Every business relies on actionable data to make crucial decisions. Without quality data, everything from operations to marketing and promotions to managing your supply chain is a guessing game. It’s all too easy to make poor decisions on where to allocate money and resources if there isn’t reliable, real-time data.

When it comes to growing and maintaining your customer base, it’s vital to know consumer trends, buying behavior, sentiment about your brand, and how to build the best connections with your customers.

Consumer insight tools help companies gain an intricate view of what matters the most to consumers. Technology is making it possible to learn more and more, putting together seemingly unrelated data points to paint a larger picture. This helps companies optimize their websites, on-page text, product listings, and buying experiences to provide visitors with the experience they prefer.

We’ll take a look at a wide range of consumer insight tools and how they help businesses stay the course with their effective practices and make improvements that align with consumer sentiment.

The Significance of Consumer Insight Tools

Companies rely on quality metrics to drive critical operational decisions. Data is used to streamline production, improve tracking for inventory and connections with vendors, and in numerous processes that help a company run more efficiently. However, many online businesses fail to take advantage of metrics vital to every company’s success: Customer experience (CX).

Customer insight tools are necessary for understanding your site’s strengths and weaknesses throughout a user’s journey. Without that data, you may never know what you’re doing right to keep long-term visitors coming back or why you’re losing sales.

With quality insights on consumers, you gain detailed intel to help analyze and optimize your site, addressing what consumers find lacking in their customer experience. In the end, you’ll see improved sales conversions. 

Criteria for Selecting Consumer Insight Tools

It’s easy for an online business to get overwhelmed by the number of tools for customer insights, and some tools are much better than others. As a general rule, you want accurate data about your customers’ spending habits, online preferences, and, equally important, what they don’t like.

Gaining insight into these key areas helps you understand what drives people to purchase so you can better predict what will lead to future sales. 

Why Does Real-Time Data Matter?

Capturing real-time data is more valuable than only relying on general online buying patterns—it informs on how someone’s experience is while they are in the moment. This is when key metrics are the most relevant.

Additionally, people’s purchasing habits change over time. For instance, different demographics may have different priorities, like an easy checkout experience or sustainability practices.

Being consistent in collecting consumer data means you remain current with trends as they come and go, whether they change over many years or have an abrupt shift. 

The Importance of Customization and Easy Navigation

Online shoppers like personalization features on sites they plan to visit more than once. Making it possible for users to customize their preferences helps them enjoy their shopping experience. As a result, they’re more likely to come back often, increasing your chances to make a sale.

For the same reasons, it’s essential to pay attention to the ease of navigating your site. Making the site intuitive reduces navigational pain points that diminish the sales potential.

How Do Quality Consumer Insight Tools Help You Scale Your Business?

Competition is fierce. To remain visible online and win over new customers, you have to stay on top of what your customers want. Consumer insight tools help you properly apply your resources where they will positively impact customers the most.

Top Consumer Insight Tools for 2024

Now, let’s delve into the tools you can use to unlock all of those important data points that help you make better connections with your customers while also helping you attract more new visitors to convert.

Bizrate’s Insights Solutions 

Bizrate Insights provides you with an extensive range of consumer insight tools that let you know what your customers are thinking. Just as importantly, they also provide feedback from the exact moments in the buying journey that matter most.

Online Buyer Survey

Bizrate Insights’ Online Buyer Survey gives you Voice-of-Customer (VoC) feedback that tells you how to better serve customers. Our proprietary two-part survey captures customer data at the point of sale (POS), triggered by their completion of a purchase at checkout. It also captures data during post-fulfillment to gauge satisfaction three days later.

Seller Rating Widget

The Seller Rating Widget takes the data you gather from our surveys and syndicates it to search engines to increase your presence and build public trust.

VitalSigns

VitalSigns provides deep analytics from your customer survey results to help you track your performance data, all in real time.

Consumer Panel

Our proprietary Consumer Panel is a group of 2.5 million verified, validated consumers who provide customized data specific to your desired demographics, geographics, technographics, and ethnographics.

Site Abandonment Survey

You learn just as much from your mistakes. In this case, you can’t fix what you don’t know. Our Site Abandonment Survey tells retailers why customers are abandoning your eCommerce site so you can turn a customer about to exit their cart into an opportunity to save the sale.

TrueExit™

Implement TrueExit™ throughout your eCommerce site for intelligent triggers focused solely on site abandonment.

