customer research tools

20+ Tools & Resources for Conducting Market Research

Published: September 15, 2023

Finding out if a product will be successful beyond the initial curiosity is just good business. With market research, you determine whether the opportunity exists, how to position the product or service, or what consumers' opinions are after the launch.

If you're sensitive to the high costs of failure and need to gather facts and opinions to predict whether your new product, feature, or location will be successful, start by investing in market research using these tools and resources.

Here are 21 of the best tools for conducting market research, including a few recommendations directly from HubSpot market researchers. Let's dive in.

Featured Resource: Market Research Kit 

Download the Kit Now

Market Research Tools

• Think With Google Research Tools
• Census Bureau
• Make My Persona
• SurveyMonkey
• Upwave Instant Insights
• Claritas MyBestSegment
• Ubersuggest
• Pew Research Center
• BrandMentions
• Qualtrics Market Research Panels

Helpful Market Research Tools & Resources

For Max Iskiev , Market Research Analyst at HubSpot, one research tool stands out from the rest, and that's Glimpse .

He told me, "Glimpse is my favorite research tool. It's quick and easy to use, allowing me to design and launch short surveys for real-time insights on trending topics."

As a writer for the HubSpot Marketing Blog, I've also used Glimpse to run short, 100-person surveys for articles (case in point: Are Sales Reps Rushing Back to the Office? ).

Not only is Glimpse valuable for doing quick pulse-checks on the latest trends, but it also leverages the power of AI for even deeper insights.

"Glimpse really shines when it comes to open-ended questions, using natural language processing and AI to analyze emotion and sentiment, saving time and offering invaluable insights," Iskiev shared.

Pricing : $1,000/month (Pro Account)

Free Market Research Kit

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

• SWOT Analysis Template
• Survey Template
• Focus Group Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

2. Statista

Statista is a data visualization website that takes data from reputable reports across the web and makes them easy and digestible for researchers, marketers, and product creators just like you.

"Statista is like my market research sidekick, giving me all the data I need without the endless search. No more digging through the haystack, with Statista I can spot trends and make informed decisions with ease," Icee Griffin , Market Researcher at HubSpot, told me.

Are you planning on launching a new video game and want to know how many hours people spend playing video games? There’s a chart for that.

One neat aspect of using Statista is that the same chart is updated as the years pass. Say that you want to allude to the value of the beauty market in your proposal. If your investor accesses that same graph a year from now, it will reflect updated numbers, as Statista always finds the most recent research to update their visualizations. (Note that Statista doesn’t carry out original research.)

Pricing : Free; $39/month (billed yearly); $1,950 (one-time 30-day access)

3. Think With Google Research Tools

Wish you had information on your product’s likelihood of success? Think With Google's marketing research tools offer interesting insights on whether anyone is looking for your product ( Google Trends ), which markets to launch to ( Market Finder ), and what retail categories rise as the months and seasons pass ( Rising Retail Categories ).

If you’d like to market your product through YouTube, the Find My Audience tool allows you to investigate what your potential viewers are interested in and what you should discuss in your brand’s YouTube channel.

Pricing : Free

4. Census Bureau

The Census Bureau offers a free resource for searching U.S. census data. You can filter by age, income, year, and location. You can also use some of its shortcuts to access visualizations of the data, allowing you to see potential target markets across the country.

One of the best ways to use this tool is by finding the NAICS code for your business, then accessing the Tables tool, then clicking Filter on the sidebar and searching for your industry. Easily find out where your target industry is most popular — or where the market has been oversaturated. Another helpful tool is the Census Bureau Business and Economy data , where you can also target premade tables depending on your industry.

5. Make My Persona

HubSpot's Make My Persona tool allows you to create a buyer persona for your potential new product. In this tool, you pick a name for the persona, choose their age, identify their career characteristics, and identify their challenges, allowing you to pinpoint both demographic and psychographic information.

This tool is most suited for B2B product launches because you’ll be prompted to document your buyer persona’s career objectives and role-specific challenges. As such, your product would ideally solve a problem for them in the workplace or help their company achieve revenue goals.

Tableau is a business intelligence suite of products that allows you to “connect to virtually any data source.” But the data isn’t presented in unreadable tables. Rather, Tableau helps you visualize this data in a way that helps you glean insights, appeal to external stakeholders, and communicate the feasibility of your product to potential investors.

You can visualize data on anything from corn production in tropical climate zones to office product sales in North America. With Tableau’s tools, you can take as granular or as general a look you’d like into potential marketplaces and supplier regions. Tableau also integrates well with spreadsheets and databases so that you can export Tableau data to Excel , back up records in Amazon Redshift, and more.

Pricing : $12/user/month (Tableau Viewer); $35/user/month (Tableau Explorer); $70/user/month (Tableau Creator)

7. Paperform

A market research survey is an effective way to understand your target audience and their needs better by asking them directly. Since this step is integral to understanding your dream customer’s problems, you want to ensure the process is as interactive as possible and incites an objective and accurate response.  

With its free-text interface, Paperform is as simple as writing a word document. Make your survey stand out by customizing colors, fonts, layouts and themes, and create your unique look and feel. f you’re unsure where to start, you can use one of their expertly made questionnaires or market research survey templates to get you started. 

With Paperform, you can add conditional logic to show or hide questions or whole sections of content. Create fully personalized paths for different personas to create more interactive forms that lower drop-off rates and boost customer interaction. Or use any of the 27+ question fields, like the ranking, matrix, or scale fields, to create visually engaging ways to collect information.

Pricing: Free (14-day trial); Essentials ($20/month); Pro ($40/month); and Agency ($135/month)

GWI is an on-demand consumer research platform that makes audience research a breeze. Powered by the world’s largest study on the online consumer base, GWI provides insights into the lives of over 2.8 billion consumers, across 50+ markets. Everything you need to know about who they are, what’s on their minds, and what they're up to. With fresh insights at your fingertips in one user-friendly platform, it’s quick and easy to become an expert on your audience and get the answers you need to succeed. Compare markets and create customized, shareable charts and dashboards in seconds.

Pricing : Available upon request

9. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a powerful tool for creating in-depth market research surveys that will help you understand your market and consumer preferences.

With this tool, you can create targeted, uber-specific surveys that help you collect answers that pertain specifically to your product. While using a data source can give you a general overview of your target audience and market, SurveyMonkey can help you get more granular insights from real consumers.

SurveyMonkey offers dedicated market research solutions and services , including a global survey panel, a survey translation service for international research, and a reporting dashboard option that allows you to easily parse through the results.

Pricing : Free, $32/month (Advantage Annual), $99/month (Premier Annual), $99/month (Standard Monthly) ; $25/user/month (Team Advantage, minimum 3 users), $75/user/month (Team Premier, minimum 3 users), Enterprise (Contact for pricing)

10. Typeform

Like SurveyMonkey, Typeform allows you to run research surveys to get direct answers from your target consumers. It’s an easy-to-use, mobile-optimized form-builder that's great for market research.

Typeform’s distinguishing factor is that it shows viewers one form field at a time. In its templates, it encourages a more conversational, casual approach (like in its market research survey template ). This makes it a better fit for product launches that target a younger demographic. If you’re targeting C-suite executives at established firms, consider a more formal option such as SurveyMonkey or keeping your tone more formal in your questions.

You can create a wide range of question types, including multiple choice questions, short-form questions, and rating scale questions. Other features include the ability to recall answers from previous questions and create logic jumps.

In a survey, you’d want to collect both demographic and psychographic information on your customer, seeking to understand their purchasing behaviors and the problems they encounter. The goal is to find out if your product is the solution to one of those problems — and whether, before launching, you should add more features or rethink your product positioning strategy .

Pricing : Free; $35/month (Essentials); $50/month (Professional); $70/month (Premium)

11. Upwave Instant Insights

Upwave Instant Insights is a consumer research tool that’s part of the Upwave brand marketing platform. While it isn’t advertised as a survey creation tool, it allows you to launch market research surveys specifically to get consumer insights.

Instant Insights allows you to target audiences on Upwave’s partner ecosystem and visualize the data for easy scanning by key stakeholders and investors. One pro of using this platform is that Upwave distributes your survey to real people — not just people taking surveys for the money, which could skew the results.

To create a survey, you sign up on the Upwave platform , click your name in the upper right-hand corner, and click “My Surveys,” where you can create as many surveys as you want. For the Basic option, you have a 6-question limit, while the Advanced option allows you to include unlimited questions.

Pricing : $2/study participant (Basic); $3/study participant (Extended); $4/study participant (Advanced)

12.  Claritas MyBestSegment

Claritas MyBestSegment provides product researchers with tools to understand an area's demographic information and the area’s inhabitants’ lifestyle habits. By finding out what a segment of the population does — without having to go out and survey them — you can find out which areas would be most receptive to a campaign or launch, which competitors are located nearby, and which lifestyle trends have shifted or are on the rise.

A snapshot of an audience segment gives you basic information on their household income, lifestyle traits, employment levels, and education levels. If you want more specific data relating to these topics, you’ll have to contact Claritas’ sales team to become a customer.

Pricing : Free; Pricing available on request

Loop11 is a user experience testing platform that allows you to test the usability of your website, study user intent, test the information architecture of your site, and examine how the user experience changes based on the device they’re using.

This tool is useful for market research because you can find out whether your target consumers find your site easy to navigate. You can also identify snags that prevent conversions.

Loop11 tests your site by making users perform tasks. They then complete a short question about how easy or difficult the task was to complete. Your product may be phenomenal, but unless consumers can buy it through your site, you won’t launch it successfully.

You can use Loop11’s participants or bring in your own.

Pricing : $63/month (Rapid Insights), $239/month (Pro), $399/month (Enterprise)

14. Userlytics

Like Loop11, Userlytics allows you to test the usability of your website, mobile app, and site prototype. You can target different devices, define a buyer persona, and disqualify participants based on screening questions.

Testing is based on tasks that your test-takers carry out. They then answer a simple question about the difficulty of the task. You can structure the question in various ways; you can leave it open-ended, provide multiple choices, or ask for a rating. Other formats you can use include System Usability Scale (SUS) questions, Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions, and Single Ease Questions (SEQ).

Userlytics performs both a webcam and a screen recording. You can compare the user’s answers with their reactions on video to understand how they feel when they’re interacting with your assets.

Pricing : $49/participant (Quick & Easy); $69/participant (Annual Enterprise); Custom pricing available on request

Sometimes you need a no-frills test to take the pulse of consumers. Temper allows you to create a question, grab a snippet of code, and pop it onto your website. The smiley face, "meh" face, and frown face make it easy for viewers to make a snap judgment.

One great way to use this tool is by adding the widget on a blog post announcing the launch of your new product. That way, you can find out general sentiment on the product before launching it. You can also add it to a product page, an email, or a landing page.

When you include the widget, you can change the question to something that’s tailored to your offerings.

Pricing : $12/month (Hobby), $49/month (Pro), $89/month (Business), $199/month (White Label )

16. NielsenIQ

NielsenIQ is a retail and consumer intelligence consultant that works with you to collect consumer insights, identify the best distribution channels for your product, and create a range of products that addresses the needs of your target buyers.

This service helps you look at your product launch from all angles and delivers forecasting data that predicts how your sales will perform upon launch. NielsenIQ can also run consumer insights surveys on their list of panelists and partners.

Because it operates like a consultant and not as a self-service software, NielsenIQ is a better option for established firms with a bigger product launch budget.

Pricing : Pricing available on request

17. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a simple tool for doing keyword and content research. You can input a phrase, and it'll create a list of keyword suggestions. You can also see top performing articles and pages so that you get an initial understanding of the type of content that ranks for the keywords.

This tool is useful for market research because you can see who your top competitors are, how often your product is searched for, and whether there’s enough space in the market for the type of product you’re launching. You can also find out the questions your target audience asks in relation to the product. Each of these questions can be turned into a blog post that can inform your audience, increasing your brand authority and driving conversions.

Alternatives to Ubersuggest include Moz , Ahrefs , and SEMRush .

Pricing : Free; $29/month (Individual); $49/month (Business); $99/month (Enterprise / Agency)

18. Pew Research Center

From economic conditions, to political attitudes, to social media usage, the Pew Research Center website has a ton of free research that you can use to better understand your target market. Best of all, the site has interactive articles that allow you to filter and sift through the data for more granular, targeted insights.

Topics include U.S. politics, digital media, social trends, religion, science, and technology.

19. BrandMentions

BrandMentions is a social media monitoring platform that can help you understand what your prospective customers are buzzing about online. Search for a keyword, and BrandMentions will show you recent social posts that contain that keyword, along with the context of its usage. After subscribing to the platform, you can also get sentiment analysis on the keyword.

You’ll also get other metrics such as Reach (how many people view the keyword per day), Performance (how many people engage with the keyword per day), and Mentions by Weekday (when people are mentioning the keyword).

You can use this tool for market research by finding out when people are looking for your product on social media sites. When you start announcing the new product, you can use insights from this tool to post about the launch at exactly the right time. It also allows you to find out how people are generally feeling about the type of product you’re launching. That way, you can better refine the tone of your campaigns.

Pricing : $99/month (Growing Business); $ 299/month (Company); $ 499/month (Enterprise/Agency)

20. Qualtrics Market Research Panels

Qualtrics takes the pain of finding respondents for your market research surveys through an online sample service. After identifying your target audience, you can go to Qualtrics for access to a representative sample. You can either use your chosen survey software or use Qualtrics’ built-in platform for insights and feedback.

21. Qualaroo

Qualaroo is an advanced user and market research tool that helps you understand your target market with targeted surveys. You can run surveys on over six channels at once (such as website, app, product, social media, and mail,) to get a 360-degree view of your existing and potential customers.

It comes packed with features like question branching, 12+ answer types, automatic survey language translation, in-depth audience targeting, pre-built survey templates, and an extensive repository of professionally designed questions.

You can create various market research surveys in minutes to collect data on the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral traits of your target audience. It can help you map customers' expectations and preferences, create customer personas, and perform audience segmentation.

Qualaroo also promotes quick feedback analysis. Its in-built AI-based sentiment analysis and text analytics engine automatically categorizes the responses based on user moods. It also highlights the key phrases and words in real-time, saving hours of manual work.

Pricing : $80/month billed annually (Essentials); $160/month billed annually (Premium)

Conduct Market Research for a Successful Product Launch

Conducting market research is essential to successfully launch a product to market. With the tools we’ve shared, you can find out who’s looking for your product, why they need it, and how you can better market it upon launch, ensuring that it’s a success.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in April 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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13 Market Research Tools: Best in Class for 2023

Most market research tools are designed to make it quicker and easier to find relevant data . Whatever the market, product, or purpose, the right research tools can do just that.

But, let’s be honest, some do it far better than others.

Whether you’re an enterprise firm with complex needs and a budget to suit or a smaller business needing free market research tools, read on to discover which online tools for market research are hot right now.

Note: The top market research tools list has been collated using review platforms like G2 , along with direct feedback I collected from over 500 business leaders in June, 2o22.

#1 Best overall market research tool: Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence

Most-loved feature: The Benchmarking tool

We might be a little biased, but this really is the fastest way to see how you measure up against competitors in any sector or location. Analyze market leaders and rising stars to unpack and track their digital success instantly.

Quick Explainer

Similarweb Research Intelligence is a single source of truth for the online world. Giving any business the ability to quickly analyze the online aspects of any industry or market in an instant. It displays critical insights in a way that makes it easy to view trends, competitive performance, audience insights, growth opportunities, and more. It’s the only market research analysis tool that brings together data from desktop, mobile web, and apps to provide a complete view of the digital landscape.

Key abilities

• Competitive benchmarking
• Market research
• Company research tool
• Audience analysis
• Consumer journey tracker
• Mobile app intelligence

Freemium Version: Yes, there is a lite version of the product that provides limited data for a single user, and a single location.

Free Trial: Yes, there’s a 7-day trial available. Try it out here .

Ongoing Subscription: Yes, you can pay monthly or annually for a subscription. Different levels are available, and each package is tailored. Review pricing and plans for Similarweb here.

Like what you’ve seen so far?

See our market-leading digital research tool in action in this quick 2-minute clip.

#2 Best free market research tool: Think with Google

Most-loved feature: Find my Audience

A way to discover new audiences on YouTube based on things like habits, interests, and intended plans to purchase.

Think with Google is a suite of digital research tools that curate resources from a huge pool of data across the web. It presents them as insights that aren’t typically available elsewhere. It’s a unique way to view trends, insights, and stats. Data isn’t offered in real-time but serves more as a library of figures and facts that take the form of articles, videos, interviews, case studies, and more. In addition to being a place people can go for forward-looking perspectives and data, there are several tools designed to help marketers.

Key functions

• High-level insights into most local or national markets
• Behind the scenes look at cross-platform digital campaigns
• Consumer insights
• Deck-ready stats (not in real-time)
• A range of tools to inform marketing objectives and actions

Freemium Version: The entire suite of market intelligence tools is free.

Free Trial: As a free market research tool, no trial is needed.

Ongoing Subscription: You can subscribe to a newsletter, but not the product.

#3 Best digital research tool for content and FAQ development: Answer the Public

Most-loved feature: Search listening alerts

A pro feature that sends you weekly emails that indicate how search behaviors shift over time. It takes the specific phrase or keywords you’re tracking in the platform and updates you weekly.

Quick Explainer 

Discover the questions people are asking online about key terms, products, or services. It’s designed to help content teams and website owners develop new content ideas, and relevant FAQs that are based on the types of queries people ask online.

• Track important keywords and phrases
• Get weekly emails about changes in search behavior
• Enter any keyword to uncover relevant questions or search terms
• Folders to help organize your research

Freemium Version: Yes. You get a limited number (3) of searches per day.

Free Trial: No.

Ongoing Subscription: Yes. You can pay monthly or annually for this service. Pay-monthly fees are a flat rate of $99. Discounts are offered for yearly subscriptions.

#4 Best tool for market research surveys: SurveyMonkey

Most-loved feature: Question bank

A library of hundreds of questions, pre-written by survey methodologists.

As far as market research surveys go, it’s the leading online research tool for surveys worldwide. With plans to suit the individual through to the enterprise, it’s a feature-rich, easy-to-use platform that encompasses creation, collection, and analysis under one roof. Surveys are optimized for any device and integrate with platforms like Zoom, Salesforce, Marketo, and more.

Key functions 

• Create and send unlimited surveys, quizzes, and polls
• Pop-up online surveys
• Mobile app access to create, send and analyze surveys on-the-go
• Team collaboration function (unlocked with a team plan)
• Survey builder
• Customization and branded surveys (available with advantage or premier plans only)

Freemium Version: Yes

Free Trial: Occasionally, free trials are offered for premium plans.

Ongoing Subscription: Yes, you can pay annually or monthly. There are three different plans to choose from, ranging from $25 to $129 per month.

Helpful: Check out our blog and see 18 different ways to use market research surveys .

#5 Best online research tool for marketplaces: Similarweb Shopper Intelligence

Most-loved feature: Cross-shopping analysis

Cross-shopping analysis shows you how loyal a segment of customers is to a brand, along with what other brands they browsed or bought from. Uncover competitors and discover new partnership opportunities; these are game-changing insights if you sell on any marketplace.

Similarweb Shopper Intelligence is a type of online market research tool that helps you uncover and analyze browsing and buying behavior across marketplaces. Using its data, businesses can track category, product, and brand performance with ease. It helps ecommerce organizations to detect potential threats, unearth new product or category opportunities, discover new potential partnerships, and optimize search strategy and performance.

• Monitor consumer demand for any product, brand, or category
• Retail search strategy optimization
• Consumer behavior insights
• Track cross-shopping, loyalty, and purchase frequency
• Analyze brand awareness

Note: This solution uses a unique data methodology via multiple networks and partnerships. At the time of writing, there is no other consumer behavior insights tool for market research that offers this quality of data for marketplaces.

Freemium Version: No.

Free Trial: Yes. There is usually a 7-day trial available here .

Ongoing Subscription: The price is determined by things like the number of categories and/or domains you want to access. Each quote is customized to a client’s specific needs.

Want to know a little more?

Watch this quick clip to see the best ecommerce digital market research tool in action.

#6 Best market research tool for brand tracking: Latana

Most-loved feature: MoE (margin of error) Readings

To deliver transparency on data confidence levels, Latana’s dashboard includes a feature that allows clients to toggle-on, or toggle-off, margin of error (MoE) readings on all data points. These are highlighted using a traffic-light system of confidence (red=low confidence, orange=medium confidence, and green=high confidence). This small feature makes a big impact — it helps clients to correctly interpret the data and to visibly see quality shortcomings.

Latana is a B2C brand tracking tool that provides granular insights about online audiences. It helps organizations understand how key segments of consumers feel about brands and portrays relevant standings vs. industry rivals.

• Focus on niche consumer segments that matter to your business
• Uncover rival’s audience data and identify opportunities to grow
• Understand brand perception, and track how it changes over time
• Discover the most well-known brands in your industry
• Track rival’s brand awareness across gender, age income, location, and education
• Find out the main purchase drivers for your industry
• Infrastructure gives reach to over 6 billion smartphone users globally for representative brand opinions

I caught up with Latana’s CMO, Angeley Mullens. Here’s what she has to say about their offering.

Ongoing Subscription: Pricing for Latana isn’t available online. All packages are tailored to individual brands and their specific needs.

Enjoy 360 Visibility 24/7

Get the data you need to adapt to market changes and industry trends in an instant.

#7  Best research tool for social media listening: Hootsuite

Most-loved feature: Multi-channel insights

It’s a legacy feature, but one which makes it the best online research tool for social listening and monitoring. Having the ability to easily schedule posts, ad campaigns, and handle responses for every social media channel from within a single platform is what makes this a market-leading digital research tool.

Hootsuite continues to claim the number 1 spot on G2’s list of digital research tools for social media monitoring . It’s a tool to help you manage all aspects of business social media, across multiple channels, in a single platform. As well as being able to manage your socials, it also keeps you up-to-date with the latest trends and activities of your rival’s social media channels.

• Publish and schedule social media posts
• Measure cross-platform results
• Message management
• Social media trend analysis
• Social media ad-campaign management

Freemium Version: Yes. You can get a free version that supports 2 social accounts and 1 user.

Free Trial: Yes. A 30-day free trial is available here .

Ongoing Subscription: There are four plans; professional, team, business, and enterprise; ranging from $49-$739.

#8 Best digital research tool for prospecting: Similarweb Sales Intelligence

Most-loved feature: Insights generator tool

The insights generator shows you unique facts for your prospects and accounts; with complete visibility into their digital strategy and performance. It’s ideal for refining sales and marketing efforts while staying focused on growth.

Similarweb Sales Intelligence helps organizations find viable prospects by showing you who to reach out to, when to do it, and how to capture their attention. The lead generator tool helps you find the right prospects, and key insights help create engaging outreach emails. For sales departments, ecommerce and mar-tech sectors, this type of digital research tool can take prospecting and engagement to a completely new level; along with revenue and growth.

Key functions: 

• Lead generation and enrichment
• Digital insights for 100M+ ecommerce websites, publishers, and advertisers
• Fraud detection
• Sales engagement
• SFDC integration

Free Trial: Yes, if you would like a free trial, please request that here.

Ongoing Subscription: Prices for this digital market research tool varies depending on the package and options chosen. Grab a live demo of the product and get a tailored quote here .

Insightful : If you’re looking at market research tools for the ecommerce industry, bookmark our Ecommerce Trends and Predictions for 2023 to read later.

#9 Best market research analysis tool for data visualization: Tableau

Most-loved feature : Connects to almost any data source

As a clear market leader, and a no-brainer for larger organizations with business intelligence analytics and teams. Tableau leads the way in online research tools for data visualization. It connects to a huge range of data sources and pulls information into a highly-appealing dashboard that is designed to make it easier and faster to explore and manage data. It takes data from platforms like Similarweb, then combines it with other data sources before presenting crisp, clear, insights that have the power to shape strategies and drive key transformations.

• Lightning-fast analytics
• Smart dashboards for richer insights
• Live connection to almost any data source, with automatic updates
• Drag-and-drop style UI: easy to use

Freemium Version: No. However, students and teachers get a year’s free access to the platform.

Free Trial: Yes. You can subscribe to a free 30-day trial.

Ongoing Subscription: Most plans are offered annually, with prices ranging from $15 per month upwards. The price depends on whether you use their hosted or on-premise versions, the number of users, and the inclusion of specific plugins.

