Unveiling Consumer Thoughts: Top 10 Customer Insight Tools

Wouldn’t it be great to know what other people think, what the motives of their actions are and what their next move is going to be? This sounds like a cool superpower especially now, when a new world of consumer behavior is emerging.

You will be surprised but businesses using customer insights tools do already have that superpower. However, don’t be afraid – they cannot actually read people’s thoughts but can get a deeper understanding of the reasons behind consumer behavior, gain insights into customer satisfaction and identify general consumer trends in the given market.

In this article, we will explore the concept of customer insights, examine top features and benefits of tools and try to compile a list of the best customer insights solutions available in the present-day market. So, fasten your seatbelts as we embark on our consumer insights journey.

What are Customer Insights Tools?

Let us start with some theory. Customer insights tools are specialized software solutions that are designed to gather, analyze, and interpret customer data. With the help of these tools, businesses gain valuable insights into customer behavior and get a better perception of their customers’ preferences, needs, and pain points. Customer insights tools allow companies to understand how their customers feel about their brand, product, and/or marketing strategy.

Importance of Customer Insights Tools

In today’s customer-centric business environment, having a 360-degree view of the customer is crucial for companies striving to succeed. It is no longer just a matter of gaining a competitive edge, but a matter of survival in the super-volatile markets we are facing today.

So, how exactly can customer insights help?

• Get a deeper understanding of customer behavior

We have already mentioned this one. Nowadays, when customers have a plethora of choices and almost unlimited access to information, they switch between brands with lightning speed. But how to stop that? How to retain a customer? Of course, by getting a holistic understanding and addressing their preferences, buying habits, and potential pain points.

• Improve personalization

By recognizing specific customer segments, companies can deliver tailored marketing campaigns, messages, and offers aiding customer satisfaction and thus enhancing customer engagement and loyalty.

• Optimize marketing and sales strategies

Having an accurate picture of their target audiences, companies have an opportunity to adjust their strategies to better meet the needs of both their new customers and the existing ones.

• Enhance product development

Actionable insights derived from customer feedback and data collected via insights tools can be of great help when planning the development of new features and products.

• Identify potential risks

Customer insights solutions give businesses the power of predictive analytics. This allows for anticipating potential issues before they even arise and then addressing them proactively.

Key Features of Consumer Insights Tools

Data collection and integration: These tools allow companies to collect data from multiple data sources including various social media platforms, customer surveys, focus groups, sales transactions, etc., providing a comprehensive view of consumer behaviors and patterns.

Advanced analytics: Consumer intelligence tools usually come equipped with robust analytics capabilities and thus allow businesses to easily decipher complex trends and patterns hidden behind huge data sets.

Customer segmentation: One of the key features of customer insights solutions is the ability to accurately segment audiences based on different criteria such as behavior, demographics, buying habits, etc. That data can then be used for better personalization and targeted marketing campaigns.

Visualization: Visualized data is easier to understand and interpret. Interactive dashboards, graphs and heatmaps allow companies to quickly grasp and easily monitor important data trends.

Feedback mechanisms: Customer feedback if it is timely and relevant is a powerful weapon not every business realizes of. The most valuable customer insights come directly from customers. So, features that help gather feedback, such as integrated surveys or feedback forms, can be invaluable.

Sentiment analysis: By analyzing social media mentions, text from reviews, comments and forum messages, businesses can monitor the sentiment around a product, brand or service and respond to negative feedback effectively.

Best Consumer Insights Tools to Use

As companies increasingly rely on data-driven strategies to connect with their target audience, the choice of the tool becomes paramount. There are lots of solutions you can use to collect customer insights today. Below we have compiled a list of the top solutions available on the market today.

#1 FuseBase (formerly Nimbus)

FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) is a client collaboration solution that encompasses all the best features of customer engagement solutions and allows companies to build no-code websites for partners and customers, organize processes around qualitative and quantitative data, create comprehensive knowledge bases and effective client dashboards and much, much more- all under your own branding.

FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) is actually a bit more than a consumer insights software tool – it incorporates lots of useful features and utilities. Let us look at them in more detail.

Key features

Client portals

One of the most prominent features of FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) is its ability to create no-code client portals with a sleek interface and businesses’ unique branding. These client portals significantly boost customer engagement and elevate the overall customer experience by offering an intuitive user experience and allowing customers not only to view but also to actively interact with content. Additionally, teams can analyze client interactions to better understand user preferences and needs.

Data collection

With FuseBase (formerly Nimbus), you can consolidate external and internal data coming from various channels in one organized hub. Having all the data at hand, it is much easier to analyze it, identify trends, and make informed decisions.

