare-bones; you’re better off extracting data in CSV formatÂ
- Price point is expensive for small businesses Â
Brandwatch pricing
- Custom pricingÂ
Brandwatch ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.4/5 (572 reviews)
- Capterra: 4.2/5 (223 reviews)
6. GlobalData
Consumer insights platform Globaldata uses the collective power of trusted data, expert knowledge, and technology to get granular insights into industries such as payments, banking, mining, insurance, and healthcare.
The insights cover the customer value chain from start to end, from suppliers, manufacturers, and distribution channels to consumer insights and global trends.
Going further, the Global Risk Report gives insights into key global, regional, and country-level risks with a proprietary risk index.
This data is then used to define your consumer insights strategy and data-driven decision-making for business development, mergers and acquisitions, and market and competitive intelligence.
Globaldata best features
- Extensive database of more than 60,000 brands across CPG industries and tracking more than 24,000 companies globally
- Quarterly survey panels capture the opinions of 5,000+ senior officials about the industry trend
- Macroeconomic data of 200 countries with detailed analysis of 60 countries
Globaldata limitations
- Users experience some lag in the dashboard especially while handling large datasets
- Service charges are expensive for small businessesÂ
Globaldata pricing
- Custom pricing
Globaldata ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.6/5 (13 reviews)
7. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is an all-in-one customer insights tool that allows enterprise organizations to use real-time insights on audience engagement, sentiment, and trends to improve their offerings and marketing campaigns.
Whether you’re a part of PR and comms, digital marketing, or social media marketing tracking sentiment, reach, and engagement is critical to optimizing your future efforts.
The platform’s social media listening capabilities include a comprehensive view of online and social conversations about your brand, competitors, and industry across 30 social media platforms and 150 million websites.
Talkwalker best features
- In-built audience libraries to discover segments relevant to your objectives and industryÂ
- Audience comparison to identify differences and similarities for creating tailored messaging campaigns for each target audience groupÂ
- Integration with advanced audience segmentation platforms like Audiense and Affinio for a comprehensive understanding of buying patterns and audience behavior and interestsÂ
Talkwalker limitations
- No analysis of profiles that mention your productsÂ
- Pulls through irrelevant mentions sometimes, which can be extra work for your team as they have to spend time filtering the relevant ones
Talkwalker pricing
- Custom pricingÂ
Talkwater ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.3/5 (130 reviews)
- Capterra: 4.4/5 (23 reviews)
8. Uxcam
UXCam is one of the only customer insights platforms to monitor mobile app user behavior. Mobile app analytics helps you understand why users fail to convert, how they experience your app and the in-app journey, and uncover reasons for low feature adoption.
Product teams use it to understand the reasons behind frustrated app user experiences, identify and improve paths to conversions, and shorten feedback loops by helping your team resolve issues faster.
UXCam best features
- Track and analyze KPIs in one place and arrange them in the team dashboard without manual code
- Analyze out-of-box segments and surface hidden patterns for conversion, churn drivers, and engagementÂ
- Screen flows identify unusual in-app journeys and find bottlenecks by filtering for common exit screensÂ
UXCam limitations
- As customers are billed annually, it can be expensive for early-stage startups
- Limited number of logins to the portal
- Creating custom events requires your engineering team to get involvedÂ
UXCam pricing
- Free
- Growth: Custom pricingÂ
- Enterprise: Custom pricingÂ
UXCam ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.7/5 (149 reviews)
- Capterra: 4.7/5 (22 reviews)
9. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a product analytics platform for mobile and web users. Product, marketing, engineering, and data teams can break down metrics by behavior, demographics, or account type and slice and dice data to get multidimensional customer insights.
For your in-app users, product teams can catch regressions early on, get to the bottom of it to validate the potential of a new feature and see the impact of product changes in real-time. Testing each variant to determine what’s working allows you to deploy high-quality releases.
Mixpanel best features
- Analyze where your users dropped off using flow reports
- Monitor and analyze growth, engagement, retention, and how many customers convert at each step in the user journeyÂ
- Segment your customers and create cohorts to identify the behavior of specific groups
Mixpanel limitations
- Limited data range of 2 weeks for user flowsÂ
- Formatting dashboards is not user-friendlyÂ
- App integrations are not well-built
Mixpanel pricing
- Free
- Growth: $20/month
- Enterprise: Starts at $833/month
Mixpanel ratings and reviews
10. Hotjar
Hotjar, a website heatmaps and behavior analytics tool, gives a holistic view of your web visitors to uncover opportunities for optimization, spot customer experience problems, and craft a compelling case for your next big idea.
Companies gain valuable information on their customers ‘ interests and challenges using heatmaps, session recordings, A/B testing, and multivariate analysis.
Get user feedback with forms and surveys on improving the website experience or what changes need to be made to the product.
Hotjar eliminates the guesswork of what people want; instead, collects customer intelligence from your website to prioritize the changes that matter.
Hotjar best features
- Heatmaps show where users move and click, so you can remove the friction points and improve conversions
- Automate the product research process from hosting to recording feedbackÂ
- Create surveys within seconds using Hotjar’s AI survey generator and generate summary reports automaticallyÂ
Hotjar limitations
- Separate subscriptions for different features
- Hotjar retains data for a limited period depending on your planÂ
Hotjar pricing
- Observe Basic: Free
- Observe Plus: $32
- Engage Basic: Free
- Engage Plus: $280
- Engage Business: $440
Hotjar ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.3/5 (298 reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (500 reviews)
Summarize this article for me pleaseReady to dive deeper into customer insights?
It’s impossible to predict customer behavior.
Different customers have different expectations, interests, and motivations. Without a customer insights tool, collating and analyzing a large amount of data generated from all the data sources across platforms is daunting.
Depending on how basic or advanced your needs are, pick a software that works for you and plays well with your existing sources of data, so that you get the most value out of your customer data.
Whatever your data sources are, ClickUp is a user-friendly customer intelligence software to pool in all your data, collaborate and move them along as action items so that you ensure that your most important insights are acted upon.
Alternatively, collect feedback using ClickUp Forms, tag the common issues, track collaborative goals for teams, analyze the responses, and act on them.
Try ClickUp for free to get started.
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