#10 Best market research tool for UX testing: Loop11

Most-loved feature: Online usability testing

This feature analyzes the usability of a website with users performing live tasks on a site. It helps you understand user behavior, and shows how and why a website is used.

Loop11 is a market research tool that provides usability testing to help organizations build better websites and products. It comes with a pack of useful features that provide both moderated and unmoderated testing, helping businesses to find the right audience to test prototypes and products. It’s designed to help you see how appealing a product is to a particular audience, determine their preferences, then build these insights into a design.

• Ability to test across multiple devices, including tablet, mobile, or desktop
• User-friendly test builder that requires no coding
• Easy-to-add surveys that collect psychographic and demographic data
• Provides useful metrics like time on task, task completion rates, and NPS
• Mapping of customer journeys during a test period

Free Trial: Yes, a 14-day trial is available here .

Ongoing Subscription: All plans come with the option to pay monthly or annually. Prices range from $199-$599 per month.

#11 Best research tool for measuring customer experience: Temper

Most-loved feature: Rating stream

See real-time feedback as customers respond to questions via website or email channels. The stream provides a detailed view of ratings, comments, locations, referrers, email addresses, and more.

Temper allows any company to find out how customers feel about their product at all times. It directly provides first-party data to a business, preventing the need to design and distribute complex surveys. It can be placed as a widget on the site or in emails, and questions are asked to gain real-time feedback from visitors and customers alike.

• Easily deploy questions across website and email channels
• Quickly spot poor experiences to identify problematic areas of a business or product
• The rating graph gives you a real-time view of results for any question asked
• Public rating wall shows how you’re performing, instilling confidence and trust
• Ratings come with open text fields to give additional context to responses
• Referrer data gives you the ability to segment feedback and relative performance
• Tracking variables let you send data with ratings, such as order numbers, user IDs, etc.
• User targeting lets you determine who sees questions and how often they see them

Freemium Version: There is no freemium version. However, their hobby plan gives you a slimmed-down version of the product and costs $12 per month.

Ongoing Subscription: Four plans are available, ranging from hobbyist to enterprise. The lowest pricing tier starts at $12 monthly, and their top-tier solution costs $199 monthly. All plans are pay-monthly, with a 60-day money-back guarantee.

#12 Best online market research tool for focus groups: Remesh

Most-loved feature: Common topics

In just a few clicks, you can view the themes and topics that are most common with your focus group across an entire session. It groups similar responses, specific phrases, and interesting responses in seconds.

Remesh facilitates live, qualitative conversations with focus groups of up to 1000 people at a time. Replicating the focus group format online delivers powerful segmentation and dynamic capabilities that speed up your time to insight and let you hold a real-time conversation at scale.

• Launch a live conversation with up to 1000 people at a time
• Organize and analyze responses in an instant
• Segment your audience based on demographic and response data
• Share visuals and text-based content with the group to get instant feedback
• The algorithm analyzes open-ended responses in real-time

Freemium Version: No

Free Trial: Yes. However, you must first book a demo with a member of their team.

Ongoing Subscription: Remesh provides custom pricing plans that can only be obtained once you’ve taken a demonstration of their platform with a member of their team.

#13 Top collaboration and documentation tool for market research: BIT.AI

Most-loved feature: Content library + smart search

While it sounds quite basic; in essence, this tool for market research professionals makes it quicker and easier to keep track, share, and store key data. Forget trawling through emails, slack, and g-docs to find files; the smart search feature helps you locate files in an instant.

A dynamic platform that helps researchers collaborate, track, share, and manage research data in a single place. This is one of the best online market research tools for those who need a place to bring together resources like websites, PDFs, articles, images, infographics, blogs, reports, videos, etc. it’s low-cost and connects to some of the most widely used tools. Being able to share multidimensional data with others, or simply keeping track of secondary market research in a single place makes it a firm favorite.

• Over 100 integrations with applications like Tableau, Miro, G-docs, Onedrive, and more
• Real-time editing and live collaboration
• Content Library
• Smart search
• Supports a huge range of content and file types

Freemium Version: Yes. Available for teams of up to 5 collaborators.

Free Trial: Yes, a free trial is available here .

Ongoing Subscription: A range of packages are available, costing between $8-$20 monthly.

Best market research tools for startups

There is another often-forgotten set of tools used for market research that are ideal for startups. If you’ve got zero budget and a little time on your hands, you can do most types of desk research for free. Sources include:

• Company reports, case studies, and whitepapers
• Research and trade associations
• Media coverage
• Internal sales or usage reports
• Academic or scientific journals
• Government and non-government agencies
• Public library records
• Competitor websites
• Educational institutions

Helpful: Check out this article about how to do market research for a startup .

Wrapping up….

With cost and time key considerations for anyone looking at tools for market research, it’s vital to choose wisely. While free market research tools are all good and well, they won’t always serve you when you’re on a deadline or require key insights on a specific competitor, market, or product.

Similarweb helps companies win in the digital world. Whatever the market, goal, or business size, its solutions are designed to help organizations understand their market and compete and beat rivals.

Take it for a test run today. Trial any Similarweb solution free for the first 7-days using this link .

Need to know more about the ROI of Similarweb? 

What are the best market research tools for secondary research?

The internet is probably the best tool for market research there is. It’s a goldmine of secondary market research data. But beware of data validity and check your information is coming from a trusted source.

What are the best market research tools for surveys?

Survey monkey is considered the best online market research tool for surveys, but key players like Typeform and Zoho follow closely behind. Budget and features usually determine the right tool for your needs.

What are the best free market research tools?

The best free tools for market research include: Answer the Public, Think with Google, Similarweb lite, SurveyMonkey’s basic plan, and Hootsuite’s free plan.

What are the best market research tools for qualitative research?

Qualitative research includes things like focus groups, open-ended surveys, case studies, and observation research. As such, the best tool for online research like this would be something like BIT.ai’s documentation and collaboration tool. Another useful tool for qualitative market research would be an online survey provider, like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Google Forms.

What are the best market research tools for quantitative research?

As this type of research is focused more on numbers, the best quantitative market research tools include things like Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence and Tableau. Each performs a different function but works together to collect, analyze, and present data in the most useful way possible.

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17 Market research tools you should be using

From trawling the mighty US Census, to calculating percent change in an instant, there’s a whole lot of research tools out there to help you do your job as a market researcher. When you’re conducting market research , the obvious tool you need is a world-class research platform. But let’s look at some other tools to help you create the best possible experience for your customers and employees.

Here are 17 of the best.

1. Pew Research Center

Insightful, rigorous and transparent data. This is what you can expect from The Pew Research Center , a non-profit organization that conducts research and analysis across a diverse range of areas. These include:

• US politics and policy
• Public opinion polling
• Social and demographic trends
• News and media
• Technology and the internet
• Hispanic interest
• Global interest

More specific topics of interest and research include:

• Social media
• Online privacy
• Broadband access
• IoT (the internet of things)

2. Growthbar

(Free Trial)

The quickest and easiest way to perform market research has to be GrowthBar. The tool allows you to do market research on the fly -- instantly unlocking critical data points about your competitors or any website and the growth channels and keywords that are working for them. This data will help you identify what others in your space are doing as well as identify which marketing channels may work to grow your own business.

See the following data for any website:

• Domain Authority
• Organic Traffic
• Top Organic Keywords
• Top Paid Keywords
• Top Backlinks
• Suggested Keywords
• Keyword Search Volume

Take actionable next steps to compete with the market by creating content that ranks fast, utilizing their powerful Open AI technology. Enter any keyword and instantly get a content outline that tells you exactly what to write to optimize for SEO. You can also pair this tool up with Sitechecker Link Extractor that helps you extract all the links from your target website to see who they're linking to.

3. Living Facts

Described as the Pew Research Center’s sister site, and created by The Pew Charitable Trusts, Living Facts has the simple strapline, ‘about Americans today—who we are and how we live. Our goal is to inform and inspire. That’s it.’

With clean, colorful design and infographics, and chock-full of statistics, educational quizzes and fascinating facts, Living Facts covers:

• Communities
• Demographics

4. US Census Business Data

There’s nothing to top the data to be found in the US Census when it comes to free market research . Start with Data Gems , videos that explain how to access census data to inform your business decisions.

Then dive into the data, with useful tools that cover:

• Economics : the Consumer Price Index and Bureau of Economic Analysis
• Money Statistics from the Federal Reserve banks.
• Income : Earnings by Occupation and Education and Income Statistics .
• The labor market : Employment and Unemployment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Industries : North American Industry Classification System or NAICS system.

5. Sample Size Calculator

You need to create surveys for a number of people so that they are representative of your target audience, but you don’t know how many. What do you do? Use our sample size calculator .

• confidence level
• population size
• margin of error

and it’ll calculate the sample size you’ll need within seconds.

6. Google Keyword Tool

Where eyes are the window to the soul, Google Keywords are the window to the web. Google’s keyword tool is very popular as it accesses the best data – Google’s.

To start you will need to create a free AdWords account to access all the results.

This Google tool shows you:

• the volume of keyword searches
• how competitive those keywords are
• how keywords are related to each other

You’ll also be able to

• limit your keyword searches to a language or geographical area
• limit searches to only those on mobile devices
• filter results by your chosen criteria

7. Qualtrics Panels

( Contact us for a demo and quote)

It’s hard work finding the right respondents for your surveys, and a survey that no one takes is pretty useless. When you deploy our panel team, you’ll get access to hundreds of thousands of opt-in survey respondents, both B2B and B2C, who are already vetted and qualified. When our team handles your research project, you’ll be able to:

• choose any target audience and access a representative sample
• boost the accuracy of your tracking studies sampling that’s 47% more consistent than standard sampling methods
• get support for your best-in-class study at every stage, from survey launch to results reporting

8. Social Mention

Would you like to know what everyone’s saying about your brand? Social Mention scours more than 100 social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, blogs, videos and images for mentions of your brand, competitors, or any keywords you wish to input. Then, it gives them to you in a single information feed.

You’ll get four key metrics:

• Strength : How much your keywords crop up on social media.
• Sentiment : Positive vs. negative mentions
• Passion : How many people are repeatedly talking about your keywords.
• Reach : Range of influence, i.e, how many individual users are mentioning your keywords.

9. Google Trends

While Google Trends has some crossover with Social Mention, it has the added feature of factoring in data from the Google search engine in addition to social platforms.

Google Trends:

• Shows how frequently your search term is entered into Google compared with the site’s total search volume over a specific period of time.
• Provides keyword-related and geographic data about Google’s users.
• Can be used for comparative keyword research and to uncover keyword spikes triggered by events.
• Gives you a more comprehensive perspective on the news, opinions, posts and perceptions affecting your brand.

10. Think with Google

This tool will give you all the information you need for uncovering market trends, understanding consumer behavior and gaining market insights, ready for your product launch. You’ll find everything from high-level insights to deck-ready statistics and useful marketing tools.

Using fascinating and useful content from Google, using data from their digital searches, Think with Google will inform your marketing campaigns by:

• Making sense of the data with articles that explain its implications
• Highlighting trends in real time
• Showing what other companies have achieved

11. Facebook Audience Insights

With around 2.45 billion monthly active users , marketers are missing a trick if they don’t track social media giant Facebook for marketing purposes. And Facebook Audience Insights will give you information about two groups:

• People connected to your Facebook page
• People on Facebook generally

These will help you create and target content, and find more people who match your target audience. You’ll also be able to extract:

• Demographic information : age, gender, job titles education, relationship status
• What people like : hobbies, interests, pastimes
• Lifestyles : location and relationship status combine to identify the types of people interacting with your business.

12. R Studio

Sometimes it just feels good to get your hands dirty romping through raw data.

• R is free language and environment software for stats computing, data manipulation and graphics, and you’ll need to install it first.
• R Studio gives you a range of statistical analysis tools to use with R. It requires that you know some coding, but it gives you tremendous power to create custom statistical analysis. RStudio is a free, open-source integrated development environment, which means it’s constantly being improved by the data-analysis community that uses it.

13. Stats iQ

( Book a Stats iQ demo )

Stats iQ may be the polar opposite to R Studio because you can do hardcore stats analysis without needing to be a hardcore stats wonk. It’s the world’s most powerful statistical analysis tool , that also happens to be the world’s easiest.

Stats iQ automatically:

• finds relationships in your data
• shows how strong those relationships are
• runs the right statistical tests and visualizations
• translates your results into simple language that anyone can put into action.

14. Make My Persona

Every marketer knows that buyer personas help your business focus time and resources, and inform product development and marketing. A buyer persona is a model of an ideal customer, created through market research and existing customer data.

Make My Persona helps you create these semi-fictitious characters in seven simple steps that you fill in, including:

• Job responsibilities
• Goals or objectives
• Preferred method of communication
• Biggest challenges
• Anything else you want to include

The tool then gives you a profile of your buyer persona that you can share with your whole organization to inform and inspire.

15. Percent Change Calculator

You use percent change to track change over time – e.g. the fluctuations of sales, subscriptions, or prices of financial securities.

For example, you sold 15,000 bicycles this year, and 9,000 last year. You want to know the percent change of your sales:

15,000 (new number) – 9,000 (old number) = 6,000

6,000 x 100 = 66.66666

You’ve sold 67% more bicycles this year.

But do you want to do this calculation every time? No! Put your two values into a simple percent change calculator and it will do the math for you.

16. AMZScout

(Free trial. Prices start at $14.99 per month)

When it comes to understanding what is happening in a market, there is no data more useful than sales numbers. AMZScout is an innovative eCommerce software that provides sellers with the insights they need to identify items that have high profit potential.

With AMZScout you can:

• Get stats for every product, including average monthly sales, reviews, sales history, and more.
• Review demand and competition levels for both products and niches.
• Predict costs and profit margins.
• Track seasonal trends and consumer behavior.

This leads to unexpected product discoveries, significant new customer flows,  efficient market insights, and long-term revenue growth.

17. Tableau

( Prices start at $70 per month for 1 creator, rising to $278 per month for a team.)

Tableau is a tool for data visualization that needs no programming knowledge. It helps you see and understand your market research data pictorially, using analytics, visualization and business intelligence .

It works like this:

• It extracts data from PDFs, Excel, text, R, Hadoop, Python or SAS, to cloud databases.
• The Tableau desktop takes the data, analyses it, then presents it as an interactive and shareable dashboard which shows trends and variations with colorful charts and tables.
• The data can be published, with features such as collaboration and automation included.
• Users can view their visualized data on platforms such as email, mobile and desktop.

Did we miss your favorite market research tool ? Let us know by tweeting us @Qualtrics

Use our market research tool for free

Aaron Carpenter // Experience Management Content Strategist

Aaron is a highly skilled and accomplished content strategist specializing in experience management. With a keen understanding of the ever-evolving landscape of digital content, Aaron brings a unique perspective to the art of crafting engaging and impactful experiences for users.

Ruth D'Alessandro

Ruth has been writing digital content for many years. She’s fascinated by what big data and artificial intelligence can bring to the human experience, and loves writing about it for Qualtrics.

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The 24 Best Market Research Tools & Software in 2024

Author & Editor at ProProfs

Shivani Dubey specializes in crafting engaging narratives and exploring Customer Experience Management intricacies. She writes on vital topics like customer feedback, emerging UX and CX trends, and sentiment analysis.

Market research tools have been at the heart of every business’s success. In a world where competition seems to be never-ending, knowing the ins and outs of your target market is more crucial than ever. 

According to a study conducted by PwC , companies that benchmark can achieve 69% faster growth and 45% greater productivity as compared to those that don’t. 

Market research has enabled organizations to uncover not only some of the biggest revelations about the market but also the tiniest details that most people miss. Market research helps organizations read between the lines and make informed decisions, which makes the process ever so important. 

Thankfully, in the 21st century, we do not require an insider to give us data about the market in the name of research. We now have some of the world-class software tools at our fingertips that would enable us to truly improve, evolve and empower our products and services for the people. 

In this blog, we’ve included a list of 12 of the best market research software and tools out there with some of the key details that you should know before making a decision to choose the one for you. 

But first, let’s take a closer look at what market research actually is.

The 24 Best Market Research Tools in 2024

There are plenty of online market research software tools that you can choose from. Here is a list of 12, which the users think very highly of:

Market research tool # 1.  Qualaroo

Qualaroo is the best market research tool and one of the best  online survey software  out there for conducting market research. It provides users with a market research platform that is easy to use and also offers actionable insights.

Qualaroo also helps you  develop user personas  through  advanced targeting , which helps you better  understand your users  and easily track their goals & behavior patterns.    

• Easy to set up and can instantly start taking feedback.
• Professionally designed survey templates to ask just the right questions.
• Catches your visitors in real-time with context for valuable responses. 
• Users can easily determine who and where the survey targets are
• Can help create detailed  customer journey maps . 
• Ask for product/website/app feedback from the audience based on engagement. 
• Supports branching logic to easily go through the redundant users. 
• Integrates with popular tools like Hubspot, Zapier, and Slack. 
• Perfect for measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty using Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.
• Helps to gather user experience (UX) feedback at every stage of the design process for any product.
• You can test prototype templates through unobtrusive pop-up surveys called Nudges™.
• Makes analyzing customer sentiments and open-ended survey results easier through the sentiment analysis engine
• Needs more filters and export options for the reports.
• Lacks a bulk action button in the survey dashboard.

Pricing:   Starts from $69 per month.

Market research tool # 2.  Google Trends

Google Trends is a free market research tool that presents data in the form of trend lines from all over the internet. When you enter a specific term into Google Trends, it will give you an accurate representation of how trendy that term has been over the course of time and also gives it a score out of 100.

• Shows the frequency of your searched term in Google with respect to the website’s total search volume over a given period of time.
• Refines your search by adding location filters.
• Presents the trend graphically for better visualization of the result.
• Easy to respond to surveys on any device, including mobile, tablets, and computers. 
• Integrates with popular tools such as  Zapier , Automate.io, and Integromat. 
• Data is generated into organized Google Sheets that can be instantly presented without making any alterations. 
• Useful tool to acquire keyword-related and geographic data about the users.
• Instantly uncover any search spikes due to special events for a search.
• Sometimes shows irrelevant results for a searched term.
• Shows only relative numbers, so a comparison analysis is necessary.

Pricing:  Free to use

Market research tool # 3.  SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is another market research software that offers new market research techniques and provides different ways to customers for voicing their opinions. They have combined an enterprise-grade platform with a suite of specialized market research and customer experience solutions to ensure that the power of feedback can be given to organizations of all sizes. 

• Professionally built question bank to ask accurate questions.
• Personalized survey techniques like skip logic, branching logic, etc.
• AI-powered analysis tool to get expert feedback on the survey draft. 
• Test creative concepts by asking the right set of questions from the right audience. 
• Ensures quality of data gathered from over 144 million users worldwide.
• Ability to get help from market research experts and dedicated accounts managers with the flexible engagement model.
• Potential to monitor market dynamics of a specific product category over time.
• Easily design recurring surveys to track sentiments with time.
• Embed survey questions into emails to improve response rates.
• Provides accurate context from the updated benchmark data.
• Analytical dashboard needs improvement to make data presentation better.
• Sometimes glitches a little while designing surveys.

Pricing:  Starts at $25/user/month. 

Market research tool # 4.  Statista

Statista is one of the top market research tools that specializes in data visualization and market research. It picks up data from reputable reports that are present all over the internet and makes them easy to comprehend and digest for researchers and other users. It can find the specific data relating to your industry and create a statistical report on it, which would be much easier to understand. 

• Ability to filter content based on a specific type. 
• Hundreds of metrics to choose from and the ability to customize visualizations.
• Also features forecasts and surveys reports.
• Flexibility to analyze the markets across 150+ countries. 
• Presents global stories and statistics in a vividly visualized manner. 
• Ability to conduct Global Consumer Surveys to understand what drives the consumers. 
• Can integrate with other marketing tools by simply copying the HTML code. 
• Great tool for portraying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to understand the consumer market outlook.
• Helps research and gather information about the companies like their headquarters, the number of employees, and revenue performance.
• Can be challenging to find relevant data for long-tail search terms.

Pricing:  Starts at $39/month

Market research tool # 5.  Google Keyword Tool

Google Keyword Tool is a highly sophisticated  market research software and analysis tool  that acts as a window into the behavior of customers when searching online. Google Keyword tool provides valuable insights into queries that your target audience is searching on google.

It acts as an accurate product research tool that tells you what the customers are looking for. To use it, you need to create a free Google Adword account.

• Shows you the volume of keyword searches.
• Lets you filter keyword searches based on location and language.
• Lets you filter searches based on the device that people use to search.
• Helps marketers build a content strategy and marketing strategies as well. 
• Offers users insights into the current marketing trends.
• Expand long-tail efforts by discovering other important keywords in the same domain.
• Integrates with other tools using Google API.
• Shows the relationship between different keywords to help you find targeted related keywords.
• Excellent tool to understand the competitiveness of the keywords.
• Shows fewer keyword suggestions than other similar tools.
• Needs more keyword filters in the dashboard.

Pricing:  Free to use.

Market research tool # 6.  Tableau Software

Tableau is a business intelligence suite for data visualization that needs no programming knowledge. Tableau uses analytics, visualization, and business intelligence to present the data in a visually appealing fashion for a better understanding.

It aims to transform the way we see and use data to make decisions. Tableau empowers its users with the help of its highly sophisticated market research tools to make the best out of their data. 

• Lets you visualize data on anything.
• Can easily extract data from PDFs, Excel, text, Python, SAS, and many more.
• Tableau dashboard provides a comprehensive and wholesome view of your data.
• Enables the marketing team to directly access the data from different formats.
• Visualizes the market research data to generate actions and make quick decisions. 
• Natively integrates with other market research tools like Qualtrics and Salesforce. 
• Flexible team collaboration and data sharing options.
• Makes it easy to connect with live data sources to stay up to date. 
• Offers data heat maps to give a general sense of the emerging patterns in the market.
• Can be an expensive tool for some businesses.
• You may need help from the IT department to set up the tool.

Pricing:  Starts at $70/user/month.

Market research tool # 7.  Typeform

Typeform is another market research software and online survey tool that allows you to conduct market research surveys to get a direct response from your targeted audience. It has a built-in photo and video libraries and a wide range of design themes to choose from. Typeform primarily aims to create people-friendly forms by making them appealing, which would gather more responses and better insights.

• Shows the viewers one form field at a time. 
• Easy to use and optimize for mobile devices.
• Let’s you create a wide range of question types. 
• Make the form uniquely yours with a wide range of customization options.
• Integrates with other tools like Google Sheets, Salesforce, Slack, etc.
• The drag and drop feature allows users to create forms within minutes.
• Variety of question types including multiple-choice, rating, opinion scale, free-form text, and many more.
• Creating conversational and casually approached surveys. 
• Gathering demographics of the customers to understand their behavior patterns. 
• Creating positioning strategy through survey results. 
• Survey design options need more flexibility and customization options.
• It would be good if there were more filters in the reporting dashboard.

Pricing:  Starts at $25/month.

Market research tool # 8.  SEMrush

SEMrush is another very effective market research software tool that marketers use to boost their conversion rates. It has over 40 tools under its portfolio that can be used to attract more visitors and increase conversions. 

This tool primarily aims at improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights by offering services like SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR,  Content Marketing , Marketing Insights, analytical tools for market research , Campaign Management.

• Provides tools like keyword research, on-page SEO, and local SEO.
• Easily monitor and manage organic rankings.
• Provides tools for content marketing, creation, distribution, optimization,
• It’s the best  tool for market analysis . 
• Lets you explore and analyze the demographics of competitors in the market. 
• Determine how to market competitors earn their traffic and also estimate your market share. 
• Integrates with popular Google and social networking applications. 
• The technical audit report gives in-depth suggestions for site optimization.
• One of the best enterprise-level tools.
• Provides a plethora of segmentation options for keyword suggestions to find the right keywords.
• Training docs can be hard to navigate. It can be hard to find what you are looking for.
• Backlink suggestions dashboard can be improved. Sometimes, it misses a lot of backlinks.

Pricing:  Starts at $119.95/month. 

Market research tool # 9.  Ahrefs

Ahref is also the top  tool for business research  or market research that offers a fully-packaged suite of  conversion rate optimization tools  is Ahrefs. It is an extremely diverse software that has tons of functionality and can easily make anyone an SEO expert. It is an extremely powerful tool for backlinks, SEO analysis, and also managing your SEO health over time.