Permission management

A clear hierarchy of roles allows managing access to information including the sensitive one with a granular precision.

Visual communication

No more boring messages – create visual texts and aggregate multi-format content in one super document.

Knowledge base

With FuseBase (formerly Nimbus), companies can create, customize, and maintain both internal and external knowledge bases of literally any size.

Enhanced embedding capabilities and integrations

And last but not least – integrations which have the utmost importance when one needs to gather customer insights. Overall, the FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) is compatible with over 2,000 different integrations, including Google Analytics, Zapier, YouTube, GitHub, and more.

Pricing

• Free plan is available
• Custom – starts at $99/month. Contact sales for a customized pricing quote

Capterra rating: 4.6 (158 reviews).

#2 Google Trends

Google Trends is a simple yet robust tool designed to analyze popular user searches and keywords across multiple languages and regions. Having information on what, where, and how people are searching on the Internet, businesses can develop their customer insights strategy and better position their product in the market.

Key benefits

Identifying emerging trends

By analyzing search queries, companies can spot emerging trends in their industry – like shifts in customer behavior and market trends – and thus remain ahead of the curve.

Understanding regional preferences

Google Trends breaks down search interest by region, helping businesses understand geographical variations in consumer interest. This can prove invaluable for adjusting marketing campaigns or expanding into new territories.

Competitive analysis

By comparing search terms, businesses can see how their brand ranks against competitors. Such consumer insights can steer marketing and sales campaigns, and help understand where exactly actions need to be taken.

Pricing

• Free trial is not offered
• Pricing is available upon request

Capterra rating: 4.7 (21 reviews).

#3 Google Analytics 360

Google Analytics is perhaps the most popular analytics solution today. It measures and tracks website traffic along with the performance of web pages. By analyzing the behavior of your website visitors, companies can experiment with UX design, conduct A/B tests, and enhance the general user and customer experience.

Key features

Target audience segmentation

With Google Analytics, businesses can segment their audience based on various criteria such as age, location, device, behavior, and more. This helps in crafting tailor-made campaigns for specific audience groups.

Conversion tracking

One of the primary goals of any business with a presence on the Internet is to convert visitors into customers. Google Analytics allows businesses to set up and track conversions, helping them understand how many customers they got through a particular page or resource.

Integrations

This tool seamlessly integrates with other Google solutions like Google Ads and Google Search Console, making it easier for businesses to combine and interpret data across different platforms.

Pricing

• Free plan is available
• Pricing is available upon request

Capterra rating: 4.7 (7594 reviews).

#4 Radarly

Radarly is an AI-drivenconsumer intelligence platform designed to collect and analyze social data. The vendor claims that the solution can track and analyze more than 100 million publications on a daily basis and monitor more than 300 million sources in 60 languages.

Key features

Social listening

By monitoring social conversations across various platforms, Radarly allows businesses to gather insights into the audience sentiment and helps them identify both positive and negative feedback.

Multilingual capabilities

Due to its ability to understand multiple languages, Radarly has proved to be of great help for multinational corporations.

Customizable dashboards

Radarly’s dashboards can be tailored to customer needs, ensuring that only the most relevant data is in focus.

Real-time alerts

The software solution offers the capability to set up real-time notifications based on specific keywords, sentiment scores, or sudden spikes in online conversations.

Pricing

• Free plan is not available
• Free 14-day trial is offered
• Pricing is available upon request

Capterra rating: 4.5 (2 reviews).

#5 Talkwalker

Talkwalker positions itself as a consumer intelligence acceleration platform. Talkwalker allows brands to listen, understand, and act based on social conversations spanning across social media, blogs, news sites, forums, and more.

Key features

Visual Analytics Center

Talkwalker aggregates daily customer data and signals and visualizes them in an intuitive interface, enabling your team to rapidly analyze, interpret, and benefit from these audience insights.

Powerful social listening capabilities

With its expansive monitoring capability, Talkwalker covers a wide array of platforms. This helps brands get a complete picture of their online reputation and customer experience along the whole customer journey.

Blue Silk technology

Blue Silk is the secret behind the magic of Talkwalker. It consolidates both external and internal data obtained from consumers and then with the help of the AI delivers valuable strategic insights for your brand.

Pricing

• Free plan is available
• Free trial is offered
• Pricing is available upon request

Capterra rating: 4.3 (23 reviews).

#6 Treasure Data

Using the latest AI technology with machine learning algorithms, Treasure Data aims to significantly simplify customer data management. These customer insights platforms help brands use the data about their customers to the fullest extent in order to improve digital marketing campaign performance, achieve operational efficiency, and meet even the most demanding customer needs and leading to customer satisfaction.

