You can even use these consumer insights to make informed decisions about future products and directions, or even understand where your competitors are failing to meet a need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Choosing a customer insights platform can be challenging. Many older and established companies already have workflows and measurement\/reporting tools in place. For new companies and startups, it can be hard to know where to begin<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read on for a comprehensive guide to the best customer insight platforms and how to select one for your business.<\/p>\n\n\n A customer insight platform, or CIP, is a tool that helps you collect, store, and report on the behavior and sentiment of your customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It might be made up of multiple elements, including:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The more information you gather about the customer journey, the easier it is to proactively meet customers\u2019 needs. This leads to more successful sales and marketing efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The best CIPs give you access to reliable, accurate data that helps shape your company\u2019s direction in the marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n We already mentioned that there are many different ways to gather and assess customer insights. Here\u2019s a quick summary of those methods:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The best CIP for you will depend on the kind of reporting and insights you want to gather. Often, the best method for any business is to use multiple tools to assess the customer journey.<\/p>\n\n\n Google Analytics recently evolved from Universal Analytics to GA4. Both platforms offer deep insights into the customer journey when a user lands on your site. You can track visitors, page views, common entrance and exit pages, and more. Insights like time on page and bounce rate help you understand the effectiveness of your website and optimize the user experience (UX).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here are some benefits of GA4:<\/p>\n\n\n\n GA4 is a powerful tool, but it only measures the way visitors interact with your website. This can help you assess your marketing efforts and improve conversions by optimizing the user experience, but it doesn\u2019t give you deeper qualitative insights into how consumers feel about the actual product or service you\u2019re selling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most effective users of GA4 inspect the various reporting views it offers and look at reactive data to prove or disprove theories about their customers. This is most effective when you pair the insights from Google with insights from a direct-source CIP that measures customer sentiment, like PickFu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A bonus tip for Google Analytics users is to also leverage Google Trends to see how consumer research is evolving in your industry. You can also use Google Trends to help determine how to intercept your target audience in their journey and guide them back towards your product.<\/p>\n\n\n Adobe Audience Manager enables you to gather anonymized customer data that you can use to inform business decisions. It provides customer profiles and segments for a range of users while complying with privacy regulations and legislation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Using Adobe Audience Manager, you can track the full customer journey with important insights into their web usage and which touchpoints they engage with the most along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n PickFu (the site you\u2019re on right now!) lets you ask direct, pointed questions to a network of over 15 million real customers across 90+ audience segments. This means you can approach the exact demographic you want to know more about and ask them clear questions about your product, service, or brand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These insights allow you to fine-tune your sales messaging or marketing efforts, and even assess the performance of the products you offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, you might want to validate a new accounting service you\u2019re thinking of offering. Your product team has an idea of what the pain points for expense reporting are, but you need to verify if the solution they offer will be effective. With PickFu, you could build a survey in just a few clicks that asks your target audience how they gather and sort receipts, and your product team can use the feedback to build the first version of the new service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PickFu is a powerful tool for consumer insights because:<\/p>\n\n\n\n PickFu makes it simple for any business to rapidly validate and create products or services and optimize their effectiveness in the marketplace. Survey participants provide fast, high-quality feedback, giving you valuable and reliable data to use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You even get reports powered by AI that help assess the keywords most respondents<\/a> use. These analytics tools provide clear, structured insights into customer needs and sentiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PickFu doesn\u2019t offer website analytics or social media tracking, but it does offer a suite of API and integration tools that let you merge client surveys into other aspects of your business, including your customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and customer support tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sign up to try your first PickFu survey free<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n Survey Monkey is another way to access customer feedback through direct contact. There are free versions for those businesses who only do occasional outreach. Its pricing grows exponentially for more advanced features, including data visualization, reporting, and integrations with existing market research tools and CRMs. If you’re interested in SurveyMonkey alternatives<\/a>, check out the linked article!<\/p>\n\n\n Many businesses already use Hootsuite to schedule social media posts and view performance. But Hootsuite also tracks brand mentions and sentiment across social media and delivers important reporting and insights through its paid products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This means you can see who is mentioning your brand, product, or service, see when they\u2019re mentioning it, and report on the customer sentiment. These tools are great because they:<\/p>\n\n\n\n With social media listening tools, you get a sense of the organic conversations that involve your business without probing for those answers. The main drawback is that a lot of these insights are reactive \u2013 they only show you the response to things you\u2019ve already done, and don\u2019t help assess future plans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hootsuite also reports on social media analytics like engagement and reach. Engagement data such as shares, comments, or reactions are useful because they help show you how successful a specific message or CTA is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Using social media to assess customer satisfaction and intent is one way to get a higher-level overlook of your performance, which you can then tie to more direct and personal insights for a holistic view of the customer experience. The reporting automation features of Hootsuite make it handy for rapidly assessing consumer sentiment.<\/p>\n\n\n Sales reports can do more than inform your bottom line. Smart businesses use tools like Salesforce to track and report on sales trends using their own consumer data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A use case for this might include changing a subscription model or pricing plan. If you notice that customers abandon one plan in favor of another, or see that customers consistently move away at a certain point in their journey with your solution, that can help you come up with ideas for a new customer retention strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Salesforce is a good option for a CIP because:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00b7 It uses data from inside its native CRM system<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00b7 It provides rapid and clear reports<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00b7 It uses automation and machine learning to quickly assess sales data<\/p>\n\n\n\n After-sales insights are reactive by nature, but these customer analytics help drive business decisions that affect your existing client base. Using sales data lets you produce real-world case studies that are valuable for sales, marketing, product, and even your accounting teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Strategically applying the valuable insights available in your own sales data means your business decisions are based on real customer behavior. This makes for more accurate forecasting and can help improve customer loyalty.<\/p>\n\n\n Mixpanel provides a a deeper understanding of customer interactions with your products and features by helping you visualize patterns in product usage. This tool makes it easy to trace product adoption and identify which consumers will use which features and when.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The features that drive the most customer engagement are likely to be the ones that lead to the most business growth, and Mixpanel aids the decision-making process by helping combine your data sources into one report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mixpanel also lets you add consumer profiles and group the analytics tools into a convenient dashboard, so your in-depth insights are accessible and readable.<\/p>\n\n\nWhat is a customer insight platform (CIP)?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n
\n
Techniques for gathering customer insights<\/h2>\n\n\n
\n
Best customer insight platforms<\/h2>\n\n\n
Best for web analytics: Google Analytics (GA4)<\/h3>\n\n\n
![\"GA4](\"https:\/\/blog.pickfu.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Random-GA4-account-with-data-970x494.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n
Honorable Mention: Adobe Audience Manager<\/h4>\n\n\n
Best CIP for Customer Sentiment: PickFu<\/h3>\n\n\n
![\"Pickfu](\"https:\/\/blog.pickfu.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Screenshot-2023-10-11-at-9.10.31-PM-970x607.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n
Honorable mention: Survey Monkey<\/h4>\n\n\n
Best CIP for social media reporting: Hootsuite<\/h3>\n\n\n
![\"hootsuite-landing-page-screenshot-above-the-fold\"](\"https:\/\/blog.pickfu.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/hootsuite-landing-page-screenshot-above-the-fold-970x430.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n
Best CIP for sales insights: Salesforce<\/h3>\n\n\n
![\"Salesforce-landing-page-screenshot-above-the-fold](\"https:\/\/blog.pickfu.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Salesforce-landing-page-screenshot-above-the-fold-Medium.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nHonorable mention: Mixpanel<\/h4>\n\n\n
Optimize your customer insights platform<\/h2>\n\n\n