• Ranks keywords with respect to their level of difficulty and traffic potential. 
• Conduct site audits to understand the weak links and boost the conversion rates.
• Conducts keyword research for Google, YouTube, and Amazon.
• Finds content that performs well on a given topic.
• Tons of different metrics to measure the data on.
• Integrates with tools like Tray.io and Rank Ranger using Ahrefs API
• Provides insights into competitors’ organic search and backlinking profiles on different websites.
• Helps to find the most optimized and well-performing content to generate new ideas and analyze competitors’ content.
• Coes with a slight learning curve. Needs inline tooltips in the product menus for quick access.
• PPC features need some optimization.

Starts at $83/month, billed annually 

Pricing:  Starts at $99/user/month.

Market research tool # 10.  Upwave (Formerly Survata)

Upwave, formerly Survata, is one of the best analytics and market research platforms to help you measure the effects of your brand advertising efforts. You can use the inbuilt dashboard to track every campaign across various channels and optimize them to improve ROI. The data from Upwave has been featured in brands like Forbes, USA Today, CBS News, and The New York Times.

• Track and optimize brand advertisement to improve brand awareness.
• Get real-time updates about outperforming aspects of every campaign to run timely optimization.
• Receive email notifications to get refreshed reports directly in your inbox.
• Provides automated tracking of different demographic & behavioral profiles in each campaign.
• You can see how accurately each campaign is reaching the target audience across various channels.
• Create customer dashboards to monitor the performance of your campaigns.
• Leverages AI-based Upwave Customer Forecast feature to predict brand lift and customer acquisition for your campaigns.
• Track market penetration, i.e., the percentage of the target audience you reached for any campaign.
• You can estimate customer acquisition numbers to study the effectiveness of your brand marketing campaigns and make changes.
• Needs more filters to include other behavioral traits in the dashboards.
• Dashboard UI can be overwhelming for new users.

Contact for a quote

Market research tool #11.  AnswerThePublic

Answer the public is the best software for market research according to their home page, ‘There are 3 billion Google searches every day, and 20% of those have never been seen before”.  AnswerThePublic is responsible for listening to autocomplete data from search engines and cranking out every useful phrase or question that people are asking about a given keyword.

• Helps you get a sense of what the people are really asking for. 
• Gives you the context behind every search. 
• Very easy to use and digestible for beginners. 
• Listens to autocomplete data from search engines like Google and cranks out useful phrases and questions. 
• Also acts as a goldmine for consumer insights, and the data can be used to create extremely useful content and product.
• Integrates with other popular applications to generate more insights. 
• An excellent tool for insights, validation, creativity, and creating content strategies.
• Word Cloud feature is fantastic to visualize related keywords and their relationships.
• Helps to uncover the untapped potential of search demands for different queries.
• The database is constantly updated to help you spot new trends, slang, and topics.
• Sometimes, the results become less relevant when you search for more than two keywords simultaneously.
• It’s challenging to find keywords for niche markets.

Market research tool #12:  Social Mention

Social Mention is one of the  best tools for market research  that digs through 100+ social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and many more, to determine the number of times your brand or keyword has been mentioned. It has the ability to accurately track and measure what people are saying about your brand.

• Displays how much your keyword crops on all social media platforms.
• Distinguishes between positive and negative sentiments.
• Gives a general overview of the customer’s perception of your brand. 
• Users can determine the overall footprint of their brand and make informed decisions.
• Supports simple integration with popular social media applications for more meaningful data.
• You can also determine the number of people talking about your keyword at any given time. 
• You can set up alerts for more minor updates using tags within broader categories.
• Consolidates the data from all over the internet under one dashboard for real-time monitoring.
• Makes it easy to research specific domains where the audience is looking.
• The UI can be updated to improve navigation for new users.

Market research tool # 13. Think With Google

Think With Google is a one-stop information resource to monitor customer behavior, get marketing insights, and view the latest industry trends. It offers several tools to find the right demographic audience for your business, test and optimize your website, and track real-time consumer behavior across any location. So, if you are looking for the best market research resources, this is the one to go for.

• Run a site audit on your domain and get custom tips on improving site speed, UX, and other aspects.
• Lets you search trends and actionable consumer insights for specific locations.
• Track emerging technologies to plan the future of your marketing strategies.
• Benchmark your website against industry standards with a simple test.
• Use Google Trends to discover trending topics, latest stories, and other hot topics.
• Free-to-use online repository to explore new markets, find the right audience, and access global consumer behavioral data.
• No advanced features to find information on sub-categories or niche markets.

Market research tool # 14. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an excellent content marketing and researching platform to produce high-performing content. You can do keyword research, competitive analysis, brand monitoring, and more to grow your business. The platform also offers a chrome extension to make the job easier.

• Find the target keywords to design your content based on monthly search volume, cost per click, and other parameters.
• Track viral trends in real-time for any domain, topic, and location.
• Track new content around your target keywords to design your SEO strategies.
• Find the most popular influencers worldwide for any topic to sponsor them for your brand.
• Set alerts for desired keywords, blogs, brand mentions, competitors, and influencers.
• Track backlinks to your domain from all over the internet.
• One of the best tools for social listening and keyword research.
• The Chrome extension is an excellent addition to one-tap monitor the performance of your campaigns.
• Doesn’t monitor the content or engagement data for Instagram posts.
• Needs more filters to separate news and general topics.

Starts @ $79/month, billed annually

Market research tool # 15. Make My Persona

If you are new to building a buyer or user persona , then MakeMyPersona is your tool. It’s a simple market research software from HubSpot that creates a buyer persona based on the data you enter into the form. Just fill in the details, and you get a ready-to-use persona template to study different customer segments. And it’s free.

• Uses demographic and psychographic details of your target audience to build a buyer persona.
• It asks for details like age, organization’s size, job title, goals, challenges, etc.
• You can also add new sections manually, if necessary.
• Download and export the buyer persona with a click.
• Quick and easy to use to build customizable persona templates.
• Requires market data from your end. You cannot use it to find information on the target market.

Market research tool # 16. PureSpectrum Insights

PureSpectrum Insights (formerly Upwave Instant insights) is a consumer insights platform to collect market research and brand tracking data. You can create surveys and questionnaires to ask questions to the right audience to gather valuable insights for your marketing strategies. The company also offers PureSpectrum Marketplace to help you buy samples from multiple market research panels with one click.

• Create focused research and brand tracking surveys and distribute them to the target audience.
• Target the right people based on age, gender, shopping behaviors, income, job title, and other inbuilt attributes.
• Get real-time updates about the performance of your market research campaign.
• Use the PureSpectrum marketplace to find the right target audience for your surveys.
• Track the data in real-time using detailed reporting dashboards.
• The panel service helps to get to the required sample size quickly.
• To improve data quality, you can create crosstab reports and set up significance tests in minutes.
• Limited survey options as compared to other tools.

Contact for quote

Market research tool # 17. Loop11

Loop11 is a usability testing and market research tool to build better products. You can perform usability testing, benchmarking, prototype testing , information architecture testing, and more using the same tool. It offers both moderated and unmoderated testing so you can find the right audience to test your product and prototypes. 

As an audience research tool, you can use it to see how your product appeals to your new target market, explore their preferences, and channel the insights into the design.

• Offers a user-friendly test builder to guide you at every step of designing a test. No coding is required.
• Create tasks, such as five-second, first click, tree testing, etc.
• Add surveys to your test to collect in-depth demographic and psychographic data.
• Design surveys using multiple question types like multiple-choice, single-choice, NPS, rating, and System Usability Scale (SUS).
• Run your test on any device like desktop, mobile, or tablet.
• Provides a dedicated participant panel service to find the right participants globally for your tests.
• Offers video, audio, and screen capture to collect first-hand data from users.
• Edit videos to extract useful points like adding time-stamps, assigning tags, and more.
• Track test metrics like task completion rate, lostness, time on task, and NPS scores.
• Use inbuilt behavioral analysis tools like heatmaps and clickstream to map participants’ journeys during the test.
• Offer more flexibility in annotating and sharing the clips than other similar tools.
• An inexpensive tool with a wide range of testing options.
• The participant panel offers niche filters to help you target the right people for your tests.
• You cannot make changes to a test after publishing it.
• It may slow down your website a little.

Starts at $63/month, billed annually

Market research tool # 18. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is one of the most advanced experience management platforms in the market. It comprises different product suites to cover different aspects of your business. You can gauge customer satisfaction, optimize products and services, run market research campaigns, and track brand awareness from the same platform. Plus, AI-based analytics put it among the leading Market research tools to collect data for brand tracking and advertisement optimization.

• Track brand awareness through AI-based dashboards.
• Uncover the aspects that provide positive and negative brand perceptions among your audience.
• Set up automated alerts to track changes in brand signals or awareness.
• Run surveys to collect customer feedback and market research data.
• Offers 27+ deployment channels like website, app, link, email, and QR code.
• Use the drag-&-drop builder, 50+ answer types, branching logic, 100+ templates, theme customization options, rebranding, and other features to design surveys.
• Provides targeting options to target the right people.
• The iQ™ analysis engine leverages AI, machine learning, and NPL to extract data, spot opportunities, and suggest improvements automatically.
• Offers XM services to collect and manage market research data for you.
• Generate custom resorts to align your data with your business KPIs for real-time insights.
• Limited customization options for your surveys.
• It takes time to add the contract data to directories. It could be improved to make the process faster.

Market research tool # 19. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is among the most trusted and leading market research tools that offer in-depth data on different industries. You can find the top website, best apps, top trending topics, and other data around your industry. The company also offers data intelligence services to help you collect insights into your target market and audience. Plus, you can perform keyword research to find relevant keywords for your marketing strategies.

• Analyze any website and mobile app to view their ranking, total traffic, demographic targeting, competitors, marketing channels, etc.
• Uncover top keyword trends based on organic vs. paid search, channels, traffic sources, and other attributes.
• Perform keywords research to find new keywords.
• Run benchmarks for your website against industry standards.
• Leverage the data repository to track and monitor consumer data signals from over 100 million sites worldwide.
• Explore competitive insights, global market trends, and audience behavior on domain and sub-domain levels.
• Get shopper insights to track consumer behavior across your website, marketplace listings, and app.
• Offers a Chrome extension to get quick performance insights about any open web page.
• Easy to use and navigate. The UI is intuitive and user-friendly.
• Sometimes the data does not accurately represent the actual insights.
• Poses a learning curve for new users. Could benefit from a detailed knowledge base.

Market research tool # 20. Userlytics

Userlytics is one of the best tools for market research and user testing. You can easily conduct remote usability testing to align your products with the target audience. It also lets you collect information about your participants and interact with live conversations to gather in-depth market data without the hassle of arranging personal interviews, making it a perfect online market research tool.

• Choose from a plethora of test types like tree testing, card sorting, usability testing, prototype testing, and more.
• Use the tests to find the right product-market fit, test products, and conduct in-depth market research.
• Offers features like multiple question types, branching logic, rebranding, multi-language support, and others to create targeted tasks.
• Use built-in targeting options to select the right audience for your tests.
• Provides picture-in-picture recording to view how participants perform the tasks.
• Choose your own participants or access Userlytics’ panel services to select your target audience.
• Offers advanced dashboards to track metrics like NPS scores, time on tasks, and success/failure rate.
• The Global participant panel with inbuilt filters makes it easy to find the right audience.
• The feedback editing tool lets you create highlight reels, bookmark, download, tag, share, and rate the transcripts to extract valuable insights.
• The panel credits needed to recruit participants cannot be shared with other users within the same company. So, you have to buy more credits for each separate account.
• It can be expensive for small businesses.

Subscription plans start at $399/month. billed annually

Market research tool # 21. Temper

Temper is among the more straightforward feedback and audience research tools that let you collect user insights and other important data about your products and services. With simple surveys on different web pages, you can measure customer satisfaction, collect demographic and behavioral data on your target audience, gauge customer experience, and do more. 

The tool is perfect for small businesses getting started with market research resources or creating a feedback loop.

• Create and add survey widgets to your website and email.
• You can show the widget as a page pop-up or embed it into the page.
• Provides multiple question types like NPS, emoji, free-text, rating scale, and more.
• Fetches respondents’ meta-data to build your market research resources.
• Add custom tracking variables to pull other user data like email address, user ID, order number, etc.
• Offers inbuilt targeting options to show the widget to the right audience.
• In-built sentiment analysis dashboard to show overall sentiment score for each campaign.
• Beautiful dashboard to view scores with time and track any changes in real-time.
• The dashboard is simple but intuitively designed to display all the data without appearing overwhelming.
• Custom tracking is an excellent way to identify logged-in users and quickly act on their feedback.
• Lacks more question types offered by other similar tools.
• No advanced tools for quick data analysis.

Starts at $12 month

Market research tool # 22. BrandMentions

If you want to know what people are saying about your brand, BrandMentions is the perfect tool. It’s a great market analysis tool to instantly search every corner of the internet and track brand engagements. From social listening to competitor spying, you can do it all and more with this feature-packed platform.

• Track aggregated social mentions across various social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
• Respond to people’s brand mentions from the dashboard to build an online community.
• Find and connect with the right influencers to fuel your marketing efforts.
• Monitor Hashtag performance across different channels.
• Run sentiment analysis of all the brand mentions and track the overall sentiment tone of people about your brand.
• Perform competitive analysis to analyze how your rivals are performing on the internet.
• Track your competitors’ brand mentions, social shares, and other data to identify their most popular channels.
• Set alerts for trending topics and news to stay on top of optimizing your business strategies.
• The UI is simple to use and navigate.
• Set real-time alerts for negative mentions to take quick action and build brand reputation.
• The initial setup takes time. We recommend consulting tutorials or help guides.
• Needs a bigger integration stack to export/import data to other workspace tools.

Starts at $99/month

Market research tool # 23. GrowthBar SEO

GrowthBar offers an all-in-one SEO toolkit for keyword research and competitive analysis to grow your business. You can find new target keywords, create new content ideas, and track competitors’ websites with a click. The business research tool also offers a Blog Marketplace to help you find the top freelance SEO writers for your blogs.

Features 

• Offers AI-based content assistant to auto-generate optimal titles, headers, introductions, word counts, images, and more for your blog posts.
• Use the inbuilt dashboard to view related keywords, difficulty scores, and suggestions for any keyword.
• Track DA, targeted keywords, Google and Facebook Ads, backlinks, and other data for any competitor website.
• Access the Blog Marketplace to find the right freelance writers to publish quality blogs.
• Offers Chrome extension to get SEO insights about any open webpage without leaving the browser.
• The AI-based content assistant comes in handy to generate optimized content outlines in minutes.
• Cannot do advanced SEO research like other similar tools.
• No option to track broken links.

Starts at $29/month, billed annually

Market research tool # 24. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is another market research tool to generate new keyword ideas for your campaigns. You just need to enter a domain or keyword. The tool shows keywords suggestions, monthly volume, and other data to help you identify the best opportunities for the target keyword. UberSuggest was acquired by Neil Patel, who has since expanded its feature list significantly.

• Generate long-tail and short-tail keywords ideas for your target keyword.
• Track metrics for each keyword like monthly search volume, PPC competition, average CPC, SEO competition, and more.
• Track top-ranking pages for any target keywords with estimated traffic, social share, and domain scores for each website.
• You can also analyze any domains for traffic, domain score, organic keywords, backlink score, and other useful information.
• Provides an SEO analyzer to run Site Audit and speed tests on your website and show suggestions to optimize it.
• The free version offers all the features to generate new keyword ideas.
• Uses location-based data to enhance data accuracy.
• Offers Word-Cloud keyword display to help you identify relevant keywords around the target term.
• Lacks several technical SEO features.
• Show limited results for niche target markets.
• No custom reporting option.

Free. Paid plans start at $12/month

Must-Have Features in Market Research Tools

You have already come across what market research software tools can do and how they are useful to marketers. But what makes a market research tool great and desirable? Let’s take a look at some of the features that every market research online tool should have

1. Identifying the Target Audience

Each step in the process of market research is crucial, but it stems from identifying your target audience in the initial stages. The inability to identify the right target audience would automatically result in the market research being void and halt the process entirely.  Therefore, a market research tool should, first and foremost, be able to fetch you the right set of audience to ask the questions from.

2. Creating a Research Questionnaire

The step that follows the identification of the target audience is the creation of a research questionnaire that will fetch you the answers that you are looking for. 

A good market research tool should provide users the ability to draft questions that: 

• Make the surveys engaging 
• Keep the surveys short 
• Always ask the right questions

3. Sharing Your Research Questionnaire

Another must-have feature of any market research tool is the ability to share the research questionnaire on multiple platforms through different channels. The flexibility of sharing your research questionnaire on different platforms is directly correlated to gathering accurate and significant data.

Respondents should be given the ability to opt for platforms that are convenient to them, like emails, social media, web links, SMS shares , and many more.

4. Collecting Data and Creating Information

A good market research tool should always be able to collect raw data and process it in such a way that it gives valuable information to the researcher. This is where an analysis tool comes in. 

The analysis conducted by the research tool should give actionable market insights by analyzing the data on a granular level and presenting it with the help of a robust reporting system.

Final Tips for Conducting Market Research

At this point, you are well aware of how important ongoing market research is for the organization’s long-term success. But even if you fully understand the depths of market research, you need to leverage it effectively. 

For that, here are some of the quick tips that would be useful for you while conducting market research:

1. Context Is Everything

Data is everywhere, yet so little of it is of any use. Even with tons of invaluable information at our fingertips, we often are clueless as to how we should use them. Understanding the true meaning and the reasoning behind the information is what makes research complete. 

As a good researcher, you should always be aware of the possibilities and limitations out there and harness the vast potential of information out there to paint a clear picture in the form of market research.

This can be done by always trying to look beyond the data points and asking questions to understand the actual meaning around the data.

Also Read: How To Measure Customer Satisfaction In Context

2. Make It Personal

When it comes to interpreting the data, you should always try and engage with the researchers and the analysts to understand how the data would be applicable to your organization. Market research is not about reading recorded visuals and texts or purchasing a report card and moving on. 

There is a vast amount of information captured on a daily basis that does not make it to a publication and remains unused. Research is often widely applicable, which is why you should personally engage with research personnel or analysts who work behind the scenes to curate the research.

Asking them the right questions about the applicability of research would give you a much better understanding.

Remember, Research Is an Ongoing Process

We live in an ever-changing society, where the consumer’s needs and market trends change at a rapid pace. In order to analyze and interpret those trends and consumers’ needs, you need to study them on a regular basis. Research needs to be an ongoing process with no inevitable end to ensure that you always stay ahead of the curve at any given point in time.

Ask the Right Questions

Before starting with your marketing research, you need to have your objectives in place. These objectives act as a blueprint for your research and would guide you towards successful market research. 

While focusing on the core objective, you would need to derive the right set of questions that would gather the specific data needed to fulfill your research. Here is a quick example of questions that can be applied in your research:

To understand how your visitors came to know about you

• How did you find our website?
• What search term did you use to find our website?
• What was the first thing you found out about us?

Understanding the purpose of your visitors

• What brings you to this website today?
• What product or service are you looking for?

Understanding the exit intent

• What is preventing you from signing up?
• What is preventing you from starting a trial?
• What could we do to make this site more useful?

Related Read – To know more about the survey questions, have a look at What Survey Questions Should I Ask?

Reflect on the Insights

Conducting market research is not the end of the process. The important bit is what comes afterward. Sharing the research data with your team and other organization members is the ideal thing to do when it comes to interpreting it. 

You can also use the analytical tool provided in the market research software that would comprehensively decipher the data and give you a bird’s-eye view. This is how reflecting on the data would give you the ability to make critical decisions.

Ultimately, market research will always be considered as a highly sophisticated way of gaining insights and answers that will eventually reduce business risk and ensure overall success.

Research success can always be determined by comparing your discoveries with the business objectives. Proper deployment of market research tools is one of the biggest enablers of this success.

With that being said, you have been enlightened with some of the best market research tools out there. All you need to do now is evaluate your needs and map them with the tool that can make it happen for your business by helping you develop what your customers need.

About the author

Shivani dubey.

Shivani has more than 3 years of experience in the modern creative content paradigm and technical writing verticals. She has been published in The Boss Magazine, Reseller Club, and HR Technologist. She is passionate about Artificial Intelligence and has a deep understanding of how organizations can leverage customer support technologies for maximum success. In her free time, she enjoys Nail art, playing with her guinea pigs, and chilling with a bowl of cheese fries.

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The 19 Best Market Research Tools Of 2023

Market research is a crucial component of any business strategy. Here are some of the best tools you can use in your market research efforts.

Building a successful business is no easy feat, especially in a world where consumers have more options – and distractions – than ever before.

That’s why market research is essential to any business marketing plan and marketing strategy .

Market research lets you learn more about our target consumers and their behavior, spot emerging trends, uncover important data, and make informed business decisions.

But with so many target consumers out there and so many places and methods to reach them, where should you start?

In this article, we’ll cover some of the best market research tools available to you across a variety of tactics and approaches.

Let’s get started.

1. SurveyMonkey

One of the more well-known survey tools, SurveyMonkey offers a broad list of features and capabilities for creating audience surveys.

Whether you want to create your own survey or choose from one of its 250+ expert-created templates, SurveyMonkey offers a user-friendly interface that enables you to customize your surveys to your needs.

It also offers a suite of helpful features, including AI-powered knowledge to help you pose the right questions, as well as built-in reporting and analytics.

• SurveyMonkey offers a free Basic tier with unlimited surveys featuring up to 10 questions and 25 responses per survey.
• Individual plans start at $39/month with unlimited surveys and questions, and up to 15,000 responses per year.
• Team plans start at $25/user/month, starting at three users. This level also gives you unlimited surveys and questions, but offers 50,000 responses per year.

2. Typeform

Typeform is an easy-to-use tool focused on helping users create intuitive and engaging forms, surveys, quizzes, polls, and more. Its selling point is the ability to create truly conversational, beautiful forms.

With Typeform, you can create slick surveys with customizable interactive elements, such as images and videos, that encourage your audience to take action. Its focus on interactivity makes it an appealing tool for market research.

Typeform offers plenty of useful features – from conditional logic to creating dynamic surveys – that adapt based on answers to real-time data analytics and integrations with tons of popular tools, from Slack to Google Analytics.

The company even offers a standalone video tool, VideoAsk, where users can create “video forms” to prompt responses.

• Typeform offers a Free plan with unlimited typeforms and 10 responses per month.
• Paid plans start at $25/month billed annually for Basic, $50/month billed annually for Plus, and $83/month billed annually for Business.
• The company also offers an Enterprise plan.

3.  BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content research and analysis tool that can help you gather some powerful market insights.

Regarding market research, BuzzSumo can help you understand the content landscape in your industry (and beyond), find out what’s resonating with your target consumers, identify influencers in your niche, and track how your content is performing vs. your competitors’.

The BuzzSumo tool analyzes articles (over 5 billion!) and social media posts across the internet to identify top-performing content. It allows you to comb through five years of data so that you can discover the right content ideas for your audience.

• 30-day free trial (no credit card required).
• Membership tiers start at $159/month billed yearly for Content Creation (individual) plan, $239/month billed yearly for PR & Comms plan, $399/month billed yearly for the Suite plan, and $999/month billed yearly for the Enterprise plan.

4. Qualaroo

Want to capture user feedback and deepen your understanding of market trends? Qualaroo might be the tool for you.

Qualaroo is a customer and user feedback tool that claims to be “10X more valuable than email surveys.” Using Qualaroo, you can add a survey to a page on your website or integrate it into your product.

The tool uses behavioral triggering to show surveys or feedback prompts in response to specific user behavior, so you know you’re targeting the right people with the most relevant questions.

Qualaroo also offers visual customization so you can get the branding right, automatic language translation, a library of survey templates, audience targeting, and IBM Watson Sentiment Analysis to help you organize your results.

• 15-day free trial (no credit card required).
• Plans start at $69/month billed annually for Essentials, $149/month billed annually for Premium, and $299+/month billed annually for Business tier.

SpyFu is a great choice if you’re looking to conduct competitive analysis as part of your market research efforts.

It allows you to effectively “spy” on your competitors by viewing their marketing strategies, advertising history, what keywords they’ve bought on Google Ads, and more – which can help you find gaps in the market and optimize your own approach.

You can feed the SpyFu tool a URL, and it will instantly show you its results for SEO topics like organic keywords, top pages, backlink analysis, total traffic, competition, and more.

Not only can SpyFu help you gain an understanding of the SEO landscape for your industry and gain a competitive advantage, but it can also tell you how hard it might be to dominate a specific niche.

• SpyFu offers paid plans starting at $16/month for Basic, $36/month for Professional, and $149/month for Team (billed annually).