Key features

Unified customer info

Like many other consumer intelligence platforms, the Treasure Data Suite consolidates data from a myriad of different sources, including but not limited to social media, online reviews, CRM systems, and even IoT devices.

Real-time data processing

As you know, an effective business operates non-stop – so does Treasure Data. It supports real-time data ingestion and allows companies to analyze data and take actions if necessary almost immediately.

Segmentation and personalization

And again, like other popular consumer insights software tools, Treasure Data provides a comprehensive view and segmentation of the businesses’ target audience allowing for more precise targeting and better alignment with customer preferences.

Pricing

• Free plan is unavailable
• Free trial isn’t offered
• Pricing is available upon request

Capterra rating: 5 (1 review).

#7 Sprout Social 

Sprout Social is a customer insights platform designed to help businesses – both large and small – extract real business value out of social media through effective engagement, publishing, listening and analytics tools. The company has recently gone public and raised nearly $150 million with the IPO. The goal of Sprout Social is to enable companies to cultivate authentic connections with their customers.

Let’s look at its core features, shall we?

Key features

Unified inbox

All messages from all of the company’s social accounts are gathered in one inbox. This way, responding to any customer request becomes super easy and not a single query will be lost in the process.

Scheduled publishing

You can prepare a post and then schedule its automatic publishing across multiple social platforms. More than that, the Sprout Social consumer insights software also offers a visual calendar for better content planning.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

This customer insight platform comes with a built-in customer relationship management CRM system that helps businesses track their interactions with customers along their whole customer journey and thus makes it easier to nurture relationships and retain customers.

Pricing

• Free plan is unavailable
• Free trial isn’t offered
• The Standard plan costs $249 per month. For each additional user, there’s an added cost of $199/month.

Capterra rating: 4.4 (562 reviews).

#8 Mixpanel 

Mixpanel is a powerful product analytics and market research tool that can easily tell you which features your users value most, who your main customers are, and how exactly they use your product. Unlike traditional analytics platforms that focus mainly on page views or clicks, Mixpanel offers consumer insights into user interactions, allowing businesses to track and analyze user behavior in more depth.

Key features

Event-based tracking

At the core of Mixpanel’s functionality is its event-based tracking. This allows businesses to monitor specific actions users take within their applications or websites, such as signing up, sharing content, and/or making a purchase.

Funnel analysis

Mixpanel lets businesses define and visualize user conversion funnels. This is essential for understanding the customer journey and identifying where potential drop-offs or areas for optimization are.

Pricing

• Free plan is available
• Free trial is offered
• Pricing starts at $25.00 per month

Capterra rating: 4.5 (123 reviews).

#9 Attest

Attest is a tool designed to make targeted consumer research accessible to everyone. It enables businesses to gather real-time insights across various demographics and geographies. Using Attest, companies can make more informed decisions based on genuine online surveys, feedback from customers, and other insights.

Key features

Custom surveys

Businesses can craft surveys tailored to their specific questions and needs, which ensures that the insights gathered are relevant and actionable.

Interactive dashboards

This consumer insights platform provides intuitive dashboards that allow businesses to easily see market research and customer surveys results and interact with the data all in one place.

Simple settings

With the help of Attest, companies can design a study that matches their target market using demographic, psychographic, and geographic filters.

Pricing

• Free plan is unavailable
• Free trial isn’t offered
• Pricing is available upon request

Capterra rating: The product has not been reviewed on Capterra yet.

#10 Typeform

Typeform is a web-based platform where you create anything from surveys to apps, without the need to write a single line of code. Its unique interface allows for more engaging and interactive data collection and differentiates it from many traditional form tools.

Key features

Versatility

Typeform can be used for a wide range of applications, including surveys, quizzes, contact forms, feedback collection, event registrations, and more.

Logic jumps

This feature allows for the creation of dynamic forms where questions can change based on user responses. This creates a more personalized and relevant user experience.

Pricing

• Free plan is available
• Free trial is offered
• Pricing starts at $29.00 per month

Capterra rating: 4.7 (778 reviews).

Conclusion

Data rules the modern world. And this is true for all spheres of our society including business, sales, and marketing. In this article, we’ve listed top tools for getting customer insights. But which one to choose? Our recommendation is FuseBase (formerly Nimbus). Among the 10 tools described, it stands out due to its impressive feature set offered at a reasonable price.

Unlock deeper insights into your customers’ needs and behaviors. Try FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) today and elevate your data-driven strategies.

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