20 Best Customer Research Tools in 2024

Ever feel like you're guessing what your customers want? Stop guessing, start asking questions. Customer research is your not-so-secret weapon. It's all about diving deep into what makes your customers happy — from the casual browsers to die-hard fans. This isn't about throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. It's about smart, targeted insights that tell exactly what your customers crave, fear, and ignore.

Why does this matter? Because when you know what your customers want, you can give it to them. And not just anything, but the stuff they’ve been dreaming about.

Customer research lets you cut through the noise, zero in on what works, and ditch what doesn’t. Ready to make your business everyone's go-to? Reading this guide is a great starting point. Let’s get down to business and start making decisions that hit the mark every time.

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Benefits of a customer research tool

When you engage in customer research, you gain valuable consumer insights crucial for tailoring your products and services to meet market demands. Customer research is conducted to identify customer segments, needs, and behaviors of target market. This is very beneficial for strategies aiming to improve relationships and customer loyalty.

By understanding consumer behavior, you can make data-driven decisions, which typically lead to higher satisfaction rates and increased loyalty among your customer base. How does this work? Identify what people want and what resonates with your target audience, and then you can improve a product or optimize messaging for better conversion rates.

Here's a complete list of benefits you can get from valuable insights about your customers:

• Enhanced understanding of customer needs: Market research allows you to uncover customers' preferences and pain points, allowing for better product development and service improvements.
• Informed decision-making: Armed with market data, your choices are no longer based on assumptions. Customer research tool enable you to perform market analysis, leading to more strategic and effective business decisions.
• Competitive analysis and understanding: Gaining deep knowledge of consumer behavior provides a competitive edge. You're able to anticipate market trends and react quicker than competitors.
• Effective marketing: With a clear understanding of your customer demographics and psychographics from market research, your marketing efforts become more targeted and, thus, more effective.
• Increased customer retention: When customers see their feedback implemented, it fosters a sense of community and belonging, often resulting in higher retention rates.
• Risk reduction: Testing products or concepts before a full-scale launch can mitigate risks. Identify potential issues early on, saving time and resources.

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By integrating customer research and market research into your strategy, you position your business to satisfy your customers better while optimizing your operations and marketing initiatives for more promising outcomes.

Interested in learning more about customer research? Check out our article about customer research methods, which includes more details about customer data, types of customer research, and interpretation of the results.

Types of customer research tools

Customer research tools are essential to understand your target audience's needs, preferences, and behaviors. These tools range from direct feedback mechanisms to more passive observation techniques and online market research tools.

Curious which one you need? Let's take a look at the available options.

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Surveys and questionnaires

You can gather vast amounts of qualitative and quantitative data directly from customers using surveys and questionnaires.

They are particularly effective across different stages of the user journey. For example, during sign-up or on your website, you might use questions like "How did you hear about us?" for a deeper understanding of marketing attribution sources.

In the consideration phase, you can run pricing research or ask your leads, "What factors are most important to you when choosing [product/service]?" This helps identify critical decision-making criteria.

Once the purchase is made, questions such as "Are you satisfied with your purchase and why?" or running NPS and CSAT surveys can help to gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty.

There are many more opportunities, and now you can leverage AI-supported tools to generate surveys based on research ideas or particular goals. These tools enable businesses to gather large volumes of data efficiently, identifying trends and customer preferences, which inform product development, marketing strategies, and customer service improvements.

Tailoring questions to each user journey stage ensures relevant insights, guiding strategic decisions and enhancing all customer experience metrics. Learn more about AI survey tools from our guide.

Social media monitoring tools

Social media monitoring tools allow you to track what's being said about your brand across various channels. Social media monitoring is indispensable for researchers seeking to understand customer perceptions and behaviors in real time.

You can uncover unfiltered customer opinions and emerging trends by tracking mentions, hashtags, and conversations about your brand or industry across platforms.

Monitoring can reveal how and where potential users discover products or help to identify what influences user preferences.

Sentiment analysis of social media feedback and continuous identification of market trends can inform user satisfaction and identify areas for improvement. This approach offers a treasure trove of qualitative data, enabling a deeper understanding of the user journey and facilitating the design of experiences that truly resonate with the target audience.