Another great tool for SEO and competitive analysis, Ahrefs is a popular choice of many marketers for good reason.

Using Ahrefs, you can learn more about the search landscape of your market, discover what keywords your customers are searching for, track your competitors, and analyze content in your industry to inform your own strategies.

With its keyword and content capabilities, Ahrefs will help you find gaps and opportunities in the market so that you can improve your content, your site, and your search visibility.

• Website owners can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free limited access to its Site Explorer and Site Audit tools.
• Paid plans start at $83/month for Lite, $166/month for Standard, $333/month for Advanced, and $833/month for Enterprise (billed annually).

7. Delve AI

User personas are a crucial facet of an effective marketing strategy – and as such, developing them is a common step in any market research process.

Thanks to tools like Delve AI , it’s easier than ever to build user personas.

Delve AI offers a suite of persona-building tools based on your needs and the data available to you. Depending on what stage your business is in, you can generate:

• Competitor personas using Delve AI’s data.
• Social personas based on your social audience.
• Customer personas using your customer information.
• Live personas for your website based on Google Analytics data.

Beyond its multi-channel capabilities, Delve AI uses AI algorithms for accuracy in personas, offers behavioral insights, real-time updates to your personas, and more.

• The company offers a free Lite plan.
• Business plans start at $71/month for Standard, $159/month for the Growth tier, and $439/month for Pro (billed annually).
• Agency plans start at $167/month for Standard, $343/month for Growth, and $687/month for the Pro tier (billed annually).

8. Sprout Social

We don’t need to tell you about the importance of social media when it comes to connecting with your audience and driving business success. It can also play a major role where market research is concerned.

Sprout Social offers a robust suite of social media management features. Perhaps the most useful for market research are social listening features – which allow you to track market trends, industry keywords, and social conversations – and its competitor analysis capabilities.

It also provides insights into audience demographics, behavior, and interests, which you can use to inform your marketing approach.

• Free 30-day trial.
• Plans start at $249/month for Standard, $399/month for Professional, and $499/month for Advanced.
• Sprout Social also offers an Enterprise tier plan.

9. Google Trends

How can you supercharge your market research efforts? Look to search data.

Google Trends is an incredible tool that enables you to analyze real-time and historical search data to discover market trends, up-to-date consumer insights, and more.

By using this tool to access the latest information on how people search on Google, you can spot emerging interests and opportunity areas, and keep an eye on what consumers are most interested in.

It also offers location filtering so that you can see what’s trending in any given market.

10. Statista

If you’re looking for data and statistics on pretty much anything in the world of business and marketing, you might want to check out Statista.

It’s a business intelligence platform that provides “statistics, reports, and insights on over 80,000 topics from 22,500 sources in 170 industries.” This means that if you’re looking for specific market research insights, Statista most likely has something to fit your needs.

From in-depth reports to data visualizations and industry forecasts, Statista can give you reliable insights into what’s happening in markets around the world, and highlight market and consumer trends.

• Free Basic account available.
• Paid accounts start at $149/month for Starter and $490/month for Personal (billed annually), with more options available.

11. Qualtrics

If you’re looking for something extremely robust, Qualtrics ’ market research platform is an all-in-one, AI-powered solution for your market research needs.

It offers a suite of features and capabilities, including:

• Panel Management : Enables you to create research panels from email lists, site visitors, social followers, and more.
• On-Demand Respondents : Companies can pay for access to survey respondents that match their target demographic.
• Product Development : Get access to early feedback on your new products and services from customers.
• Purchase Behavior : Explore data on what is fueling purchase decisions among your target customers.

While it requires a more dedicated investment, Qualtrics’ software is scalable and powerful. It comes with automation and integration with many other tools, and customers have access to a support team.

• Qualtrics offers a free survey maker tool with up to 500 responses.
• For pricing details, reach out to the Qualtrics team.

It’s important to stay on top of how your customers feel about your business, services, and products – and Temper provides a super simple way to do just that.

The concept is simple: Come up with a simple question you want to ask your question, and your customers can respond by clicking a smiley face that corresponds to how they feel.

You might want to ask your customers, “How do you feel about our new product?” or “Please rate your experience with our customer support team.” With just a little bit of code, you can place a Temper widget on your webpage, in a blog post, or in an email footer and get quick feedback on audience sentiment.

• Plans start at $12/month for Hobby tier, $49/month for Pro, $89/month for Business, and $199/month for White Label.
• Temper offers a 60-day risk-free, money-back guarantee.

You’ve likely heard of the question-and-answer site Quora , but have you considered its potential as a market research tool?

Quora is an online community where real people can go to ask questions about anything they’d like, and share their experiences and opinions with others via answers.

It offers a unique opportunity for brands to conduct market research within their specific industry or area by connecting with Quora’s diverse community of consumers, professionals, and others.

Try searching Quora for topics related to your business or niche, and look at what types of conversations are trending. Or, you could ask a question yourself!

It’s a great tool for engaging your audience , keeping an eye on your competitors, and even developing new ideas for content, product development, and more.

• Quora is free to use, though it also offers separate business solutions.

14. Crunchbase

Crunchbase is a handy tool for getting a good picture of your industry landscape and how your competitors are faring.

It’s a database of companies that includes information like funding round data, investors, and financial information for each business. It also includes information such as employee headcount, leadership data, and more.

You can search Crunchbase by region or industry, allowing you to see how other companies in your niche are growing, and who is deciding to fund them. This can help you identify investment opportunities and market gaps, or even just gauge the overall health of your industry.

• Crunchbase offers a Free plan where you can preview profile pages at no cost.
• Paid options start at $29/month for Starter and $49/month for Pro (billed annually).
• An Enterprise option is also available with custom billing.

15. Google Market Finder

Another excellent market research tool from Google is Market Finder . This free, interactive tool is focused mostly on researching target markets – so you can use it to discover which markets might have the most potential for your company, monitor demand for your products or services, and more.

There are two primary features within Market Finder:

• Test your export readiness.  By providing your company’s URL and completing a short quiz, the tool will grade your “readiness” to expand into new markets abroad.
• Dive into new markets. You can take another short quiz that will suggest new market recommendations based on the information you provide, as well as external data like search volume and Google Ads.

Market Finder can also integrate with your Google Analytics data for more accurate information.

16. Semrush

Semrush is a one-stop marketing tool that can be leveraged to gain incredibly useful market research insights.

The company offers features dedicated to this type of research, such as its Market Explorer tool, which enables you to get quick information on your specific industry, conduct an analysis of market share, and benchmark your business against your competitors. You can also use the tool to analyze the potential of a new niche or market region for your business.

You might also find Semrush’s traffic analytics tool useful, as it allows you to go deeper with competitive analysis and target consumer demographics.

• Semrush offers a free account with limited capabilities.
• Paid accounts start at $108.33/month for Pro, $208.33/month for Guru, and $416.66/month for Business (billed annually).

17. Pew Research Center

While not a traditional marketing tool, the Pew Research Center is a widely known and respected resource that can be super effective when it comes to market research.

The site hosts a robust catalog of reports, surveys, and research covering everything from tech and digital media to politics, cultural trends, and more. The data is unbiased and credible, offering a unique perspective into what today’s consumers think and feel on various topics.

You can use the Pew Research Center as a tool to further hone your market research efforts, providing you with insights into the attitudes and behaviors of your target consumer, as well as the various factors that are impacting their desires and purchasing decisions.

18. Exploding Topics

We all know the saying, “I liked it before it was popular” – well, with Exploding Topics , your business can be the one to say this.

Exploding Topics helps you spot trends before they become super popular by analyzing searches, mentions, and conversations across the web to identify products, topics, and industries that are on the rise.

You can use Exploding Topics as a resource to help you predict shifts in the market and consumer interests, which can inform everything from your product design and strategy to your marketing approach.

It’s a lot like Google Trends, with some key differences; it pulls in data from a variety of sources and is focused on highlighting emerging trends before they take off.

• Exploding Topics offers a free version of its Trend Database.
• Paid tiers begin at $39/month for Entrepreneur, $99/month for Investor, and $249/month for Business (billed annually).

In today’s day and age, you can’t build a successful business without an effective website. But how can you know whether your website will resonate with your target consumer?

You can use Loop11 , a usability testing platform that helps facilitate user testing of your products.

Loop11 makes it simple to create a usability test and secure participants.

It enables you to view the user’s experience through video, audio, and screen recordings. Then, it presents you with in-depth insights and UX metrics to help you understand what’s working with your website, app, or product and what’s preventing people from converting.

• Free 14-day trial with full capabilities.
• Paid plans start at $179/month for Rapid Insights, $358/month for Pro, and $533/month for Enterprise (billed annually).

Market research is key to any business plan, no matter what industry you’re in, what stage of growth your business is at, or what customers you’re serving.

From competitive analysis to keyword research, user feedback, and more, focusing on your market research efforts will pay dividends to your business in the long run.

And while there are plenty of different ways to approach market research, these represent some of the best tools available to you – and can be a great jumping-off point for you to get started.

More Resources: 

• How To Calculate Your Total Addressable Market (TAM) For SEO
• Market Intelligence: What It Is & How To Use It
• Competitor Mapping: What Is It & How To Do It

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18 best consumer research tools and datasets Talkwalker

Show me how to do consumer research!

Marketing is about decoding consumer behavior . If you’d like to try Talkwalker’s consumer intelligence platform, to find and unscramble your consumer insights, give our free demo a spin.

Businesses that conduct consumer research want to understand what drives a consumer. What they like and dislike. Why they love one brand, and avoid another.

Surveying consumers provides insights so that marketers can create consumer profiles, which highlight buying behavior, pain points, attitudes, and needs. Once this information is available, you can improve your offerings - product development, customer service, payment procedure, marketing campaigns, communication, paid ads - to align with customer expectations.

For example, supposing you're launching a new product. You'll need to find out precisely what consumers are looking for, so you're able to optimize it and meet their demands. Your consumer research will also provide actionable insights into how to present your new product to existing customers.

Using consumer research will help you gain a deeper understanding of what influences customer behavior , to support development of your business strategy, increase brand loyalty and trust, and deliver a healthy bottom line.

Let’s take a closer look at what consumer research is and how it can benefit your company, along with all the datasets you can access generated by your research.

Table of contents

What is consumer research, why should i do consumer research, how do i do consumer research, best consumer research tools, best consumer research datasets, consumer research tool free demo.

Understanding consumers' decision making and purchasing behavior means your business can put customers at its core and be wholly customer-centric . This will increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, and drive more sales. 

Not including consumer research in your marketing strategy means that you'll be making assumptions based on your knowledge of your industry and your product. Conversely, leading your marketing strategy with data and research can improve resonance with your audience and help convert more prospects into sales. Listening to consumers ensures that you don't waste time and money taking your business and/or product development in the wrong direction because you've ignored consumer demands.

This TED Talk from best-selling author Joseph Pine underscores how consumer research can help guide brands toward better product offerings by discussing how the evolution of branded products has driven different consumer wants and needs based on pricing, customization and availability. 

Regardless of industry. Regardless of size. Your business will only succeed if you meet consumer demands, and drive loyalty across your customer base. 

It’s essential that you recognize how your brand is perceived by consumers. The sentiment behind the comments . Their buying behavior. Their opinion of your competitors. Without consumer insights research tools, you’ll struggle to predict the changes in consumer behavior and needs, which in turn, will stunt the growth of your business.

In this Masterclass presentation, Cara Buscaglia , Chief Innovation & Insights Officer at Talkwalker, discusses the importance of leveraging real-time consumer intelligence to inform your consumer research and more effectively create a holistic customer experience.

Here are a few other reasons why researching consumers is so important for your brand:

Find your target audience with consumer research

When things are tight, with budgets being cut and consumers spending less, it’s time to target your marketing. Identifying consumers who are likely to purchase your products or services, and understanding how you should communicate with them becomes essential. 

Ask questions. What’s influencing buying decisions? Which brands are consumers favoring over yours? Which brands are being ignored?

New customers’ insights

Talking to new customers about your brand - which channel they found you on, what they associate with your brand, why they switched to you from a competitor, which piece of content led to their purchase - provides insights into what’s working for you. 

Understanding new customers’ journeys to your brand means you can target future campaigns.

Understand customer churn

Why are you losing customers? What’s caused them to switch to another brand? Until you understand this, you’re in danger of repeating whatever mistakes you’re making, and losing more.

Are your products missing the mark? Do your prices scare people away? Is the customer experience clunky? It’s impossible to improve if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong. Consumer research insights will enable you to make data-driven decisions to strengthen your business strategy . 

Find your competitive edge

Your team can sit around a table and guess why consumers are choosing you over your main competitors, or you could ask consumers.

Not wanting to diss your team, because I know they’re all experts in your product, but… making assumptions without customer input, is going to lead to your marketing campaigns missing their target, or product development going in the wrong direction.

The best consumer research blends art and science. It’s not quite as simple as that of course. While many have codified market research into various numbers of steps, the key tenets are the same.

• The first step is a hunch or assumption. That’s the art. It could be something as simple as: cold soda tastes better than warm soda. You’ll build your marketing strategy around it if the consumer research validates your hypothesis. That’s where science comes in. 
• Step two requires you to pull the numbers, and make sense of what you’re seeing in the market itself. Market research tools will definitely help here. 
• Step three is of course insight creation - what do the numbers tell you to exploit? Finally, more art, time to build a numbers-backed marketing strategy based on an outstanding consumer research report, powered by the best consumer insights research tools and datasets. 

Here’s a rudimentary example:

• Step 1 -  Assumption/hypothesis: People who like soft drinks need a cooler to store them.
• Step 2 - Learning the market: Turns out the market for coolers is much larger if you include people who store beer in them.
• Step 3 - Insight creation: Beer drinkers are three times more likely to Google coolers than soda drinkers.
• Step 4 - Art time: Whip up a beautiful campaign targeting these cooler-Googling beer drinkers. Using a little Don Draper magic and a lot of resonance powered by insights that showed up in the data. 

In this consumer research example, the original hypothesis was wrong - people who like soft drinks don’t need coolers. At least, not as much as people who drink something else do.  Your research tells you that beer drinkers will buy coolers much more frequently. 

This is important: do what the data tells you! 

It’s okay to be wrong about your hypothesis, but your time and effort will be for nought if you don’t follow what you learn doing your consumer research. Trust your data, not your disproven hunches. 

What are you actually looking for when you do your consumer research? A few different things.

Check out the competition

Once you know what you’re after, find out who you’re up against. 

Your competitor analysis strategy should include the following questions: 

• Who are their customers? 
• Are they loyal? Why? 
• Is the competition missing an important audience or segment? 
• What do you admire about them? 

Listen for your opportunity

Get listening, not lucky. Social intelligence tools can power a brand to new levels of strategic insights, but you don’t need a fancy product or service to know when opportunity strikes. A simple listening solution like TweetDeck could be all you need to strike at just the right moment and achieve virality. 

Opportunities come in many forms, like memes, user-generated content , or retro moments. If you’re not trying to hear from all parties on all channels at all times, you’ll find you’re missing more opportunities than you ever thought possible.

Know who's who

Social media audiences are evolving. They’re becoming more mature, and they’re demanding more from brands. 

No, you can’t just have my info. The same message doesn’t work on every platform. Social’s not some task to be dumped onto the intern. If your brand can’t understand these simple truths, the simple truth is that audiences won’t understand you either. 

Social intelligence will help you identify audiences and segments that are predisposed to certain messages, helping you to achieve greater success trying to target and reach them. Listening will help you understand what builds loyalty, and how to cultivate it.

Deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment

The last point your consumer research should help you pinpoint is how to align your brand in this magical trifecta. 

• The right message is the one this audience wants to see. That means it’s useful, of value, or interesting. 
• The right person is the one who wants to buy. Not simply the one who comes for the witty memes or the informative pontificating.
• The right moment is that time when they'll buy, because your brand aligned these forces to make it so. 

Your consumer research should help you answer these unknowns.

Here are some of the best, most affordable consumer research tools to help you conduct your consumer research. They range from fonts of information on humanity itself like Google or Facebook, to real-time solutions to your customers immediate problems like Talkwalker or TweetDeck.

Talkwalker  | Consumer Intelligence Acceleration Platform

Talkwalker’s consumer intelligence platform is an ideal consumer research solution, regardless of budget. Offering free consumer research methods and tools in addition to paid analytics, our platform provides several solutions, including…

Talkwalker Alerts | Google Alerts +++

Use our free Talkwalker Alerts  to monitor in real time the words, ideas, and personas of the consumers that your brand’s trying to reach. You’ll also be able to learn what forums and social media platforms they’re active on, to further focus your marketing strategy.

Talkwalker Alerts - free consumer/customer research tool.

Like Google Alerts, but supercharged, set up alerts to receive mentions from websites, blogs, forms, and Twitter. Yep, you can monitor Twitter.

Free Social Search | Free consumer insights

You can research further into these likely consumers using Talkwalker’s Free Social Search, which includes seven days of data. Another free consumer insights tool, it’s perfect for tracking an important event in your industry, checking competitors’ campaigns, or taking a snapshot of a week in the world of your target audience.

Free Social Search for hashtags, events, competitors, consumers...

Quick Search | Social media search engine

Quick Search, Talkwalker’s social media search engine, is ideal for new practitioners of social media listening and monitoring to start their consumer research.

Quick Search analysis will reveal mentions, engagement, sentiment, potential reach, and consumer demographics.

Using sentiment analysis , image recognition , hashtag tracking , and easily followable core KPIs, the widgets allow anyone to get an at-a-glance look into the minds of the consumers they want to reach. 

It’s also a great tool for experts who want to scrutinize in detail their ideal consumer.

Talkwalker  | Consumer intelligence

The Talkwalker consumer intelligence platform offers brands social intelligence, market intelligence, and customer intelligence. Talkwalker can take your companies’ owned customer data from focus groups or online surveys, and compare it to your social mentions and existing market research to develop robust insights about your target market, your competitors, and your industry.

We’d love to give you a tour and help your brand go from insights to impact.

Google Trends  | Analyze search queries

People are constantly searching for the answers to questions and solutions to their problems. The best consumer research methods will dig into those queries, and find out how your brand can help.

Google Trends analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across multiple regions and languages.

Capitalize on emerging trends or find an underserved niche that desperately needs a solution your product can provide. However you go about it, Google Trends is a free data collection tool, packed with great datasets that’ll help you understand customer pain points and interests. It’s also one of the best consumer behavior research tools for analyzing consumer behavior. 

Remesh | Qualitative Insights

Remesh is a qualitative insights tool that makes it easy to gather qualitative data to shape your marketing strategy. Using Remesh, marketers can have a live conversation with up to 1,000 people simultaneously, and the platform sorts all of that incoming qualitative data for you into simple, easy to understand insights about customers. 

The Remesh Hub, where marketers can aggregate and analyze qualitative feedback to yield research-driven insights relating to its customers.

By facilitating live conversations with hundreds of people at once, marketers can better understand what their audience is saying in real time. These qualitative insights move beyond typical demographic data to give marketers a hand up in guiding strategic marketing decisions.

Facebook Audience Insights  | Create targeted ads

If Google Trends should be used more ephemerally, to insert your brand as a solution, Audience Insights from Facebook is best used for the hard sell. Facebook knows its audiences, and knows how to sell to them. Use their insights to help power your brand forward.

Inspire campaigns that are meaningful to people and drive real results.

This research tool finds data about your audiences, allowing you to compare audiences, plan campaigns, and create targeted ads. Using native and third-party-data, Audience Insights can break down your audience according to:

• Age, gender, relationship status
• Education level, job role
• Top categories
• Top cities, countries, languages
• Frequency activities

You can also identify trending topics that people are posting on Facebook, so you can create content that resonates with consumers, and increase your follower numbers.

Choose your goals - more leads, boost a post, more website visitors, more calls, promote your page.

Heartbeat Ai | Emotional Language Analysis

Understanding social mentions is the first step to social listening, but analyzing text for the author’s emotions can help marketers understand the root of customer challenges and frustrations. This is the goal of Heartbeat Ai.

Heartbeat Ai goes beyond traditional analytics and sentiment analysis to recognize emotions and themes in your qualitative text data. HEARTBEAT HX is an empathy analytics platform that measures the complexity of human experience (HX) that helps organizations communicate more authentically and empower companies to uncover truths about their customers and employees.

Leveraging AI at scale, Heartbeat Ai analyzes text based on over 20,000 emotional words and phrases to give marketers better understanding of how customers feel about a given brand or product

TweetDeck  | Social media dashboard

Real-time monitoring of everything that’s important to you, on Twitter. Use Boolean queries to build out columns or lists monitoring everything from the competition, the keywords, the hashtags, or the purchase intent of your target customers.

Here’s a quick guide to Boolean operators if that sounds complex.

TweetDeck for consumer research on Twitter.

TweetDeck is great if you're looking to jump into live discussions with consumers. The platform is connected to your Twitter account and has the options to add multiple accounts. Best of all, it’s a free consumer research tool!

HubSpot | Make My Persona

In 7 easy steps you’ll have your persona laid out in front of you, including their business needs, job responsibilities, who they report to, their goals and challenges all compiled on one easy reference sheet.

Create a buyer persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better.

Audiense | Segmentation by consumer, or cultural relevancy

Finding the perfect influencer for your cultural niche doesn't have to be hard - even if you're looking for a B2B influencer.

Audiense helps marketers and consumer researchers to put consumer segmentation and cultural understanding front and center of their strategy. The platform applies machine learning to instantly understand who makes up your target audience. They also include two free plan options.

Typeform | UX-Optimized Customer Surveys

Typeform makes surveying customers and consumers user friendly. This survey form builder tool can help marketers make consumer research easier with a mobile-optimized user experience to get insights directly from consumers.

Typeform shows consumers one prompt at a time, enabling a more casual, comfortable way for consumers to disclose demographic and psychographic information. This means that the platform can not only produce better research data from younger users, but it can also support a variety of question formats including multiple choice, short-form questions and rating scales.

Typeform’s simplified survey interfaces help consumers answer research for marketers in a comfortably designed, user-friendly format.

Qualtric  | Sample Size Calculator

This handy tool lets you calculate margins of error, helping you to verify your datasets and increase your confidence levels.

Determine your ideal survey sample size in seconds.

2023's social media trends, plan now!

70+ PR & marketing experts. 50+ actionable insights. 10 social media trends. Increase consumer engagement, improve brand visibility, drive ROI.

Where are you even going to find the data you need to power your insights? These databases below should cover most of your needs.

Pew Research Center

Download these datasets to get statistically rigorous insights into the trends and attitudes shaping the country and the world. Whether you’re doing primary or secondary research, you’re sure to uncover something new about your target audience with this dataset.

Statista includes great charts with their wide variety of datasets that cover many industries and subcommunities.

The Twitter firehose + 150 million websites crawled daily in 187 languages ? Over 500 million results a day? The path to customer research that creates customer satisfaction is there. We’ll help you narrow it down.

The simple interface makes it easy to get going in just a moment. This tool can definitely help you reach the audience you want in a place you didn’t expect, or an audience you didn’t know you wanted.

"Forget expensive surveys or time-consuming research. SparkToro identifies your customers' biggest sources of influence, and the hidden gems⁠ - so you can reach them where they hang out."

Tableau Public

You know people have probably done the research into your topic before, right? See if they put it up on Tableau Public, which has thousands of freely accessed reports pulled from a huge array of datasets. Plus, it’s all displayed beautifully, as expected from Tableau.

Census.gov features US population data collected nationally every ten years.

If you’re an American citizen, you helped fund Census Bureau research. And therefore you’re able to access the data for free.

Detailed demographic and income trends are easy to uncover across counties or states. This is the perfect place to start your primary research. Target those Facebook ads!

Google Trends

I mean, how’d you get here? If you used a search engine, you should be incorporating the data around searched terms into your consumer research.

Facebook Audience Insights

Audiences on Facebook are inclined to buy, and Facebook knows when to get them to do it. You should arm yourself with this knowledge too.

Why do consumer research? They're the driving force behind your business decisions. 

Put consumers first and understand what they want, what they like, what drives them,and  which channels they spend time on. You'll find new markets where you can promote your brand. Plus, the insights you collect will help you customize and target your social media and paid ad campaigns.

Consumer research tools can help avoid expensive mistakes when launching new products by gathering feedback from customers and performing competitor analysis, to find preferred features, so you provide a product based on the expectations of consumers.

Having a plan is important, but your business has to remain relevant. Researching trends and consumer needs, then adapting your long-term plan will ensure your brand grows alongside the changes in consumer behavior and demands.