Google Trends

Google Trends offers free consumer insight data from Google searches, helping you enhance the customer’s experience using your site.

Hotjar

Hotjar creates a range of tools in its product experience platform. You can learn about consumer behavior from surveys, website heatmaps that let you see where you lose buyer attention, and other powerful tools.

Mixpanel 

Mixpanel is a product analytics tool that helps you understand the customer’s journey, providing:

• Customized formulas for analyzing metrics
• Intelligent algorithms that account for anomalies with specific user characteristics
• Easy time comparisons to gauge your metrics between now and a previous period

Zendesk

Zendesk aims to help businesses improve customer support, providing companies with data aggregation, customer reporting and analytics, and other great features of their Zendesk Explore that help improve agent and representative productivity.

Mention.com 

Monitor over 1 billion sources across the web to “listen” to your audience and manage your social media presence. Mention.com helps you find new customers, engage with your audience, and learn about valuable trends as they occur.

Kissmetrics  

Kissmetrics provides powerful web analytics that optimize conversion rates. They offer event analytics, multi-channel A/B testing, and numerous integrations.

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a search listening tool that provides data about the questions people ask in search results. This shows what people are asking about specific keywords so you know precisely what people care about the most. It also quickly identifies new trends before your competition does.

Birdie.ai

Birdie.ai is a platform that offers Insights-as-a-Service (IaaS). This AI-based tool gives users a centralized place to study user feedback and gather evidence, making easier collaboration easier with teams around a single source of important consumer data.

PureSpectrum

PureSpectrum provides end-to-end market research with online surveys, respondent-level scoring, automated fielding, and powerful analytics from its robust metrics.

Google Analytics

You know the search engine, but you might not realize how much information Google makes available to businesses about customer insights. Google Analytics provides:

• Data about customer interaction on different apps
• Analytics that use machine learning (ML) and predict future actions
• The ability to optimize your marketing performance with other integrations
• Custom insights you can use to track changes in data that are relevant to your business

Qaultrics 

Qualtrics offers a range of tools to help you find gaps and pain points you can improve upon. Their software helps reduce friction in your customers’ buying journey. They also provide research and brand tracking tools that let companies track metrics specific to their brand, online presence, and reputation.

Pew Research Center

Pew Research Center provides a wide range of data that includes:

• Downloadable microdata datasets
• Roper iPoll survey questions and responses
• Data from nearly 600,000 international interviews on numerous topics
• The Religious Landscape Survey (RLS) of religious affiliation across all fifty states
• The Political Typology Quiz
• And more

U.S. Census Bureau

The U.S. Census Bureau provides interactive applications that allow you to gather statistics from different surveys, data on consumer expenditures, and population surveys. The Census Survey Explorer helps small businesses find the most relevant data for their searches.

Statista

Statista offers an entire suite of insight tools that include consumer surveys, DIY analysis for heat mapping and targeting groups, a brand profiler to build KPIs on brand awareness and loyalty, and more.

Think with Google Research Tools

Think with Google is a suite of tools aiming at helping marketers in several areas of research, including:

• Consumer Insights for uncovering data about consumer interactions with brands
• Google BrandLab, which provides quantitative consumer data
• YouTube Analytics and Google Consumer Surveys for capturing focus group data
• Find My Audience, which is designed to help businesses better understand what customers are looking for
• Google Trends, which helps marketers gauge search behavior with real-time trends

Challenges and Solutions in Consumer Insights

Businesses often suffer from too little data about their customers and website visitors. But they also face the opposite problem: Too much data. One of the challenges today is knowing what to do with the analytics and customer feedback you receive.

Similarly, businesses often get lost trying to integrate their data into a platform, or several platforms, where they can gain meaningful and actionable insights. Without properly capturing data and knowing how to analyze it or even where to load it, marketers and business owners find themselves at a loss for how to interpret customer data.

The Solution: Bizrate Insights—A Leader in Site User Surveys

Powerful analytics tools help companies put their customer feedback to work for them. With a unified platform like Bizrate Insights, companies automatically collect the most valuable data at the most opportune points in the customer’s journey.

Real-time analytics and automated processes help companies avoid missed opportunities without allowing time to lapse and that data to become irrelevant.

Bizrate Insights provides:

• Unlimited customer surveys
• Deep analytics on customer behavior
• VoC feedback
• The industry’s best survey completion rate

Build strong connections with your customers and improve their experience. Get started today!