Analytics and data analysis platforms

Finally, analytics and data analysis platforms are crucial for examining customer behavior and spotting recurring tendencies. These platforms range from web-based analytics like Google Trends, which provides insight into search patterns and popularity, to more comprehensive data analysis tools that synthesize various forms of customer data to draw actionable insights.

You can track user actions from initial contact to post-purchase behavior, identifying drop-off points and opportunities for optimization. For instance, analysis might focus on which channels drive the most traffic, using metrics like page views or social media referrals.

You can investigate time spent on product pages or the number of return visits to indicate user interest. After purchase, data on repeat usage or customer support requests can provide insights into user satisfaction and loyalty.

This comprehensive view allows you to make data-driven decisions, tailor user experiences, and effectively measure changes' impact on user behavior.

20 best customer research tools

When searching for the best customer research tool, you have diverse options. These research tools can provide valuable data and insights into your customer base, helping you to understand their preferences and behaviors better.

Let's look for the best customer research tool to help you get quality market data.

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Survicate

Survicate is a comprehensive customer research tool designed to streamline the process of gathering and analyzing customer data across multiple channels.

It offers a range of features, including AI-powered surveys and survey templates such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES), among others.

You can utilize Survicate to deploy surveys via email, web, in-product, in-app or direct links, ensuring they can reach customers at various touchpoints.

The platform's analytics capabilities allow for in-depth insights, including advanced result filtering, data export and AI categorization. You can connect survey feedback to your tool stack (CRMs, marketing automation tools, research tool, or data analytics platforms to segment customers and tailor your future campaigns).

Survicate is particularly useful for conducting market research, measuring user experience, and collecting user feedback, which can inform product development, customer service improvements, and overall business strategy.

Features:

• Multiple distribution channels
• AI-powered surveys and analysis
• Data export
• Around 30 integrations with CRMs, Product analytics, communication platforms and other third-party tools
• Feedback Hub

Here's an example of an NPS survey you can run with Survicate:

SurveyMonkey

Suitable for creating and distributing customer surveys. Survey Monkey supports multiple use cases such as customer research, website feedback or employee engagement.

Thanks to real-time insights, you can use all the data immediately. This tool also offers various integrations, making access to data and further segmentation easier.

Despite the flexibility of use cases this tool supports, some users find it difficult to fully customize the survey and apply a branded experience. This is crucial if you aim to launch a website or in-product surveys that look reliable and encourage more people to submit their data or feedback.

Survey Monkey might be a better fit for organizations with bigger budgets; however, if you're looking for more flexibility in pricing, you might want to look for better options.

‍Features:

• Multiple distribution channels
• Data export
• SurveyMonkey Audience
• Multilingual surveys

Typeform

Typeform enables the creation of interactive surveys and forms to engage with your audience. Typeform is an online form builder that you can use to collect customer data. Those surveys can be shared via a link.

Conversational forms help to provide respondents with a smooth customer experience. However, if you aim to collect market data from the website or inside your product, you won't be able to achieve that with this research tool. Micro surveys in the form of widgets or smaller pop-ups might be better and not as intrusive while users are performing a specific action.‍

Features:

• Link surveys
• Customizable design
• Logic settings
• Custom domain

Qualtrics

A tool for in-depth market research and customer experience feedback.

Its core features include survey creation, distribution, and analytics tools that enable users to conduct in-depth customer experience management, employee experience assessments, and product feature research.

With Qualtrics, you can collect customer insights, pricing research, or Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge customer loyalty and learn more about your target audience. It allows for various use cases, such as deploying exit interviews to understand employee turnover or conducting market research to identify consumer preferences and trends.

This market research tool is an advanced and robust platform that benefits larger companies. However, their pricing can be a roadblock in some companies' implementation of this tool.

Qualtrics might be complicated for some users, especially regarding their advanced analytics capabilities. If you're counting on budget-friendly and effortless onboarding, there might be better solutions than Qualtrics.‍

Features:

• Website and mobile app feedback
• Customer Journey Optimization
• Complex reporting and analysis
• AI-text analysis

UXCam

This mobile session recordings and heatmaps tool lets you empathize with your customers on their user journey.

With behavioral data, you can get closer to your customers by seeing what they are going through. UXCam provides actionable insights and can help with data visualization and identifying what is making users drop off from their customer journey.