Talkwalker's consumer intelligence platform will help your brand evolve to continue meeting the needs of consumers . Sign up for a free demo from one of our team of experts.

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The 13 Best Market Research Tools

Jan 3, 2024

10 min. read

The 328 million terabytes of data we create each day can be very telling about your target audience’s preferences and buying habits. This same data can also be inaccurate and low quality, depending on the source. That’s why the market research tools you choose matter — you need to be able to get the most up-to-date insights and trust what the data is telling you.

While traditional manual methods of market research and secondary research (aka desk research or complementary research ) still have a time and place in the digital world, marketers are supplementing them with market research platforms and software that do most of the heavy lifting.

Astronomical amounts of market-related data are created at lightning speed, far outpacing our ability to consume it all. To help find, filter, sort, and make sense of all this information, we’ve chosen 13 of the best market research tools to streamline and improve the process :

Meltwater Radarly

Think with google, ubersuggest, surveymonkey, answer the public, brandmentions, heartbeat ai, u.s. census bureau.

Tip: Also take a look at the top secondary research companies out there.

A leader in AI market research tools, Radarly is Meltwater’s AI-powered market research platform that provides real-time insights into consumer preferences . This always-on consumer intelligence suite uses a combination of data science, AI, and human market research expertise to surface insights about customers based on online conversations and activities.

Most of the world’s data is unstructured ( about 90% , by some estimates), making it harder to act on and understand its significance. Radarly brings structure to the unknown by detecting patterns and understanding audience sentiments.

Also, Meltwater for market research continuously sources new information and works in real-time. This gives marketers an advantage by working with the latest data so they can make informed decisions when it matters most.

See Meltwater Radarly live in action by requesting a free tour of our platform. Simply fill out the form at the bottom of this post and we'll be in touch.

Statista offers data trends and reports on a wide range of topics and interests, from Facebook’s monthly active users to leading beer brands based on sales. In total, the market research platform spans more than 170 industries and 150 countries .

What sets this resource apart is its visualizations — all of Statista’s stats have been compiled into neat and tidy graphs that are ready to publish or share in your own reports. This makes it easy to see trends over time or gain quick insights about consumer preferences.

There’s a chart for just about anything, and they’re updated on a regular basis. In many cases, Statista will include a brief explanation of the chart’s findings and recommend related charts for further research.

Google’s status as the world’s most popular search engine makes it a great resource for market research. Google has access to billions of first-party data points based on what people are searching for online. 

For market research purposes, users can tap into Google Trends to see the popularity of searches over time. See the terms that are trending on a daily or weekly basis, or check out shopping-related trends to predict the hot new products of the season ( trend prediction ).

Google’s Market Finder can also pinpoint new markets that might be a great fit for your product or service. Learn how various markets compare to each other and how your business might fit in.

And if you’re selling physical products, you can see how sales trends might impact your business using Google’s Rising Retail Categories . Retailers use this tool often to predict hot-selling holiday items and right-size their inventory.

Attest brings old-school focus groups and surveys into the digital era with its rapid-response approach. In the past, organizing interviews and focus groups took weeks or even months. Once the research activities were finished, analysts required additional time to compile the results. No more.

With Attest, you can hear directly from consumers who fit your audience profiles, with ready-made questions and respondents at your fingertips. All responses are recorded in the Attest platform, and the market research software analyzes results and collects consumer insights on your behalf.

Users pay per response, so you can scale your market research as needed.

A popular survey tool, Typeform offers a mobile-friendly way to collect market research insights . It’s unique in that it only shows users one field at a time to limit distractions. The look and feel lend to a more casual, conversational approach, which may encourage survey takers to be more candid in their responses. (We can’t prove it, though.)

Users can create various question types, including multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions, and scale ratings. It’s intuitive and makes basic market research a breeze.

Ubersuggest, a popular k eyword research tool , also has market research capabilities packed into its user-friendly interface . That’s because keyword research is a form of market research , giving you a glimpse of what people are actively searching for online.

Let’s say you’re launching a new facial cleaning device for your beauty brand . By using Ubersuggest for keyword research, you can also uncover:

• Other brands selling facial cleaning devices
• Publications talking about facial cleaning devices
• The popularity of online searches for facial cleaning devices
• Competition for related keywords
• Questions related to the keyword “facial cleaning device”
• Cost per click to rank for the keyword via paid ads
• Search volume (and interest) over time

This is a great tool to help you see who your top competitors are online, what type of content ranks well for a keyword, and how crowded a market is for a particular product or service.

Market research doesn’t always have to be a costly, complex beast, and SurveyMonkey is a great example. This easy-to-use survey tool can create simple or in-depth surveys sent to targeted audiences for feedback. 

For example, you might have one-off questions to ask customers who made a purchase to learn more about their buying habits. Or, you might want to send longer surveys to customers to help develop a new product. No matter your use case, you can customize surveys to reach highly specific audiences and compile their answers instantly. 

SurveyMonkey also offers turnkey market research solutions, including a global panel survey, translation services, and a reporting dashboard. These services can help you reach more people and get more use from your data.

Answer the Public is a free search listening tool that compiles the questions people are asking online. These questions can serve as a starting point for new product development, product improvements, and content marketing .

This market research software uses autocomplete data from Google . When you start typing a search, Google will try to guess what you’re looking for based on what other people have searched for. You can do this manually, but it’s time-consuming and relies only on your ideas.

Answer the Public makes life easier by compiling related questions in an easy-to-understand graphic. And since the data comes from Google, market researchers can trust its reliability and quality.

Ever wonder what it is about a brand (including yours) that people love? The things that get people talking? BrandMentions can help provide some context.

Specializing in social media monitoring , BrandMentions takes the next step into showing why a particular keyword is buzzing. Type in a keyword and you’ll see recent social media posts that also contain that keyword.

You can also see the keyword’s Reach, Performance, and Number of Mentions — all of which can come in handy when you’re planning a new product launch. You can use these insights to plan your launch-related posts to generate the most buzz.

Tip: Learn more about brand monitoring , brand tracking , brand reputation measurement , about the best brand tracking software , and understand why your brand mentions are spiking .

AI market research tools like Heartbeat AI allow you to put market research on autopilot , or at least close to it. Using sentiment analysis , this market research tool recognizes themes and trends in qualitative text data.

No more poring through pages and pages of text — Heartbeat AI can quickly surface insights about how your audience feels regarding your brand or products (or your competitors). What’s more, it can turn these insights into attractive visuals for simpler understanding or sharing with other stakeholders.

Qualitative research can be more difficult to sort and analyze because it contains more variables. Unlike quantitative research, which deals with specific, measurable data, qualitative research involves the complexities of human behavior and perception. The results are subjective in nature, and it involves more work to extract their value.

Discuss aims to change the narrative with AI-powered insights . Offering video capabilities, built-in note-taking, and auto-generated highlight reels, marketers can capture the “Aha!” moments without losing efficiency.

The market research platform makes it easy to refer back to conversations and keep their audience engaged throughout the process, leading to more complete data.

One of the oldest but most trusted market research sources , the U.S. Census Bureau offers basic demographic information about U.S. citizens. This platform gives you instant insight into America’s people , including things like family sizes, income levels, and populations.

Beyond demographics, the market research platform has thousands of tables and maps to bring your research to life. You can customize your own maps and tables using any of the data available.

Another option is to find your business’s North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code , and then filter the Tables tool to focus on your industry. This allows you to see where your industry is most popular and where it might be over- or under-saturated.

Tableau from Salesforce is a business intelligence platform that connects to all of your data sources, making it easier to connect the dots between disparate systems. It excels at transforming unstructured data into visualizations to streamline decisions.

Their goal is to democratize data and make it more accessible and user-friendly. It accomplishes its mission with a user-friendly interface, visual data transcriptions, and a community of more than a million members who share how-tos and best practices.

Make Your Market Research Tools Work for You

Online market research tools aren’t replacing the traditional survey or focus group — they’re enhancing them by providing an always-on approach to speed up results. By tapping into the wealth of data people are openly sharing online, businesses can gain more insights than ever before, on demand.

Meltwater offers some of the best tools for market research that are accurate, reliable, and easy to use. By tapping into billions of data points and analyzing them in the context of your business, you can make valuable data-driven decisions to move your company forward.

Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below:

Continue Reading

How To Do Market Research: Definition, Types, Methods

What Are Consumer Insights? Meaning, Examples, Strategy

Market Intelligence 101: What It Is & How To Use It

Consumer Intelligence: Definition & Examples

Secondary Research Guide: Definition, Methods, Examples

What Is Desk Research? Meaning, Methodology, Examples

Top Secondary Market Research Companies | Desk Research Companies

The 12 best market research tools for reliable data analysis in 2024

Market research tools help you get to grips with your market and audience, faster. Here are 12 of the best market research tools you can use today.

12 market research platforms and tools for accurate analysis

Choose the best market research software platform, which is the best tool for market research your faqs answered.

It’s the time of year again when you get to plan a trip. You only have so much to spend on your holiday, and you’ve got other people to keep the whole group happy. 

You scan Google Flights, TripAdvisor, and sneak peek on Instagram to see what people posted at the hotel you were eying. You’re doing your own market research. Because you only get to spend every dollar once, right?

Launch your next product with a data-driven strategy

Attest’s market research platform comes complete with a team of insights professionals who will help your team get real results from your survey data.

Similarly, when it comes to launching a new product , engaging your audience , and making important business decisions, market research is your roadmap to success, and the right tools help you get there.

Here we’ll explore some of the top market research tools and creative testing tools and industry benchmarking that can help you navigate the ever-changing landscape of your market and arrive at your destination with confidence. We’ll cover a bunch of the top market research companies in the US and beyond, so whether your research is local, national or global, make sure your research tool does the job!

Strapped for time? Here’s our TL;DR list of market research tools:

Use these top tools and market research software platforms to gather informed insights about your target audience.

With Attest, you can easily conduct regular surveys, spot trends, and work towards predicting market changes instead of just following them. This ability to predict changes in the market can help you stay ahead of your competitors and make strategic decisions to better prepare for the future. By using Attest’s market research platform, you can make your operations more bulletproof against big changes, ensuring you stay agile and adaptable in a constantly evolving market.

Attest gives you quality consumer insights that are delivered fast! And every Attest customer has a designated research manager to offer advice throughout your research project.

I love Attest. I love the speed and agility. I also really love that you guys provide a dedicated rep. I’m a marketer by trade, not a researcher, so it is nice to be able to have somebody to talk to whenever I have questions. Monica Aguilo, Senior Director – Consumer Insights, Strategy, & Social at Manscaped

Price: Find out more about Attest pricing .

Standout features:

• Dedicated research expert on standby: we want you to make the most of your research. That’s why all of our packages include a dedicated research manager who’ll help you create solid surveys, analyze your data and action your findings. There is no limit on platform support and research advice.
• Always the right audience: you get access to 125 million people in 59 countries. But go ahead and make your survey audience as niche as you need! You can layer different targeting specs to make sure you’re getting super-relevant results.
• Highest data quality: our sampling approach gives you the reliable answers you need from the people you’re looking to speak to. We use a mixed-methodology approach, meaning every survey is answered by multiple high-quality sample sources. Add to that three layers of quality control, both human and machine-learning-led, and you can confidently use your data for business decisions .

Best uses: you want to launch a survey for solid market research . Whether it be a competitive analysis, concept testing, consumer profiling or anything else—Attest has you covered. If you are looking for full support, we’re here for you. Check out our free market research survey templates and get started in seconds!

Turn insights into action with Attest

Our cutting-edge consumer insights platform is cost-effective, easy to use, and truly global. You’ll also get dedicated support from our Customer Research Team to make sure that you get the most valuable insights from your audience.

2. Google Trends

Price: Google Trends is a completely free market research tool!

• Search term analysis over time: imagine being able to track the rise and fall of a trend in real-time, like a stock market chart for search terms. With Google Trends, you can do just that. You can see how frequently a term is being searched and where in the world it’s most popular.
• Related topics and queries: want to know what your customers are thinking about? Check out the “related topics” and “related queries” features. This will give you an idea of the other search terms that are closely related to your original search term, giving you a glimpse into the minds of your target audience.
• Comparative keyword research: with the ability to compare multiple search terms, you can see how your brand stacks up against the competition, or even find new opportunities for growth.

Best uses: the main use case for Google Trends is to see market trends evolve over time. You can easily uncover basic data on how interest in a particular product, brand or industry changes over time. It’s a great starting place for market research to see what direction to go in.

Price : You can book a demo with Latana to find out how much it would cost for your business.

• Industry benchmarking: Latana helps you understand where your brand ranks in your entire industry. You can easily compare your own KPI data against your competitors in an interactive dashboard. They’ve got data from hundreds of industries and thousands of brands.
• Mobile-first micro surveys: with Latana you can conduct your own market research using mobile-optimized surveys. They have a reach of over 6 billion smartphone users, which you can access through in-app surveys.
• MRP algorithm for data quality: Latana uses machine learning to select the right audience for you.

Best uses: Latana is great for quick surveys with short and simple questions. It’s used for brand tracking as well.

4. Pollfish

Price : The concept testing feature starts from $1 per completed survey. A basic plan starts at $95 and allows you to collect up to 100 completed surveys with up to 5 questions.

• AI-powered surveys: tell AI what you want to know, and it will automatically create a survey for you.
• Mobile-optimized surveys: Pollfish has a mobile-first approach, meaning your survey will land on the smartphone of your users.
• Easy concept testing: Pollfish has a feature that lets you test whether your logo is giving you the responses you’re looking for from your target audience.

Best uses: Pollfish is great for short and sweet surveys, for instance for concept testing or brand tracking.

Price: the cheapest Solo plan allows you to do social listening and publishing, and you can set up 2 basic alerts for up to 5,000 mentions. That all starts at just $41 per month.

• Real-time social media monitoring: mention is like having a live news feed for your brand. You can track conversations and mentions of your brand on social media and the web, and find out what people are saying about you, without having to go look for it.
• Competitive analysis: mention doesn’t just monitor what people are saying about you. You can complete your market research by adding what your target audience is saying about your biggest and smaller competitors, to paint a better picture of where you stand.
• Industry tracker: mention comes with a retail and finance industry tracker, allowing you to track live online conversations around trending topics.

Best uses: your market research focuses on what your target market thinks about your brand or about competitors. This is perfect for market research revolving around branding, marketing campaigns and customer experiences.

Price: there’s no mention of pricing on the website, so book a demo to find out more.

• Scalable focus group: Remesh works like a scalable focus group. You can launch a live conversation with an audience that is relevant to you, with up to 1,000 participants at once.
• Live AI analysis: ask in-depth questions to a lot of people at once and let AI do the analytics part. The Remesh AI will uncover trends and themes, compare responses and segment your audience, all automatically.
• Different question types: you can keep the conversation flowing with open-ended questions and polls, and even add visuals to make it more clear what you are asking about.

Best uses: Remesh is ideal for concept testing and innovation processes. It works well if you want to go deep, like in a one-on-one, but need to talk to a lot of people in your target market at once to verify what the best decision is.

7. Heartbeat Ai

Price: Heartbeat Ai doesn’t mention any prices on their website, so book a demo to find out.

• Qualitative text analysis: Heartbeat Ai is like that friend who just knows how you feel by reading the texts you send. They’ve got a strong sentiment analysis tool that can recognize emotions and themes in your qualitative text data.
• Sophisticated sentiment analysis: Heartbeat Ai goes beyond identifying positive and negative sentiments. It can categorize text input into 9 primary emotions, 97 secondary emotions and 3 body sensations.
• Science-based: Heartbeat Ai is a market research tool made with cognitive psychology and affective neuroscience in mind

Best uses: you’re looking to uncover valuable insights on the qualitative side of market research. If you have text data and don’t have the manpower to manually read into the sentiment of it, Heartbeat Ai does the heavy lifting.

8. Answer the Public

Price: You get one free search per day, and can create a free account to unlock 3 free searches per day. If you need more, start with the individual plan for $9 per month and 100 searches per day.

Standout Features:

• Search listening: enter one or two words, a region, and watch all the adjacent topics, questions and thoughts people have about your keywords.
• Content ideas: struggling to come up with content ideas? Give in some keywords and ATP gives you a lot of related topics that will surely inspire your next piece of content.
• Data visualization: all the flat datasets you get can be turned into data visualizations for you to share with your team.

Best uses: during the ideation phase or to track specific key words and find what else people are wondering or saying about that. Also great for research for your content marketing.

9. Stravito

Price: book a demo to find out what pricing plan works best for you.

• Company content database: gather all your company knowledge in one place. Keep it organized and give people access in just a few clicks. With seamless drag-and-drop upload and a wide variety of integrations to centralize all your company knowledge.
• Intuitive UX: Stravito has a drag-and-drop upload system, uses multilingual search powered by Natural Language Processing for finding what you’re looking for, and tops it off with AI-powered content recommendations.
• Dedicated support: Stravito has a clear onboarding plan, promising to get you up and running within 6 to 8 weeks.

Best Uses: for enterprises who have a lot of knowledge, reports and data and want their employees to have easy access to this.

10. Typeform

Price: The cheapest plan starts at $21 per month, but only includes 100 responses.

• User-friendly surveys: Typeform is another survey creation tool that shows respondents one question at a time, mimicking a human conversation.
• Question formats: it’s not just what you ask, it’s how as well—that’s the philosophy at Typeform. They offer all kinds of question formats, like multiple-choice, scale ratings, and open-ended questions. Add in conditional logic to structure your survey based on a respondent’s answers.
• Ease of use: Typeform offers a bunch of pre built survey templates, which helps you to send great-looking surveys in mere minutes. And with all its integrations, you can integrate it in your workflow easily.

Best uses: you want to survey but also be on-brand. It matters to you that each survey elevates the customer experience. Your research can be both qualitative and quantitative, shorter or longer.

11. Qualtrics

Price: It will depend on which market research tools you are looking to use, so reach out to them for a custom demo.

• Survey tool with audience management: don’t have access to your own list of respondents? You can purchase access to millions of respondents through Qualtrics. If you do have your own lists, the tool will help you create neat panels.
• Analyze existing data: upload an existing data set and Qualtrics will run statistical tests and apply visualizations on it to help you make sense of the data you have, and to communicate it to stakeholders.
• A variety of market research tools: Qualtrics comes with tools to measure and analyze purchase behavior, market segmentation, competitor analysis benchmarking—to name a few.

Best uses: Qualtrics has a wide variety of market research possibilities, so if you’re very regularly doing different types of research, this platform might be a good fit for you.

If you’re looking for market research survey software, check out our list of the top 11 Qualtrics alternatives .

12. Statista

Price: you can check out some stats for free, but if you want to have full access to their best market research tools, a starter account starts at €39 per month. Access to Market Insights for one month will cost you €1,950.

• Statistical reports: if you’re wondering about certain statistics, chances are Statista has it. Pick any topic, industry, and country and find detailed reports, numbers and trusted content made by industry experts.
• Visual data: practically anyone can make sense of the data on Statista, thanks to its visualization and easily interpretable data representation.
• Consumer insights tools: With Statista Consumer Insights you get access to all kinds of market research tools and all results of the exclusive Statista surveys.

Best uses: it’s a great starting point for any research, but also a great source to support your research with trusted stats, numbers and existing market research data.

The best market research tools and market research services are the ones that help you reach your goals efficiently. Any tool is just as good as the support you can get, and that’s where Attest sets itself apart from the rest.

If you’re looking to launch market research surveys with ease and expertise combined, reach out to our team. You’ll get a dedicated research expert assigned to you that will help you get all the customer feedback and market data you need. Sign up today!

Choose the #1 market research tool

Attest gives you the best of both worlds in consumer insights: a cutting-edge platform and dedicated research expertise when you need it.

Market research tools come in all shapes and sizes. There are reporting tools that help you visualize data, survey tools that get you first-hand data and tools that give you an in-depth analysis of what’s being said about you on social media platforms. Attest gives you access to a global audience, with the power to drill down into the demographics that matter most.

It depends on the needs of your business. Always keep the desired action in mind when choosing a market research tool: what do you want to be able to decide or change after this? Then trace back which information you need to make those decisions to choose the best market research tools for your plans. Attest makes local and global market research easy.

Depending on your business’s needs, you can choose survey tools, data visualization tools, tools that help you identify trends and many other marketing tools. The best market research tools are the ones that help you reach your goals and enable your business to live up to its full potential!

If you choose the right market research tool for your goals and needs, then yes, market research tools are worth the investment. Market research tools provide your business with insights into your audience, competition and trends. This knowledge will help you minimize risks and maximize profitability in the long run. Plus, many of these tools offer features that save time and resources, such as automated survey distribution or data analysis. 

Market research is what can elevate creative ideas into powerful solutions that your customers will love and buy. It helps you uncover the information you need to reach customers better, to create marketing campaigns that are effective, and to craft products or services that will generate profit over a long period of time. Without data supporting all these elements, you’re taking big risks, and it can slow down your decision-making. Market research helps you take impactful steps, with confidence. 

Customer Research Lead 

Nick joined Attest in 2021, with more than 10 years' experience in market research and consumer insights on both agency and brand sides. As part of the Customer Research Team team, Nick takes a hands-on role supporting customers uncover insights and opportunities for growth.

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Customer Research 101: Definition, Types, and Methods

12 February 2024

Table Of Contents

What is Customer Research?

Why is customer research important, types of customer research.

• 6 Customer Research Methods
• How SurveySparrow Can Help

Do you want to improve your marketing or product? Then, customer research can help.

Your customer is at the heart of all your business decisions. In fact, everything revolves around a customer. A business is about having a paying customer, and it wouldn’t exist without one.

The effectiveness of your product or marketing depends on how well you know your customers. When you know your customers better, you can make better product or marketing decisions.

In this article, we break down:

• What customer research is
• Why it’s valuable for your business
• Different types of customer research
• Six customer research methods you can use to refine and grow your business

Customer research (or consumer research ) is a set of techniques used to identify the needs, preferences, behaviors, and motivations of your current or potential customers.

Simply put, the consumer research process is a way for businesses to collect information and learn from their customers so they can serve them better.

Businesses typically conduct customer research to uncover new insights on their customers. They then use these newly uncovered insights to improve their product, craft an effective marketing strategy, and more.

Here are 2 key questions customer research helps you answer:

• Who are my ideal customers? Who is the best fit (or worst fit) for our product?
• What channels can I use to find and communicate with my ideal customers?

Online survey tools like SurveySparrow can help you answer these questions. With omnichannel survey distribution, snazzy data visualization, and 1,500+ integrations with your favorite tools, SurveySparrow simplifies customer research for your GTM and product teams.

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A. How well do you know your customers? Not knowing enough about your customers can cost you time and money.

For example, a recent survey revealed that 46% of customers broke up with a brand because they received irrelevant content pushes.

Successful marketers realize that research is necessary to understand and cater to the ever-changing needs of today’s customers. According to a study by Coschedule:

• Successful marketers are 242% more likely to conduct audience research at least once every quarter.
• 56% of the study’s most elite marketers research at least once a month.

B. You shouldn’t make assumptions about your customers’ preferences or needs. You have to go out there and get opinions from real customers.

C. You need to go beyond your general idea about your customers. The more you understand your customers, the better you’ll be able to serve them with your product or service.

D. If you want to make your product the best in the market, you need to identify any unmet needs and learn how well your product serves the needs of your current customers.

E. Customer research helps you learn more about your customers, both the potential and existing ones. Serving your customers better than the alternatives starts with understanding them better and more deeply.

F. Here are other key reasons why you should research customers:

• Know the Why : Your analytics dashboard merely tells you what your customers do. Only research can help you understand why they do that.
• Validate Assumptions and Best Practices : In most cases, guesswork leads to terrible decisions. Your customers might not need what you think they need. And what works for most businesses might not work for you. The only real way to know is to talk to your customers.

Customer research can be done in two distinct ways: primary and secondary.

Primary research

Primary research is research you conduct yourself. In other words, in primary research, you collect the data yourself. Some examples of primary research are face-to-face interviews, surveys, and social media interactions.

Secondary research

Secondary research (or desk research ) is done by someone else. In secondary research, you make use of data that’s been collected by other people. A few examples of secondary research are forums or communities, industry reports, and online databases.

Primary and secondary research can be further broken down into two kinds of data: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative data

Qualitative data is descriptive and conceptual. And the nature of the data makes it subjective and interpretive. Examples of qualitative data include descriptions of certain attributes, such as blue eyes or chocolate-flavored ice cream .

Quantitative data

Quantitative data can be expressed using numbers, which means it can be counted or measured. As opposed to qualitative data, it’s objective and conclusive. Examples of quantitative data include numerical values such as measurements , length , cost , or weight .

Customer Research Methods that Work in 2024 (and Beyond)

Now that you know what customer research is and why it’s important, read on to learn the different consumer research methods you can use to make the most of it.

In a survey, you ask a series of questions to your customers regarding a subject or concept.

You can conduct a survey in person, over the phone, through emails, or online forms.

Here are some advantages of conducting customer research through surveys:

• Quickly collect a ton of insightful data without the high costs.
• The data you collect using surveys is simple to analyze.
• You can ask various questions since you get a wide range of question formats.

When it comes to surveys, it’s all about how you ask. Clear and concise questions can help you get reliable information.

An online survey tool is your best bet for quickly gathering customer information. All you need to do is create a survey with a ready-to-use template and send your customers a link to take it.

If you’re in need of a cost-free and easy-to-use solution for conducting customer research surveys and beyond, consider exploring SurveySparrow . This tool aids in gathering essential data by enabling you to conduct thorough data analysis via its user-friendly and conversational survey format.

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In an interview, you speak directly to your customers and ask them open-ended questions.

• Interviews allow you to have deep, one-on-one conversations with your customers and explore a topic in-depth.
• You can go into the details, obtain data beyond surface-level information, and gather deeper insights.

While interviews allow you to probe deeper into a subject, success depends on the expertise and skills of the researcher (or interviewer) conducting the interviews.

Conducting interviews isn’t easy. It’s time-consuming and costly. However, the information you collect can be invaluable for your company’s growth.

You can meet your customers in person to conduct your interviews. Or you can use video conferencing tools such as Google Meet or Zoom to converse with your customers online.

Your analytics dashboard lets you in on your customers’ actions within your product.

Just a glance at it and you’ll know what your customers do and how they engage with your product.

The irony is that customers don’t know what they want or why. They might think they need something but that might not be the case.

What they say they need doesn’t equate to what they do.

The point is that customer-reported behavior is different from actual behavior. That’s why it pays to track and observe your customers’ behavior.

You can use heatmaps, click tracking, scroll mapping, and user-recorded sessions to gain insights into your users’ actions and behavior.

Focus Groups

In this method, you combine a small group based on certain criteria such as demographic, firmographic, or behavioral attributes.

And you ask this group about whatever topic or concept. It could be about your product, marketing message, or something else that’s related to your customers or business.

The idea is to get them to talk to each other and have meaningful conversations.

A moderator helps facilitate the conversations between the individuals in this group. The moderator will try to draw meaningful insights from these conversations and discussions.

You mainly use this technique to understand a certain topic or subject better.

Competitive Analysis

Studying your competitors’ strategies and tactics is a great way to learn more about the target market and the existing solutions.

You can analyze both your direct and indirect competitors depending on the needs you address and the customers you cater to.

You can conduct a competitive analysis from a marketing or product perspective.

If you conduct your analysis from a marketing perspective, you study your competition’s SEO strategy , landing page copy, blog content, PR coverage, social media presence, etc.

You can also conduct your competitive analysis from a product perspective and analyze your competitors’ user experience, features, pricing structure, etc.

Review Mining

The reviews of you and your competitors are another great way to get inside your customer’s head. This method can be especially valuable if you are a SAAS company.

It helps you better understand your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses as well as your own. This understanding helps you improve your own products and better address the needs of your ideal customers.

This kind of data is easy to acquire as it’s publicly available, and you can get them on:

• Review sites such as G2Crowd and Capterra.
• Forums and niche communities such as ProductHunt, Reddit, Quora, etc.

Why SurveySparrow is the Best Customer Research Tool

SurveySparrow facilitates comprehensive customer research by enabling businesses to efficiently collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback, leading to better informed and customer-centric decisions.

• Collect Feedback Easily : Create simple surveys to find out what customers think about your products or services.
• Understand Satisfaction : Use surveys to figure out how happy customers are with what you offer.
• Learn Buying Habits : Find out why customers buy certain products, which helps in planning what to sell.
• Get Product Opinions : Ask customers what they like or don’t like about your products to make improvements.
• See How People View Your Brand : Understand how customers see your brand, which is important for your marketing.
• Keep Up with Trends : Regular surveys help you stay updated on what your customers want or need.
• Group Customers : Identify different types of customers to target them more effectively with your marketing.
• Improve Customer Experience : Learn where you can make the buying process better for your customers.
• Test New Ideas : Before launching new products, check if your customers would be interested.
• Check Customer Loyalty : Find out if customers would keep using your products or recommend them to others.

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Businesses that deeply understand their customers have a huge advantage over the ones that don’t. Period.

Whatever you’re looking to learn or achieve, it becomes a lot clearer with a little research.

When done right, customer research can be your competitive advantage.

Be sure to pick a method that’s right for your situation. What are you looking to learn and achieve? Think through each research method carefully and pick the one that works best for you.

Have you conducted customer research? What did you learn? And how did it go? Tell us about that in the comment section below.

And if you’re looking to conduct customer research through surveys, feel free to check out SurveySparrow .

I'm a developer turned marketer, working as a Product Marketer at SurveySparrow — A survey tool that lets anyone create beautiful, conversational surveys people love to answer.

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The 8 free market research tools and resources you need to know.

With over 400,000 new businesses opening in the United States each month, the need for individual companies to conduct their own market research has never been more urgent.  However, conducting market research isn’t an easy task — it presents challenges to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

With that being said, those with large budgets do enjoy certain advantages. When you have access to an endless array of top-tier tools and resources, you can uncover strategy-changing insights with relative ease.

Does that mean businesses with small (or non-existent) budgets are out of luck? Absolutely not.

Nowadays, free market research tools and resources are abundant — and you’ll be familiar with eight of our favorites by the time you’re done reading this blog post.

But first, some housekeeping:

What is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing information about your customers — both current and prospective — with the intent of optimizing your business strategy.

Customer-related information that you may want to gather includes (but is not limited to):

• The goals they want to achieve
• The pain points they want to alleviate
• The income or budget that constrains them
• The products and/or services they use (a.k.a. your competitors)
• The strengths and weaknesses of the products and/or services they use

Why is market research important?

Market research is important because — if you’re thorough and open-minded — it dramatically improves your chances of long-term success. Only through market research can you uncover the insights you need to develop a product or service that (1) satisfies the demands of your prospects and (2) stands out from the competition.

For a complete overview of how conducting market research can benefit your business, here’s Market Research Defined and How to Get Started .

Cool? Cool. Let’s dive into the good stuff.

Top 4 Free Market Research Tools

For clarity, we will define a free market research tool as any tool that:

• Costs nothing, and
• Helps with the collection and/or analysis of customer-related information

Keep in mind that “customer-related information” encompasses everything from a pain point to a weakness of one of your competitors’ products.

1. Google Trends

If you want to get a sense of the level of interest in a particular product or service — as well as how that interest fluctuates over time and across regions — Google Trends is an excellent tool.

All you need to do is enter a search query and toggle with the filters. As an example, take a look at the level of interest in “office supplies'' in the U.S. over the past five years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, interest peaked in February 2020 — at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic:

Plus, you can explore variations in interest across the 50 states, as well as related topics and queries that are surging in popularity:

The “interest by subregion” data is powerful. In Wyoming, searches for “office supplies” account for a greater percentage of all search queries than in any other state. Your average resident of Wyoming, in other words, is more interested in searching for office supplies than is your average resident of, say, Louisiana — a valuable insight for anyone who sells office supplies online.

Equally valuable is the insight that searches for “where to buy office supplies in bulk” are on the rise — potentially indicative of an emerging pain point.

2. SurveyMonkey

As some of you already know, one of the best ways to conduct market research is to ask your customers a handful of open-ended questions. You can do this for free with SurveyMonkey .

Specifically, with a free SurveyMonkey account, you can ask up to 10 questions and field up to 40 responses with each of your surveys.

Open-ended questions you may ask your customers include (but are not limited to):

• Why did you buy our product?
• What has our product helped you accomplish?
• How does our product compare to others that you’ve used in the past?

With just three questions — well under the limit of a free survey — you can learn quite a bit about your target market. If, for example, the majority of respondents say they bought your product because they were struggling to do their jobs in a cost-effective manner, that gives you a clearer picture of your prospects’ pain points and your competitors’ weaknesses .

3. Make My Persona

As you collect and analyze customer-related information, it’s a good idea to create or tweak your buyer personas : detailed profiles of the semi-fictional people for whom your product or service is designed. In the context of market research, personas are useful because they help you synthesize and comprehend the information you’re gathering.

Thanks to our friends at HubSpot, you can use a wonderful free tool called Make My Persona .

Intuitive and fun, Make My Persona is a seven-step process that walks you through the essential components of your target customer: demographic information, firmographic information, job title, pain points, and so on. And if you want to go beyond the bare essentials, you can add as many extra sections of information as you like.

Important note: Your personas should be dynamic. As you conduct further market research and learn more about your target customers, your personas should evolve accordingly.

4. WordSift

Make My Persona is appealing, in part, because it enables you to make sense of raw data — to separate the signal from the noise. The same can be said about WordSift , the final free tool we’ll be discussing today.

Built to help teachers with the instruction of vocabulary and reading comprehension, WordSift allows you to generate word clouds: images that represent the frequency with which certain words are used in a given body of text. Look what happens when I copy the introduction to this blog post and paste it into WordSift:

Instantaneously — and unsurprisingly — I can conclude that “business,” “market,” and “research” are among the most frequently used words in the introduction to this post.

What does this have to do with market research? Well, let’s say you’ve been using SurveyMonkey to ask your customers about their reasons for buying your product. One by one, if you were to copy their responses and paste them into WordSift, you’d be able to see which words your customers use most often. That’s a market research gold mine!

Top 4 Free Market Research Resources

Again, for clarity, we will define a free market research resource as any resource that:

• Helps with the collection of customer-related information

The scope of “customer-related information" remains the same  —  encompassing everything from a pain point to a weakness of one of your competitors’ products.

5. Bureau of Labor Statistics

A government organization that “measures labor market activity, working conditions, price changes, and productivity in the U.S. economy to support public and private decision-making,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a wealth of information.

Because this is a blog post about market research — not an economics class — we’ll focus on BLS’ industry- and region-specific information. If you’re on the homepage and you hover over the Data Tools drop-down menu, you’ll see a hyperlink to something titled “Industry at a Glance.” Click on that, find your industry of interest, and explore the dozens of statistics that BLS has aggregated.

If, for example, you’re interested in the apparel manufacturing industry — either because you’re in the industry or you sell into it — you can see how earnings, prices, and productivity figures are changing over time.

Head back to the homepage, hover over the Subjects drop-down menu, and you’ll see a section labeled Geographic Information:

Select your region of interest, filter by state or metropolitan area (if necessary), and take a tour of BLS’ enormous library of area-specific data.

6. U.S. Census Bureau

On a mission to “serve as the [United States’] leading provider of quality data about its people and economy,” the U.S. Census Bureau is another terrific resource that costs nothing to use.

Just as we did with the BLS, we’ll focus on industry- and region-specific information. Admittedly, using the Census website to find industry-specific information is slightly more complicated than it is when using the BLS website. If you’re on the homepage and you hover over the Explore Data drop-down menu, you’ll see a hyperlink titled “Explore Data Main.”

Click on that, and you’ll be brought to the Census’ search engine. Then, click inside the search bar and select “Advanced Search.”

Underneath “Find A Filter,” type in the name of the industry you’re interested in researching. Once the search suggestions load, simply check the appropriate box and click “Search.”

From there, you’ll be able to explore thousands of data tables, maps, and whitepapers — many of them chock-full of industry-specific information that you can use to your advantage.

Finding region-specific information is a bit more straightforward. Head back to the Advanced Search engine, select “Geography” from underneath Browse Filters, and go from there:

7. Pew Research Center

A nonprofit dedicated to “inform[ing] the public about the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the world,” the Pew Research Center is one of the most authoritative sources of information for anyone striving to make better business decisions.

Whereas the BLS and the Census are (among other things) aggregators of economic data, the Pew Research Center is a “fact tank” — an organization focused on public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis, and other forms of social science inquiry. 

So, although you can’t necessarily use Pew to uncover hyper-specific insights related to your industry or region, you can use it to learn more about your target audience. The best way to do this is through the Topics section of the Pew website.

Clicking that hyperlink brings you to an index of dozens of topics, ranging from Online Video to Homeownership to Democracy. Selecting any of these topics will bring you to a list of relevant content — reports, fact tanks, transcripts, and other forms of media that can date back as far as the early 1980s.

As an example, let’s say you’re developing a product or service that targets new homeowners. If you were to click on the Homeownership topic, you’d land on a list of reports like this one:

If I were you, that’s not a report I’d want to overlook!

We’ll wrap up today’s guide with a free resource specifically for those of you in the software world. Designed to help buyers determine which products are best suited to their needs, G2 is the leading source of validated, unbiased software reviews.

G2 is, in other words, an excellent way to find out what your target customers are saying about your competitors’ products. Do a quick search for the type of software you’re developing and you’re in business.

If you were developing a sales compensation software product and you searched this keyword, you’d be brought to the page you see below. To learn more about Spiff — one of your top-rated industry competitors — all you’d need to do is click “Read Spiff Reviews.”

If you want to get granular, you can filter reviews in a number of different ways. As an example, let’s say you’re developing a sales compensation software product specifically for small businesses. G2 has the filter you’re looking for:

And just like that, you’ve got access to dozens of valuable insights like this one:

Start using market research tools today!

If you try to bring a product or service to market without an understanding of your target customers, your chances of success are slim. According to the most recent State of Competitive Intelligence Report , 84% of businesses say their industry has gotten more competitive in the last three years. With the range of choices at your prospects’ fingertips growing by the day, the need for a thorough market research strategy only intensifies.

We hope you find these free market research tools and resources useful. And if you decide to make the leap to a paid solution, make sure to request a demo of Crayon — the competitive intelligence platform that enables you to track, analyze, and act on everything happening outside your businesses’ four walls.

See why Gong, Mastercard, and ZoomInfo trust Crayon to help them win more competitive deals.

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Customer Research Methods: Key Strategies for Market Insights in 2024

• Customer surveys : Survey tools such as Survicate are essential for conducting quantitative and qualitative research across various customer touchpoints and improving digital CX
• Diverse research methods : Employ a mix of customer research methods like different types of surveys , interviews, focus groups, observational studies, and usability testing to gain comprehensive insights into customer behavior and product interaction.
• Importance of continuous feedback : Establishing feedback loop mechanisms is crucial for ongoing improvement, ensuring that products and services evolve in response to customer needs .
• Data analysis : Systematic data collection followed by thorough analysis using appropriate customer research tools is key to identifying trends and making informed decisions. ‍
• Actionable feedback : Prioritize and strategize based on research findings to create actionable insights that drive measurable improvements in customer experience management and business processes.

Cutting through the chatter to hear your customers' true opinions is no small feat.

Tailored for business owners and marketers, this article zeroes in on how to conduct customer research . We'll highlight the strategies that directly connect you to your audience's preferences and pain points. By tapping into these insights, you'll be equipped to make informed, impactful business decisions.

Dive in to transform customer feedback into a clear direction for your brand's growth and success.

What is customer research?

Customer research is an essential practice focused on collecting data about your customers to understand their characteristics, needs, and behaviors.

Why is customer research important?

• Informed Decision-Making: You gain actionable insights into customer preferences and satisfaction, empowering you to make data-driven decisions.
• Enhanced Customer Experience: Understanding what your customers value guides your efforts to improve their experiences with your product or service.
• Strategic Focus: Tailoring your business strategy becomes more focused as you identify key demographics and market segments.
• Product Development: Product features and improvements align better with customer expectations when informed by customer research.
• Competitive Edge: Detailed knowledge about your customers can give you a competitive advantage by identifying opportunities and gaps in the market.

Customer research vs. market research

Customer research and market research serve distinct purposes in understanding buyers and the competitive environment.

Customer research dives deep into your existing or potential customers' behaviors, needs, and preferences . It aims to create a detailed understanding of the customer journey , from awareness to purchase and is often qualitative in nature.

On the other hand, market research takes a broader approach, examining the market as a whole, including industry trends, competitor analysis, and market share.

While customer research is about the 'who' and 'why' behind purchasing decisions, conducting market research addresses the 'what' and 'how' of market conditions and opportunities.

Both types of research are crucial for informed decision-making but focus on different aspects of the business landscape. Customer research is about improving the customer experience and tailoring products or services to consumer needs. Market research is about understanding the market landscape to strategize and position offerings effectively.

Primary research vs. secondary research

In customer research, understanding the distinction between primary research and secondary research is crucial for choosing the right approach to obtain your insights.

Primary research

Primary research involves collecting data firsthand for your specific research goal. This data is original and gathered through methods directly controlled by you. Examples include:

• Surveys and questionnaires : Deploying custom surveys to collect customer feedback on a new product or service.
• Interviews : Conducting one-on-one dialogues to dive deep into customer opinions and experiences.
• Focus groups : Facilitated group discussions to obtain a range of perspectives on a particular topic.

Secondary research

Secondary research methods rely on data previously collected by others. It's an evaluation of existing information that may include:

• Industry Reports : Analyzing market research findings related to your sector.
• Academic Journals : Reviewing studies and papers for trends and outcomes that align with your interests.
• Market Analysis : Assessing competitor data and market summaries to inform your strategies.

Types of customer data

Before diving into specific categories, understand that customer data is essential to personalize your marketing strategies and enhance customer experiences. This data comes in two core types: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative data

Qualitative research gathers non-numeric information that captures your customers' opinions, motivations, and attitudes. This data often comes from:

• Interviews , direct conversations that provide in-depth insights.
• Open-ended survey responses allow customers to express their thoughts in their own words.

Quantitative data

Quantitative research collects numerical data and can be measured and analyzed statistically. Key sources include:

• Transaction records : Sales data showing purchasing patterns.
• Website analytics : Metrics like page views and click-through rates representing user behavior.

Best customer research methods

When conducting customer research, you need to select the right methodology to gain valuable insights. Various research methods cater to different needs, from understanding user behavior to gauging customer satisfaction.

Customer surveys and questionnaires

Deploy online surveys and questionnaires to quickly gather quantitative and qualitative data from a large audience. For example, a survey tool such as Survicate offers a variety of different distribution channels:

• surveys embedded in emails
• website pop-up surveys
• mobile app surveys
• link surveys
• in-product surveys

Surveys are a cost-effective way to gather market research insights from the entire customer digital journey . If you use them as a part of a feedback loop, they can help you improve the CX considerably.

widely via email, websites, or social media platforms. Ensure your questions are direct and easy to understand to maximize response rates.

Conduct interviews to collect in-depth qualitative data. One-on-one interviews allow for a deep dive into customer opinions, beliefs, and experiences. Record these sessions, if possible, to ensure that none of the details are lost.

Focus groups

Utilize focus groups to explore customer attitudes and behaviors in a group setting. This method sparks conversation and can uncover insights that might not surface in one-on-one interactions. Be wary of group dynamics such as conformity, which can influence individual responses.

Observational studies

Observational studies involve watching how users interact with your product in their natural environment. This method provides unfiltered, real-world user behavior that can be invaluable in understanding how your product is used.

Usability testing

Usability testing is imperative for evaluating the functionality and design of your product. Recruit participants to complete specific tasks while observers note where they encounter issues or experience confusion.

Field trials

Conduct field trials by providing users a prototype or beta version of your product for a certain period. This hands-on approach yields feedback on your product's performance in real-life scenarios.

Review mining

Lastly, review mining involves analyzing customer feedback found in online reviews and forums. This passive method is particularly useful for identifying common pain points and areas for improvement without the need for direct interaction.

Types of customer research

Customer research encompasses various methodologies aimed at understanding your market and clientele. Tailoring these approaches helps you stay informed and make data-driven decisions.

Competitive research

You analyze your competitors to benchmark your products, services, and customer satisfaction levels against them. This helps in identifying industry standards and areas for improvement.

Customer journey mapping

Journey mapping involves charting the steps your customers take, from discovering your brand to making a purchase and beyond. It's a strategic approach to understanding customer interactions with your brand.

Buyer persona research

You create detailed profiles of your typical customers based on demographic and psychographic data. These personas help in crafting targeted marketing strategies.

Customer experience research

You assess customers' overall experience with your brand, from the usability of your website to customer service interactions, to optimize every touchpoint.

Customer segmentation research

Market segmentation divides your customer base into distinct groups based on common characteristics to provide more personalized products and services.

Customer needs research

You investigate your customers' underlying needs and desires to develop products that solve specific problems or enhance their lives.

Customer satisfaction research

You measure how your products and services meet, exceed, or fall short of customer expectations, often using surveys, feedback forms, and follow-up interviews.

Pricing research

You evaluate customers' responses to pricing changes and their perception of your product's value to establish an optimal pricing strategy.

Brand perception research

You gauge how customers perceive your brand to ensure your messaging aligns with their beliefs and your company values.

Designing a research plan

Precision and structure are pivotal for gathering actionable insights in constructing a customer research plan. These steps will guide you through creating an effective framework for your research efforts.

Set objectives

Identify what you want to achieve with your research. For instance, you may aim to understand customer satisfaction , identify buying patterns, or test product concepts. These objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) to ensure clarity and focus.

Identify target audience

Determine who your customers are by segmenting the market. To accurately represent your overall market, include demographics, psychographics, and behaviors in your segmentation. Knowing your audience can tailor your research to yield more relevant data.

Recruit participants

Once you know who to target, select participants who best represent your customer base. Employ strategies such as customer databases, social media outreach, or third-party panels to gather a varied group that reflects your target audience's diversity.

Choose appropriate methods

Your objectives will dictate the methods you choose. Qualitative approaches like interviews afford depth, while quantitative methods like surveys provide breadth. Select the right blend of methods to gain a multidimensional view of customer sentiments.

Sampling techniques

Employ sampling techniques to generalize your findings. Random sampling ensures everyone has an equal chance of selection, while stratified sampling involves dividing your audience into subgroups and sampling from these categories to ensure all segments are represented.

Build a continuous process with feedback loops

Establish ongoing mechanisms to capture customer feedback regularly. This could involve periodic surveys or real-time feedback systems. Make sure you continuously iterate your product or service based on this input, creating a virtuous cycle of improvement.

Data collection and analysis

Effective customer research hinges on the systematic collection and meticulous analysis of data to decipher patterns, understand behaviors, and make informed decisions.

Gather data systematically and analyze it to uncover patterns and trends. Use analytical tools that can handle your data type and amount. Look for relationships between variables and compare these findings against your goals.

Quantitative data analysis

You'll handle numerical data that can be measured and compared in a straightforward manner. Quantitative analysis often employs statistical tools to interpret data sets and deduce meaningful insights. Common techniques include:

• Descriptive Statistics: Summarize your data through means, medians, and modes.
• Inferential Statistics: Make predictions and infer trends from your sample data.
• Regression Analysis: Determine the relationship between variables.

Qualitative data assessment

With qualitative data, your focus is on interpretative analysis of non-numerical information, such as customer interviews or open-ended survey responses. Key approaches involve:

• Thematic Analysis: Identify patterns or themes within qualitative data.
• Content Analysis: Categorize text to understand the frequency and relationships of words or concepts.
• Narrative Analysis: Explore the structure and content of stories to gain insights into customer perspectives.

Mixing methods

Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis can provide a holistic view of your customer research. Employ a 'mixed methods' strategy to:

• Validate findings across different data types.
• Gain a richer, more nuanced understanding of research questions.
• Balance the depth of qualitative assessment with the generalizability of quantitative analysis.

Interpreting and reporting results

Turn your data into action by using insights to inform business decisions. Whether it is refining product features or adjusting marketing strategies, use the research to create value for your customers and your business.

Drawing conclusions

When you are ready to draw conclusions from your customer research, begin by assessing the data's significance. Look for patterns and trends in the feedback and quantifiable data. Tabulate your findings when possible, as this makes comparisons clearer:

• Quantitative Data : Calculate averages, frequencies, and percentages. A table showing the response distribution for each question can clarify these statistics.
• Qualitative Data : Group feedback into themes. For instance, list common descriptors used by customers when discussing a product feature.

Conclusions should directly relate to the research objectives you set before the study.

Creating actionable insights

After drawing conclusions, it's crucial to translate them into actionable insights:

• Prioritize : Determine which findings substantially impact your objectives or pose the biggest challenge to your CX.
• Strategize : For each priority area, brainstorm potential strategies. This may involve a simple list or a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) for complex decisions.

Always ensure that your insights are actionable; they should inform decisions and lead to measurable improvement in consumer experience or business processes. Communicate these insights with clear, straightforward language to the relevant stakeholders in your organization.

Emerging trends in customer research

Conduct market research with ai.

Customer research is adapting to leverage cutting-edge technologies. You'll notice a significant shift towards harnessing data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to derive deeper insights into customer behavior.

You can leverage Survciate AI-powered features as well. Try the AI survey creator that will design your customer or market research survey in under a minute after you describe your needs and objectives.

After you collect feedback, you can use the AI Topics feature to speed up getting qualitative insights. It will automatically categorize and summarize answers to your open-ended questions. Worth trying, isn't it?

Social listening

Social listening tools are another trend on the rise. They enable you to monitor your brand's social media presence and gather direct feedback from conversations about your products or services. Mobile ethnography also offers a way to observe customer interactions in a natural setting, providing contextually rich data.

Predicting customer behavior

Lastly, as the emphasis on personalization grows, predictive analytics are being adopted to tailor customer experiences. These techniques analyze past behavior to anticipate future needs, enhancing your ability to meet customer expectations preemptively.

Remember, these methods involve collecting various forms of customer data, so being vigilant about privacy and ethical data use is crucial. Follow regulations and best practices to ethically manage the information you gather.

Survicate for your market and customer research

As we've explored, the key to thriving in the current market is to truly understand your customers. The challenge, however, lies in efficiently gathering and interpreting their feedback to inform your business strategies.

With its user-friendly interface, Survicate allows you to create targeted surveys, collect real-time feedback, and analyze the data with ease, ensuring that every customer voice is heard and accounted for.

Survicate's suite of features simplifies the process of connecting with customers and extracting the insights you need to make data-driven decisions. Whether it's through NPS , customer satisfaction surveys, or user experience research, Survicate provides the clarity and direction required to adapt and excel in a fast-paced market.

For those ready to elevate their customer research, consider giving Survicate a try. Start your journey to clearer insights today with a free 10-day trial of the Business Plan , and experience the full potential of focused customer feedback. Take the step today, and transform the way you connect with your audience.

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Customer research

Understand your customers

Use our customer research software to engage with customers and learn what they need

Connect in new ways

Customer research is foundational to product success. Once you have clarity about what your customers need, you can find innovative ways to solve their problems. Use ideas portals to capture feedback, then deeply engage with your users in new ways. Define your research plan and choose from a variety of methods to gather qualitative and quantitative data. Summarize learnings in a shared space so everyone can benefit. Seamlessly incorporate feedback into your strategic planning process when you use Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Ideas Advanced together .

Reinvigorate customer research

Build customer empathy

Customers often tell you what they need. But the "why" can be harder to discern. You need to learn who your users are, the problems they are trying to solve, and what they actually want. Bring customers together for an online focus group so you can engage in conversation. Launch feedback polls in your ideas portal to proactively ask questions and gather input. These insights help you develop rapport with your customers and put their needs at the center of every decision.

Host an empathy session

Improve the user experience

Find out what customers think while they are actually using your product. Start an open dialogue with your users about a specific feature or area of your application. Your community can interact with you and one another to discuss their needs, share experiences, and suggest potential enhancements. This feedback approach is perfect for gathering insights during beta testing or after a launch — so you can iteratively improve the functionality.

Collect in-app feedback

We are now far more empathetic to our customers' needs. Aha! helps us crystalize what their pain points actually are rather than hypothesizing what we think they want. Shri Iyer Vice president of product management, SimpleLegal

Ready to get started?

Use Aha! Roadmaps with Aha! Ideas Advanced for a complete product management solution that includes innovative new customer research methods

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Top capabilities for customer research, customer success stories.

See how Aha! Ideas and Aha! Roadmaps help Genesys save significant time

Learn how Aha! made sure Enplug could standardize idea capture

Learn how Aha! helped Webflow dig into customer needs

Best practices to help you with customer research, how to get clearer customer feedback.

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Customer Communication Tool: Types, Methods, Uses, & Tools

Effective communication lies at the heart of every business in today’s digital era. With customers expecting prompt responses and personalized interactions, companies continually seek innovative ways to engage with their audience. Enter customer communication tools – versatile platforms designed to streamline and enhance interactions between businesses and their clientele.

A customer communication tool can serve many purposes within modern enterprises. They facilitate seamless interactions across various channels, including email, live chat, social media, etc. By centralizing communication channels into a single platform, businesses can efficiently manage inquiries, feedback, and support requests, regardless of the channel through which they originate.

These tools enable businesses to manage multiple channels, robust customer service platforms, call center software, desk software, live chat software, client communication software, online community software, and virtual meeting software, ensuring a cohesive and efficient approach to customer communications.

Organizations can build trust, loyalty, and advocacy among their customer base through timely responses and personalized engagements. Additionally, by harnessing data analytics and automation capabilities, businesses can gain helpful insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points, enabling them to refine their offerings and strategies accordingly.

What is Customer Communication?

Customer communication guides the interaction between a business and its customers through various channels such as email, phone calls, live chat, social media, and in-person interactions. It encompasses all forms of communication initiated by either party, including inquiries, feedback, support requests, sales transactions, and marketing messages.

Effective customer communication, a key driver of customer satisfaction and loyalty, involves conveying information, listening to customer needs, addressing concerns, and building relationships. It is vital in shaping the overall customer experience and influencing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

Businesses employ various communication strategies and tools to engage with customers, provide assistance, gather feedback, and deliver personalized experiences. By prioritizing clear, timely, and empathetic communication, businesses can build trust, foster loyalty, and differentiate themselves in the competitive marketplace.

What is a Customer Communication Tool?

A Customer Communication Tool is any software or platform designed to facilitate communication between a business and its customers across various channels such as email, live chat, social media, SMS, and more. These tools are instrumental in managing and enhancing customer interactions by providing features like messaging, ticketing systems, analytics, automation, and seamless integration with customer relationship management (CRM) software.

A customer communication tool aims to streamline communication processes, improve response times, personalize customer interactions, and foster strong relationships, driving satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. These versatile platforms enable businesses to manage customer conversations seamlessly across various channels, including email, live chat, social media, and more.

By centralizing communication channels into a unified platform, the customer communication tool ensure that customer inquiries and support requests are efficiently managed and responded to on time. It helps businesses maintain a positive brand image and allows them to capitalize on opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, and resolving issues before they escalate.

Furthermore, customer communication tool enable businesses to track customer behavior and preferences, providing valuable insights to tailor their customer communication efforts effectively. With features like virtual call center integration and advanced analytics, businesses can optimize their support team’s performance and consistently deliver exceptional service.

With features like video conferencing and call center software, the best customer communication tool empower businesses to provide comprehensive support and engagement opportunities, further strengthening customer relationships and driving long-term success.

By harnessing the power of data-driven insights and personalized communication, companies can enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction , ultimately driving growth and success in today’s competitive marketplace.

Types of Customer Communication Tool

Customer communication tool encompass a variety of platforms and technologies designed to manage customer interactions between businesses and customers across different channels. Here are some common types of customer communication tools:

Live Chat Software:

Live chat software enables real-time communication between customers and support representatives via text-based messaging through chat tools. Businesses can embed live chat widgets on their websites or mobile apps to provide instant assistance, answer questions, and resolve issues promptly with live chat software.

Project Management Tools:

Project management tools aid in team collaboration and communication for multiple projects. While primarily used for internal communication, these tools often include features for sharing project updates, assigning tasks, and coordinating workflows, which can indirectly impact customer communication by ensuring the timely delivery of products or services.

Contact Management Tools:

Contact management tools help businesses organize and maintain customer contact information, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and interaction history. These tools typically include features for categorizing contacts, tracking communications, handling customer conversations, and managing customer support process systems.

Email Marketing Platforms:

Email marketing tools allow businesses to create, send, and track email campaigns to engage with customers, deliver promotional offers, and share relevant content. These platforms often feature automation capabilities, segmentation options, and analytics to track team performance and nurture customer communication management.

Social Media Management Tools:

Social media management platforms enable businesses to manage their presence across various social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. These tools streamline publishing, monitoring, and engagement activities, allowing businesses to interact with customers, respond to messages and comments, and track social media metrics.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems:

Customer Relationship Management systems centralized customer data and interactions, providing businesses with a comprehensive view of customer profiles, preferences, and engagement history. These desk software enable businesses to track leads, manage contacts, and automate communication workflows to personalize interactions and measure customer satisfaction.

Helpdesk and Ticketing Systems:

Helpdesk and ticketing systems streamline customer support operations by organizing and prioritizing incoming inquiries, such as email requests, support tickets, or mobile phone calls. These platforms often include features like ticket routing, knowledge bases, and performance analytics to optimize support processes and resolve issues efficiently.

SMS and Mobile Messaging Platforms:

SMS and mobile messaging tools enable businesses to send personalized text messages, notifications, and alerts to customers’ mobile devices. These platforms effectively deliver transactional updates, appointment reminders, and promotional offers, driving engagement and customer retention.

Voice and Video Communication Tools:

Voice and video communication tools facilitate real-time communication between businesses and customers via voice calls, video calls, or conferencing solutions. These platforms are beneficial for providing live support, conducting virtual consultations, hosting remote meetings, enhancing communication effectiveness, and building customer rapport.

Feedback and Survey Platforms:

Feedback and survey platforms enable businesses to collect customer feedback through surveys, polls, or feedback forms. These tools allow businesses to gather insights into satisfaction, preferences, and pain points, enabling them to identify areas for improvement and complete data-driven decisions to enhance the customer experience.

These are just a few examples of the diverse customer communication tools available to businesses today. By leveraging these tools effectively, businesses can optimize their customer communication strategies, build stronger customer relationships, and drive growth and loyalty in competitive markets.

Effective Customer Communication Methods

Effective customer communication methods encompass a range of strategies and tools tailored to meet customers’ diverse needs and preferences. Here are several methods that businesses can employ to enhance their communication with customers:

1.Personalized Email Campaigns:

Crafting personalized email campaigns based on customer data and preferences can improve engagement and conversion rates. Segmenting email lists and delivering relevant content, promotions, or updates can ensure your messages resonate with recipients.

2.Live Chat Support:

Live chat support embedded on your website enables customers to connect swiftly with a representative. This immediate accessibility offers assurance that their concerns will be promptly addressed, elevating their satisfaction levels and bolstering retention rates.

3.Social Media Engagement:

Engaging with customers on social media platforms empowers businesses to build relationships, address inquiries, and gather feedback. By maintaining an active presence and responding promptly to comments, messages, group voicemail messages, and mentions, businesses can demonstrate their commitment to customer service and brand transparency, fostering a sense of empowerment among their audience.

4.Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems:

IVR systems use automated prompts to route incoming calls and provide self-service options for common inquiries. By offering a menu of options and allowing customers to navigate to the appropriate department or service, businesses can streamline the call center software experience and reduce wait times.

5.SMS and Mobile Messaging:

Leveraging SMS and mobile messaging platforms enables businesses to reach customers directly on their smartphones with personalized updates, reminders, promotions, or transactional notifications. These channels offer high open rates and can be particularly effective for time-sensitive communications.

6.Feedback Surveys and Reviews:

Soliciting customer feedback through surveys, reviews, or feedback forms provides valuable insights into their satisfaction levels, preferences, and pain points. By analyzing valuable customer interaction, feedback, businesses can pinpoint areas for improvement and enact changes to elevate the customer experience.

Combining and adapting these customer communication methods to fit your business’s unique needs and audience preferences can cultivate strong customer relationships, drive loyalty, and differentiate your brand in a competitive marketplace.

Uses of Customer Communication Tools

Customer communication tools play a pivotal role across various sectors, aiding businesses in fostering meaningful interactions, addressing inquiries promptly, and cultivating lasting customer expectations. Here’s how these tools are utilized in different industries:

Retail and E-commerce:

In the retail and e-commerce sectors, customer communication tools are essential for providing personalized shopping experiences, managing order inquiries, and offering support throughout the customer journey. Features like live chat support, email marketing, and social media engagement enable retailers to engage with customers in real-time, address concerns, and assist with product selection, ordering, and post-purchase inquiries.

Hospitality and Travel:

Effective communication is vital to delivering exceptional service and ensuring customer satisfaction with hotels, airlines, and travel agencies. Customer communication tools such as reservation management systems, automated booking confirmations, and mobile messaging platforms enable businesses to streamline booking processes, deliver timely updates on travel arrangements, and provide personalized assistance to guests, enhancing their overall experience.

Healthcare:

In the healthcare industry, patient communication tools facilitate seamless communication between healthcare providers and patients, improving access to care and enhancing patient engagement. Appointment scheduling customer communication management software, patient portals, and telemedicine platforms enable healthcare organizations to communicate appointment reminders, share test results securely, and provide virtual consultations, ultimately improving patient outcomes and satisfaction.

Financial Services:

Customer communication tools are integral to the financial services sector for delivering personalized financial advice, managing account inquiries, and facilitating secure transactions. Banking institutions leverage secure messaging, mobile banking apps, and chatbots to provide round-the-clock support, deliver account notifications, and address customer queries regarding transactions, loans, or investment portfolios.

Technology and Software:

In the technology and knowledge base software industry, customer communication tools provide technical support, gather product feedback, and deliver software updates. Helpdesk ticketing systems, knowledge bases, and community forums enable technology companies to provide self-service support options, troubleshoot technical issues, and foster user collaboration, ultimately driving product adoption and customer loyalty.

Regardless of the sector, other customer communication tools empower businesses to deliver exceptional customer experiences, build brand loyalty, and drive growth in a competitive marketplace.

How to Choose Communication Tools to Enhance Customer Experience

Selecting the right customer communication tool is crucial for enhancing the customer experience. Here’s a guide on how to choose the best tools:

Identify Customer Needs:

Understand your customers’ preferences and communication habits. Are they more comfortable with email, live chat, phone calls, or social media? Tailor your customer communication software selection to meet their preferences.

Evaluate Features:

Consider the features offered by each communication tool. Look for functionalities such as real-time messaging, automation, integration with CRM systems, analytics, and multichannel support.

Scalability:

Choose specialized tools that can scale with your business as it grows. Ensure the communication platform can handle increasing customer inquiries and support needs without compromising performance.

Ease of Use:

Opt for intuitive and accessible tools for customers and employees to use. Complex interfaces or convoluted processes can deter customers and hinder effective communication.

Integration Capabilities:

Select tools that seamlessly integrate with your existing systems, such as CRM software, helpdesk, and e-commerce platforms. Integration ensures smooth data flow and enables a unified view of interactions.

Security and Compliance:

Prioritize tools prioritizing security and compliance with regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA, especially when handling sensitive customer information.

Customer Support:

Evaluate the level of the customer service team or customer support team provided by the tool vendor. Ensure that reliable technical support is available in case of issues or emergencies.

Cost Considerations:

Assess the cost of each communication tool, including subscription fees, setup costs, and any extra charges for add-on features or usage limits. Choose the best customer communication tools that balance features and affordability.

Feedback from Users:

Collect feedback from individuals who will be using the communication tools daily. Their insights can provide valuable perspectives on usability, effectiveness, and overall tool satisfaction.

By carefully considering these factors and selecting communication tools that align with your business objectives and customer needs, you can improve the customer experience and drive long-term success.

Best Practices Better Customer Communication

Effective customer communication is essential for building strong relationships and fostering loyalty. Here are some best practices to enhance customer communication:

Active Listening:

Listen attentively to customer inquiries and feedback, demonstrating empathy and understanding. Acknowledge their concerns and validate their experiences before providing solutions or assistance.

Prompt Responses:

Aim to respond to customer inquiries and messages promptly, preferably within a predefined time frame. Quick responses show customers that their concerns are valued and help prevent frustration or dissatisfaction.

Personalization:

Tailor communication to each customer by addressing them by name and referring to previous interactions or preferences whenever possible. Personalized communication shows customers they are valued as individuals, not just as transactions.

Clear and Concise Customer Interactions: 

Ensure that information is communicated clearly and concisely, avoiding jargon or technical language that could confuse customers. Use simple language and provide step-by-step instructions or explanations when necessary.

Multichannel Support:

To meet customers’ preferences, provide support through various communication channels, including email, phone, live chat, and social media. Ensure consistency in messaging and service quality across all channels to provide a seamless experience.

Transparency:

To build trust with customers, be transparent about policies, pricing, and processes. Inform customers about any changes or updates that may impact them, and maintain transparency regarding any limitations or challenges your business encounters.

Proactive Communication:

Anticipate customer needs and proactively communicate relevant information or updates. To keep them informed and engaged, notify customers of order status changes, product recalls, or upcoming promotions.

Feedback Collection:

Promote customer feedback and actively pursue opportunities for improvement based on their experiences. Use surveys, customer review platforms, feedback forms, or post-interaction surveys to gather insights and identify areas for enhancement.

Training and Empowerment:

Provide training and resources to frontline staff to ensure they can effectively handle customer inquiries. Empower employees to autonomously make decisions and resolve issues, as appropriate, to improve the customer experience.

Continuous Improvement:

Regularly review and analyze customer conversations and communication metrics to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement. Use this data to refine communication strategies and processes over time to better meet customer needs.

By implementing these practices, businesses can enhance their customer communication efforts, establish trust and loyalty, and ultimately achieve sustained success.

6 Best Customer Communication Tools for customer support teams

Helpful communication with customers is vital for success. As businesses strive to meet their clientele’s evolving needs and expectations, leveraging the right customer communication software is necessary for perfect customer communication capabilities.

1.QuestionPro:

QuestionPro is a versatile and dynamic customer survey software and feedback platform. It offers businesses a comprehensive suite of tools to gather invaluable insights from their customer base. Companies can manage their data collection efforts to suit their needs and objectives through customizable surveys, polls, and feedback forms.

What sets QuestionPro apart is its robust set of features, including advanced analytics, real-time reporting capabilities, and multichannel distribution options. These features empower businesses to collect feedback, analyze it effectively, and take actionable steps toward improving their products, services, and overall customer experiences.

• Surveys & Feedback.
• Advanced Analytics.
• Customization.
• Multichannel Distribution.
• Integration.

Limitation:

• Advanced features require more effort and resources to be effectively used.

Pricing: Most popular plans start at $99 per month, Team addition starts at $83, with pricing tiers available for businesses of all sizes. Custom pricing options are available for enterprises with specific needs.

Zendesk is a leading customer service software platform offering a comprehensive tool suite to manage and enhance customer interactions across many channels. From traditional email correspondence to real-time live chat support, social media engagement, and telephone assistance, Zendesk provides businesses with the means to effectively address customer inquiries and concerns regardless of the communication medium.

At the heart of Zendesk’s offerings lies its robust ticketing system, which streamlines the process of logging, tracking, and resolving customer issues. Its expansive knowledge base also empowers customers and support agents with readily accessible information and solutions.

• Ticketing System.
• Multichannel Support.
• Knowledge Base.
• Automation.
• Steep learning curve.
• Cost-prohibitive pricing.
• Integration challenges.

Pricing: Pricing starts at around $5-$19 per user per month for the Support Suite, with additional costs for other features like Chat, Talk, and Explore. Custom pricing is available for larger enterprises.

3.LiveChat:

LiveChat is a great live chat desk software solution renowned for effortlessly enabling immediate interactions between businesses and their users. By harnessing the power of text-based messaging, LiveChat empowers enterprises to engage with their audience directly on websites or mobile applications, fostering instant communication and connection.

Its robust features, including chat customization options, visitor tracking capabilities, and in-depth agent analytics, equip businesses with the tools they need to deliver unparalleled customer support experiences. From promptly addressing inquiries to guiding users through purchases, LiveChat enables organizations to elevate customer satisfaction levels while boosting sales conversions.

• Real-Time Messaging.
• Chat Routing.
• File Sharing.
• Canned Responses.
• Visitor Monitoring.
• Limited multichannel support.
• Scalability issues.
• Customization constraints.

Pricing: Starts at $20 per seat per month.

4.Kustomer:

Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform that combines omnichannel support, automation, and data integration to deliver personalized customer experiences. With unified customer profiles, intelligent routing, and actionable insights, Kustomer enables businesses to streamline support operations, resolve inquiries efficiently, and improve customer relations.

Kustomer’s robust automation capabilities revolutionize support operations by automating routine tasks and processes. From simple ticket routing to complex issue resolution, the platform empowers agents to focus on high-value interactions that require human expertise and empathy. It drives operational efficiency and enhances the overall quality of customer service.

• Unified Customer View.
• Omnichannel Support.
• Case Management.
• Collaboration Tools.
• Integrations.
• Customer Insights.
• Implementation complexity.
• Cost considerations.
• Integration limitations.

Pricing: Starts at $89 per seat per month.

5.Mailchimp:

The popular email marketing center software empowers businesses to build, send, and track email campaigns to engage with customers and drive growth. With features like drag-and-drop email builders, audience segmentation, and marketing automation, Mailchimp enables businesses to deliver targeted and personalized email communications that resonate with their audience.

From customizable landing pages and post-campaign analytics to A/B testing and predictive insights, Mailchimp provides a complete suite of solutions designed to optimize every aspect of the email marketing process.

• Email Marketing.
• Audience Segmentation.
• A/B Testing.
• Limited customer support.
• Automation complexity.
• GDPR compliance challenges.

Pricing: Starts at $6.50 per month for Essentials Plan.

Aircall is a cloud-based mobile system designed to manage inbound and outbound calls for modern businesses efficiently. With features like call routing, analytics, CRM, and helpdesk software integrations, Aircall enables businesses to provide professional phone support, collaborate effectively across excellent customer support teams, and track call center performance metrics to improve customer communication strategies.

Whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise, Aircall’s cloud-based infrastructure allows for seamless expansion and customization to meet evolving needs. With Aircall, businesses can enhance their customer communication strategies and future-proof their operations in an increasingly digital and interconnected world.

• Cloud-Based Phone System.
• Call Routing.
• Call Monitoring.
• Voicemail & Recording.
• Integration complexity.
• Call quality issues.
• Limited advanced features.

Pricing: Starts at $30 per user per month.

As technology evolves, investing in the right customer communication tools remains essential for businesses committed to delivering excellent experiences and staying ahead of the curve.

How QuestionPro Can be A Perfect Customer Communication Tool

QuestionPro can be a perfect customer communication tool due to its versatile features tailored for gathering feedback, conducting surveys, and analyzing customer sentiments. With its intuitive interface and customizable survey templates, businesses can easily create surveys to collect valuable customer insights.

Versatile Survey Solutions:

QuestionPro offers versatile customer survey software that allows businesses to gather customer feedback through customizable surveys, polls, and feedback forms.

Real-Time Feedback Collection:

QuestionPro enables businesses to gather real-time customer feedback, empowering them to swiftly address issues and utilize data-driven insights to enhance the customer experience.

Analytics and Reporting:

The platform provides strong analytics and reporting features that allow businesses to analyze customer survey software data, identify trends, and gain actionable insights into customer preferences and satisfaction levels.

Multi-channel Engagement:

QuestionPro supports multi-channel engagement, allowing businesses to reach customers with various channels such as email, mobile, web, and social media, ensuring broader participation and higher response rates.

QuestionPro integrates with popular customer relationship management systems, allowing businesses to centralize relevant customer data and streamline communication workflows, ensuring a seamless and cohesive customer experience.

Customization and Branding:

The robust customer service platform offers extensive customization and branding options, enabling businesses to tailor surveys to match their brand identity and create personalized customer experiences.

Affordable Pricing Plans:

With affordable pricing plans starting at $99 per user per month, QuestionPro offers cost-effective comprehensive solution for businesses of all sizes, making it accessible to startups and large enterprises.

By leveraging the features and capabilities of QuestionPro, businesses can effectively communicate with customers, gather valuable feedback, and enhance the overall customer experience, ultimately driving satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth.

Benefits of a Customer Communication Tool

The benefits of a customer communication tool are numerous and impactful for businesses of all sizes. Here are some key advantages:

Improved Customer Satisfaction:

Practical communication tools allow businesses to address customer inquiries promptly, leading to higher satisfaction levels. By providing timely assistance and personalized interactions, businesses can enhance the overall customer experience.

Enhanced Customer Retention:

Strong communication fosters loyalty and trust among customers, increasing retention rates. By staying connected with customers and proactively addressing their needs, businesses can reduce churn and encourage repeat business.

Increased Efficiency:

Customer communication tools streamline communication processes, enabling businesses to handle inquiries more efficiently. Automation features, such as chatbots and auto-responses, help manage high volumes of requests, freeing up time for support teams to focus on more complex issues.

Better Insights and Analytics:

These top customer communication tools provide valuable insights into customer preferences, behavior patterns, and satisfaction levels. Businesses can better understand their audience by analyzing data collected through multiple communication channels and choosing strategies accordingly.

Cost Savings:

Practical communication tools can reduce operational costs by automating repetitive tasks and optimizing resource allocation. By improving efficiency and productivity, businesses can achieve a more significant ROI on customer service investments.

Competitive Advantage:

Businesses prioritizing communication and engagement frequently surpass competitors in terms of satisfaction and loyalty. These companies can distinguish themselves in the market through exceptional support and personalized interactions and allure new customers.

Investing in a customer communication tool is essential for businesses looking to create better customer relationships, drive loyalty, and thrive in today’s competitive landscape.

Customer communication tools are indispensable for businesses seeking to establish a strong customer journey and gain a competitive advantage. By enabling timely and personalized interactions across various channels, these tools empower enterprises to address customer inquiries promptly, gather valuable feedback, and deliver exceptional support.

Furthermore, customer communication tools measure knowledge base satisfaction, foster loyalty, and drive successful business growth. By prioritizing communication and engagement, businesses can assist customers and draw new ones through positive word-of-mouth and referrals.

Ultimately, investing in a comprehensive customer communication strategy supported by robust tools and technologies is essential for businesses looking to succeed in a dynamic marketplace. By prioritizing customer communication and leveraging the right tools effectively, businesses can build lasting relationships with their customers, drive loyalty, and achieve sustainable success in the long run.

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10 voice of the customer tools to get better feedback

Last updated

8 August 2023

Reviewed by

Jean Kaluza

In this article, you’ll learn about the most important features of dedicated voice of customer tools and see our selection of the 10 most promising options available. There is also a bonus resource—including our top pick for true voice of customer mastery!

• What is voice of the customer (VoC)?

Voice of the customer (or VoC) is a strategy for collecting and analyzing customer feedback and, more importantly, mining it for insights to enhance your customer experience (CX) .

VoC is a streamlined method for learning about your customers:

Needs and desires

Motivations to use your product

Product experiences

Brand perceptions

Behavior and habits

Pain points

To discover all these aspects, you need to employ a multi-stage process of:

Data gathering

Planning or implementation

To accomplish this, most voice of customer tools fulfill several functions:

Feedback management: to funnel communications from various channels into a central database

Customer journey mapping : to graphically show what the customers experience at each stage of their interaction with your company

VoC efforts can become extremely granular by using tools that are pigeonholed into one function or another, for example:

Social media analytics

Real-time response triggers

Glossy feedback reports

Automatic conversation tagging

Depending on your team’s needs, research goals, budget, and resources, you may prefer a voice of the customer tool with more or fewer features.

• Why use VoC software?

Voice of customer tools can help you learn what you’re doing right and what can be improved. The best VoC feedback comes from the audience wielding the biggest impact on your company's success: your current customer base.

Unless a company is carrying out specific prospective market research or elaborate ethnographic studies, voice of the customer tools are most often used as a platform for those people with whom a company has already established relationships. 

Gaining and acting on these insights can help you fulfill countless goals, ranging from basic product improvements to major revenue benchmarks. Businesses are reaping the following rewards by mastering voice of customer tools:

Gaining clear insight into customer sentiments

Creating products and services their ideal customer base loves

Boosting brand recognition while building a reputation for genuine customer rapport

Creating a thriving company culture that aligns with their customers' ideals

Making key business decisions in sync with real-time market demand

Extracting more value from their buyer personas

• 10 voice of the customer tools to maximize customer experience

The heart of any voice of customer research is that it must be universal. This requires seamless integration with multiple channels—as many as your customers use. Further, it must be easily customizable, because VoC data is inherently unique and will constantly evolve.

When trying out the following tools, pay close attention to how much they keep the customer data front and center, rather than the tool itself. In no particular order:

A true titan in the CRM field, HubSpot pioneered many customer journey techniques (not to mention much of the lingo) used today. It's no surprise that HubSpot's diverse range of customer-centric sales tools can accommodate customer feedback in fairly sophisticated ways.

Like any of the tools in this list, allowing external tools to host your VoC data works well if you're already outsourcing a significant portion of your current workflows to the app in question. Those using HubSpot's winning CRM and related tools will likely be happy to let it handle an influx of VoC data.

However, HubSpot isn't built for weighty general research. If you aren't already a dedicated HubSpot user, becoming one just for VoC might not be the most efficient choice for long-term data collection and analysis.

Even if you are, you may commit valuable customer data to HubSpot apps, then realize you need an outside resource anyway. Comparing VoC data to wider, more specialized market research could result in redundant efforts, unless you're already a HubSpot-integration wizard. 

When you find yourself spending more time in the system settings than looking at your customer data, you know it's time to move on.

2. Medallia

Medallia is more specifically made for customer feedback analysis in pursuit of the optimal customer experience. To that end, it has an impressive array of algorithm-based analytics that are well-suited for identifying trends.

It's easy to share your research with others, and Medallia has a useful prioritization function development teams will find useful to improve product features. Some of the other options in this list are weighted more toward customer support.

One of the biggest potential drawbacks of Medallia is that it's made strictly for VoC. That could be a strength, given its huge multichannel integrations. But if your market research includes persona development, market strategy, user testing , in-app data, or anything else outside VoC, you could be facing tricky combinations of additional apps when the time comes to implement your hard-won insights.

3. InMoment

Another CX-optimization suite, InMoment takes VoC research head-on. It was developed specifically with surveys in mind, yet it's still possible to compare your customer research with revenue, sales, in-app, and CRM data.

Another strength is InMoment's in-house AI and collaboration tools, which hold the potential to boost the speed and accuracy of quantitative analysis while bringing departments together on the same tasks. But because it's much more attuned to the needs of developers, product testers, and CX staff, other teams (customer support, sales, etc.) may have less reason to use it except when specifically called to do so.

On the other hand, InMoment's easy info-sharing features alone make it a useful collaboration tool that could give less CX-focused staff reason to use it.

4. Qualtrics

Qualtrics positions itself as a comprehensive experience management (XM) platform. This is a good option when you want to capture live customer data, due to its real-time conversation analytics. Qualtrics (which is actually a suite of tools) also emphasizes natural language processing, including algorithms to identify the most effective time to interact with particular customers.

If VoC is viewed as the total process of data gathering, analysis, and implementation, Qualtrics provides a decent balance of all three, but with a somewhat compartmentalized feel. It also doesn't flex its data-gathering might far beyond customer communications. Perfectly suitable for VoC—less so for other data-intensive needs.

Verint is another CX optimizer, with more of a focus on web services and mobile apps. This gives it an edge on the communication front, where the close relationship between mobile apps and rapid communications is more expected than with other products or channels.

To these ends, Verint includes a suite of real-time listening and guided response tools. Because it's focused on CX, it makes good contextual suggestions that product teams will likely find clear and useful. Verint is also useful for those in customer support or other customer-facing roles, where communication speed is important.

6. SentiSum

With a focus on auto-prioritization and root-cause analysis, SentiSum tries to limit distractions and keep users focused on their goals, not the app itself. SentiSum's approach to natural language processing is to give more consistency and depth and reduce excess. In this way, it rightly bills itself as a high-efficiency tool.

That said, some have reported a consistent need to manually adjust or even correct SentiSum’s machine-learning function. To the extent that's also true of any algorithm-powered tech, it's still efficient with massive data streams, and we'll leave it to you to decide if it's worth the lofty price tag. SentiSum also features extensive language support, which, with its high cost barrier to entry, suggests they're gunning for an enterprise-only niche.

7. AskNicely

Despite its strong emphasis on customer service, this VoC tool isn't just nice for consumers. Users also appreciate its 50+ app integrations and communications efficiency. However, because AskNicely is dedicated to funneling customer feedback and response to customer success teams, there's a bit less here for others. Of course, if customer-facing services are your primary focus, it's highly effective.

With a low learning curve and intuitive interface, Feedier leaves a great first impression. It provides an excellent enterprise-grade experience out of the box, and it's equally polished on the customer and company side (complete with custom branding options).

Feedier also provides a streamlined process for identifying qualified leads in the customer data, which sales teams will love. You can also make the most of Feedier’s incentivized feedback mechanism, where customers can earn upgraded service and other perks.

One issue is that data can be too easily pigeonholed, meaning users may unknowingly create data silos . Feedier also provides highly restricted SMS support, which is a no-go for those using numerous texting channels. In general, Feedier has some drawbacks, such as odd limits on which survey options are accessible at different times.

They'll likely resolve these issues, however, because they've developed a strong reputation for acting on their own VoC data.

9. CustomerGauge

With a solid balance of real-time reporting and usability, CustomerGauge is well-received by its users. Its (initially) easy-to-use UI makes core VoC tasks a snap, but there are some speed bumps when trying to blaze through different features. It can make the app's nuts and bolts more of the focal point than the data itself. Fortunately, CustomerGauge provides excellent support services.

CustomerGauge shines when it comes to website/app optimization by making clear visual connections between feedback and product functions. It's a more developer-friendly option, without detracting from its main focus of customer success .

Granular NPS reporting makes CustomerGauge useful even at the C-suite level, but there are some barriers to full-fledged organization-wide collaboration. For example, there's a noticeable lack of obvious reminders and schedule notifications, making it hard to delegate tasks and manage the broader workflow.

Also, the VoC reporting isn't fully customizable. It can leave you feeling "locked in" to a certain viewing mode, when you want to move data throughout different parts of the platform with ease.

10. MonkeyLearn

Most first-time users are impressed by MonkeyLearn's clean and simple interface. It makes for an easy learning curve, even if the UI tends more toward simplicity than utility. That said, its data visualizations are remarkably easy to understand. Under the hood, MonkeyLearn boasts impressive data-crunching capabilities, and the ability to train custom language models as you see fit is downright innovative.

Like most of the tools previously mentioned, where it leaves users wanting is a nearly unwavering focus on customer feedback—when what companies need most is fewer tools that handle more, not the opposite.

• One tool to rule them all

There is one other way to maximize your voice of the customer strategy—but it involves stepping outside the SaaS merry-go-round and settling on one application to manage all your feedback gathering, data crunching, and reporting needs.

With Dovetail , you'll have voice of customer data automatically interwoven into your workflow. Each department's vantage point converges into a highly adaptable platform, where its intuitive design runs through every mode and function. The result is a highly consistent experience and the shortest learning curves for each unique function.

From insight to ready-to-market product, Dovetail shortens the time between VoC questions and data-driven answers.

• Final thoughts

With any research tool, you can't allow the app to become the centerpiece of your work. An effective voice of customer tool must provide all the following:

Clear, actionable insights from even the deepest data repositories

Clutter-free sharing of all data

Sophisticated (yet silo-free) categorization and tagging

Easy integration of live VoC data with all other research

Versatile reporting functions, with one-click customization

Adaptability to changing workflows via powerful job-sharing and collaboration tools

Automatic customer-journey mapping built around VoC feedback

Functions that serve each department's core needs—from real-time customer support hand-offs to automated lead tagging and beyond

Automation at every turn, including:

Fast and accurate transcription

Real-time conversation analysis

Categorization and topic correlation (e.g., product feedback, usability testing, social media buzz, and so on)

NPS analysis and tagging

It's no longer the nineties when digital product specialization was the only way. Now, some of the most useful business tools are those built for the maximum number of tasks, and with no appreciable loss of niche functionality. But finding that sweet spot requires as much foresight as you expect from your digital toolkit vendor.

• Voice of the customer template

Having done the research, compared the options, and imagined how each one may (or may not) fit your needs … which way do you go?

To get you started faster, we've made one of our most popular customer feedback tools immediately available. With a free Dovetail trial, you'll have access to our voice of the customer template and countless other free survey tools, accessible anywhere there's an internet connection.

With immediate click-and-drag mastery and vast data-crunching prowess, Dovetail can reveal exactly what's shaping your customer's perceptions in a heartbeat.

What is a voice of the customer strategy?

Quite simply, it's the backbone of the most customer-centric product strategy and CX-optimization efforts. Doing it right requires a concerted effort to:

Gather feedback

All three must be automated as much as possible, or you'll be more focused on the details than the takeaways. Voice of the customer tools are not strategies. While the tools can streamline and automate an impressive amount of feedback and analysis—and even provide highly contextual guidance—you must ultimately choose how to act on those insights.

That's why your voice of the customer strategy must start with the easiest and most distraction-free tools, then end with a plan for weaving your VoC insights into your daily operations. It begs the question: how well does your voice of customer tool adapt to your general workflow, rather than the reverse?

How is voice of the customer used?

Acting on your hard-won VoC data is 100% up to you, but you're not on your own. As you apply customer insights, it's best to create a feedback loop where new customer feedback automatically integrates with previous data. Doing so provides a hands-free way to detect shifts in customer behavior as you apply previous VoC insights.

This will reveal how your company's efforts reflect what's going on in your customers' minds and hearts. It may sound too good to be true; but all it takes is streamlining your research with real-time, automated analysis.

Get started today

Go from raw data to valuable insights with a flexible research platform

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6 Areas Where AI Improves CX  

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This article will review each use case and provide examples of popular tools that can help improve your CX.

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Disclaimer: These lists are based on publicly available information and may include vendor websites that sell to mid-to-large enterprises. Readers are advised to conduct their final research to ensure the best fit for their unique organizational needs.

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Pricing: The “lite” plan is available for free. Standard plans start at $140/month for 1000 monthly active users. Enterprise plans are custom-priced.

Google Dialogflow

Google Dialogflow Opens a new window offers a comprehensive development platform that helps to build conversational interfaces such as chatbots, voice bots, and virtual agents using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning .

Pricing: It v aries, as monthly pricing is based on the edition (standard or advanced) and the number of requests made.

Salesforce Einstein Bots

Salesforce Einstein Bots Opens a new window employ AI to automate customer interactions and assist support agents, enabling businesses to offer personalized and efficient customer service across channels. This streamlined approach enhances customer satisfaction and ensures smooth service delivery by providing quick assistance. 

Pricing: $70 for 100 conversations per month, available with Enterprise and Unlimited editions.

Microsoft Azure Bot Service 

Microsoft Azure Bot Service Opens a new window allows enterprises to develop intelligent bots that interact with people through natural language. This tool helps companies to provide assistance, gather information, and perform tasks on behalf of users, streamlining business processes and bolstering productivity. 

Pricing: Microsoft Azure includes unlimited messages in standard channels. Premium channels are also free for up to 10,000 messages/month. Users pay for resources consumed and can build custom packages for an additional fee. 

Oracle Digital Assistant

Oracle Digital Assistant Opens a new window enables businesses to develop and implement conversational interfaces across multiple channels, including websites, mobile apps, and messaging platforms. The platform facilitates the seamless creation of conversational experiences within business applications, supporting text, chat, and voice interfaces. 

Pricing: Users can pay per request ( $0.0232 per request) or select a monthly subscription by the employee ($3 per seat), named users ($6 per seat), or sessions ($275/1000 sessions). Minimum amounts may be required.

Voice recognition technology enables customers to interact with businesses using natural language, eliminating the need for traditional input methods such as typing or clicking. This delivers shorter wait times, provides 24/7 availability, ensures consistency, simplifies personalization, and empowers users to help themselves. Customers enjoy faster access to support, round-the-clock assistance, consistent experiences, personalized interactions, and hands-free convenience.

Source: Fortune Business Insights Opens a new window

Amazon Lex Opens a new window is a fully managed AWS service that develops conversational interfaces using voice and text. It powers Amazon Alexa’s voice recognition capabilities and enables businesses to integrate voice-enabled features into their applications and services.

Pricing: The bot is free (with limits) for the first year. Afterward, the cost per request varies based on the type of request (text or speech) and the number of requests. Custom bot training incurs additional costs.

Google Cloud Speech-to-Text

Google Cloud Speech-to-Text Opens a new window is a powerful speech recognition service that converts audio input into text transcriptions and integrates speech recognition into applications with easy-to-use APIs. It offers high accuracy and supports multiple languages, making it suitable for various applications, including voice-enabled customer service and voice-controlled devices.

Pricing: Per minute ranges between $0.016-$0.024, based on the API version.

IBM Watson Speech-to-Text

IBM Watson Speech to Text Opens a new window , available on the cloud, is a speech recognition service that converts audio into text with high accuracy. It supports multiple languages and can transcribe audio from various sources, such as phone calls, videos, and live streams.

Pricing: Up to 500 minutes per month are free. After that, pricing varies based on the minutes used. Enterprise pricing is available by request.

Apple SiriKit

Apple SiriKit Opens a new window is an iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS framework incorporating Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant. It enables developers to add voice-controlled features to their apps, allowing users to perform tasks and access information using natural language commands. The framework creates a better customer experience and loyalty by simplifying user interactions and offering hassle-free convenience.

Pricing: Free, but requires an Apple Developer Program membership.

Omnichannel support means customers get the same great experience no matter how they reach out, whether through chat, email, phone, or social media. Customers can switch between channels without feeling lost, and businesses can track all their interactions. This is essential for meeting modern consumers’ diverse needs and preferences who expect a seamless and integrated experience across all channels.

Zendesk Opens a new window is a leading customer service software trusted by 200K+ customers that offers omnichannel support solutions, including ticketing, live chat, phone support, and self-service portals. It enables businesses to manage customer interactions across multiple channels from a single interface, ensuring every customer’s consistent and personalized experience. It allows businesses to capture insights and make informed decisions for their customers.

Pricing:  Basic plans start at $19 per agent per month. Plans with access to ticketing, messaging, and AI features start at $55 per agent per month. Enterprise pricing is available on request.

Freshdesk Opens a new window is a cloud-based customer support software with omnichannel support capabilities, including email, chat, phone, and social media integration. It helps businesses streamline customer satisfaction and deliver timely and personalized support across all channels.

Pricing: A free plan is available for up to 10 agents. Monthly fees start at $15 per agent and range up to $95.

Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud Opens a new window is a customer service platform that helps businesses efficiently manage and resolve customer inquiries and issues. It also assists companies in delivering personalized and connected customer experiences across all channels, including email, chat, phone, social media, and messaging apps. Salesforce Service Cloud provides a unified view of customer interactions and enables seamless collaboration among service teams.

Pricing: A free trial is available. Monthly fees start at $25 per user and range to $500. Some features may incur additional costs.

HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub Opens a new window is a customer service software that offers omnichannel support solutions, including ticketing, live chat, phone support, and knowledge base management. With Service Hub, businesses can provide prompt, exceptional, personalized customer support and build lasting customer relationships.

Pricing : Free tools are available for up to five users. Plans vary based on company size and features and range from a monthly fee of $15 per seat up to $130 per seat.

Zoho Desk Opens a new window is cloud-based help desk software designed to create happier customers, empower agents, and foster healthier businesses. It helps companies monitor critical customer service KPIs, gain deeper insights into customer needs, and provide value-driven support.

Pricing: A free plan is available for basic needs. Tiered plans start at $7 per user per month.

According to a BCG survey, 67% of CMOs actively consider generative AI for personalization Opens a new window . This technology drives personalization engines, which analyze customer data to deliver tailored experiences and recommendations. With the help of personalization engines, businesses can anticipate customer needs, provide targeted offers, and create personalized marketing campaigns. This boosts customer engagement, increases conversion rates, and fosters greater satisfaction and loyalty.

Source: 360iresearch

Adobe Target

Adobe Target Opens a new window is a personalization engine that helps businesses deliver targeted and personalized customer experiences across digital channels. It offers advanced segmentation, testing, and targeting capabilities, enabling companies to create and optimize customized campaigns, content, and offers. By delivering personalized experiences, Adobe Target empowers businesses to improve customer engagement, drive conversions, and enhance overall CX.

Pricing: Adobe Target software packages and licensing are custom-built. Pricing varies based on the feature set, the type and number of digital properties involved, and the number of channels in use.

Dynamic Yield

Dynamic Yield Opens a new window is a software platform that focuses on real-time personalization to enhance customer experience. It uses machine learning and predictive analytics to deliver product recommendations and other dynamic content to individual customers. It makes it easier for businesses to optimize interactions across websites, apps, emails, and other digital touchpoints.

Pricing: Potential customers must contact the sales team for a demo or submit an RFI/RFP for pricing information.

Personalization Engine by Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a Personalization Engine Opens a new window tool to help deliver personalized one-to-one experiences to customers across websites, mobile apps, and other digital channels. The platform provides advanced segmentation, real-time personalization, and behavioral targeting capabilities. Businesses can deliver customers with relevant content, offers, and recommendations based on their unique preferences and behaviors.

Pricing: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization is available to enterprises on an annual basis, starting at $108,000 per year.

Acquia Personalization

Acquia Personalization Opens a new window is an add-on for Drupal that can deliver personalized, relevant customer experiences across websites, mobile apps, and other digital channels. It offers no-code personalization, adaptive targeting, and machine-learning-powered content recommendation capabilities, empowering businesses to tailor their messaging and offerings to individual customers in real-time. It also integrates with customer data platforms (CPD) to incorporate real-time data into tailor-made customer experiences.

Pricing: Varies, as this is an add-on for Acquia’s CMS offering.

Sentiment analysis, also called opinion mining, uses natural language processing and text analysis techniques to extract qualitative insights about how customers are feeling or reacting to a topic or brand. These tools analyze text-based information (such as customer feedback, online reviews, and social media posts) to determine the prevailing sentiments or emotional tones expressed within the text. Businesses can more easily analyze customer perceptions, identify trends and patterns, and adjust their products, services, or overall customer experience programs accordingly.

Lexalytics Opens a new window is a text analytics and natural language processing platform that provides business sentiment analysis and data mining solutions. It provides an easy and quick way to determine sentiments from extensive unstructured data. Use cases include social media monitoring, regulatory compliance, robotic process automation, and voice-of-the-customer programs.

Pricing: Pricing varies based on the chosen solution and installation method: on-premises, in the cloud, or within a hybrid infrastructure.

Talkwalker Opens a new window is a consumer analytics platform offering sentiment analysis and social listening solutions that Hootsuite recently acquired. The platform combines data sources on audience demographics, interests, motivations, and other factors to better monitor brand sentiment and analyze social media conversations.

Pricing: Potential customers must contact the sales team for a demo and pricing.

Predictive analytics utilizes historical data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques to forecast future trends, behaviors, and outcomes. A familiar use case of predictive analytics is when your mobile phone suggests what word you are most likely to use next in a text message. This technology can improve your company’s operations by calculating customer lifetime value, finding high-value customers, targeting marketing campaigns, and improving customer retention rates.

IBM SPSS Opens a new window is a software platform for performing advanced statistical analysis, including predictive analytics and modeling capabilities. It is designed to analyze large datasets, build predictive models, and uncover insights that support decision-making. Several add-ons are available, including a modeler, collaboration, deployment services, structural equation modeling, and an analytic server.

Pricing: Flexible, including monthly subscriptions and perpetual licenses, with options like Base ($3,830/user), Standard ($8,440/user), Professional ($16,900/user), and Premium ($28,200/user). Discounted rates for students and educators are also available.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics Opens a new window is a web analytics platform that provides predictive analytics and business insights. It helps businesses understand their customers across devices and platforms. It also allows companies to track website traffic, analyze user behavior, and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Using Google Analytics, businesses can predict customer preferences, identify opportunities for improvement, and optimize CX strategies to boost user experience and drive conversions.

Pricing: Google Analytics is available for free. Additional features may be available through Google Marketing Platform, an enterprise-level solution.

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI Opens a new window allows users to connect to and visualize data. It also integrates with Microsoft 365 to deliver real-time insights within the apps themselves. Capabilities include descriptive and predictive analytics to identify trends and forecast future outcomes.

Pricing: Free accounts are available. Advanced licenses start at $10 per user per month, or it can be bundled with access to Microsoft Fabric.

Integrating AI technologies in CX transforms how businesses engage with customers. Companies can deliver personalized experiences, simplify customer interactions, and drive loyalty by utilizing advanced AI tools. With the right AI-driven strategies and solutions, businesses can stay ahead of the competition and thrive in today’s digital landscape.

Do you use AI technologies to enhance customer experience in your organization? Let us know on LinkedIn Opens a new window , Facebook, Opens a new window and X Opens a new window . We would love to hear from you!

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