This is great market research software for all researchers and product managers aiming to build better applications, attracting more users and retaining them for longer.‍

Features:

• Session recordings and heatmaps
• Dashboards with automatically generated reports
• Customer journey funnels

You can use UXCam integrations and connect tools such as Survicate to improve data quality. This will let you use customer survey data to segment and analyze customer behavior to understand your target audience better.

Smartlook

Smartlook is a powerful analytics solution that offers qualitative insights into user behavior, making it an essential tool for customer research. With features like session recordings and heatmaps, Smartlook allows businesses to understand how users interact with their websites and applications.

By watching real user sessions, companies can identify usability issues, uncover obstacles within the user journey, and discover areas for improvement. The heatmaps provide a clear, aggregated view of where users click, move, and scroll, highlighting the elements of a page that attract the most attention.

In Smartlook, you can segment recordings based on specific user actions or events. This segmentation enables focusing on particular aspects of the customer experience, such as how users complete a purchase or react to new features.

Additionally, Smartlook's funnels help identify where users drop off, allowing for targeted optimizations to improve conversion rates.‍

Features:

• Session recordings
• Heatmaps
• Funnels
• Integrations with Salesforce, Survicate, Intercom, Slack and many more

FullStory

FullStory is a digital intelligence platform that provides businesses with a deep understanding of their customer experiences online. It offers features like session replay, which allows you to watch recordings of user sessions to pinpoint where users struggle or disengage, and heatmaps, which visually represent where users click and interact most on your site.

These features are valuable to customers and optimize the user journey. FullStory's capabilities extend to detailed analytics, enabling the identification of trends and measurement of conversion funnels to understand the paths that lead to customer success or drop-off.

Similarly, as with UXCam, you can connect your account to customer insights with Survicate integration.‍

Features:

• Session replays and heatmaps
• Dashboards and conversion tracking
• User segments

Custify

Custify is a customer success software tailored for SaaS businesses, focusing on fostering customer relationships and reducing churn.

It equips teams with a 360-degree view of the customer lifecycle, providing insights into user behavior and engagement. Key features of Custify include health scores, which predict churn risk, and playbooks for automating customer success workflows.

By analyzing data from Custify you can identify trends in different customer segments.

You can derive insights from data and use them in customer success and marketing strategies to improve conversions, retention and loyalty.

Features:

• Product adoption, customer lifecycles and usage
• Alerts
• Customer health score
• Automations and workflows

Intercom

Intercom is an AI-powered communication platform that plays a pivotal role in customer research by facilitating direct user interactions. You can utilize Intercom for real-time chat and targeted messaging and enrich your account with custom properties and customer profiles.

With Intercom, you can easily segment your audience and discover more about your customers. The platform's ability to integrate with other tools allows for enriching customer profiles and collecting comprehensive feedback.

Thanks to that, you can combine customer data with what they are discussing with your support team to understand their point of view better. This approach also allows you to send follow-ups and ask additional questions.‍

Features:

• Customer service inbox
• Integrations with ticket management and data platforms
• Chatbots
• Email communication and workflows

HubSpot

HubSpot serves as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that is effective for customer research, providing you with data to inform your strategies. The platform's contact management system creates a centralized database that captures detailed interactions and customer behaviors.

This allows for enhanced customer understanding and segmentation, which are critical for targeted marketing efforts and personalized customer experiences.

With HubSpot, you can track the entire customer journey and pinpoint critical touchpoints. The platform's automated data entry and reporting capabilities provide real-time insights into customer preferences and trends, which can drive product development and content creation.

Additionally, HubSpot's integration with various marketing tools allows for comprehensive research campaigns, including email surveys and feedback forms.

You can gain a deep understanding of their target audience by leveraging HubSpot's analytics and built-in dashboards.‍

Features:

• Hubs for Sales, Marketing, Service, Operations, CMS and Commerce teams
• Automated workflows
• Custom dashboards and reports

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email marketing platform that can be used in customer research.

You can use this tool to send targeted communication and collect insights by embedding feedback forms with Survicate and Mailchimp integration.

The platform's analytics provide a clear understanding of engagement metrics, helping to understand what works and what can be improved. Using Mailchimp for customer research can help businesses build stronger relationships with their audience, tailor their offerings, and make data-driven decisions to drive growth and improve customer experience.‍

Features:

• Email automation
• Customer segmentation
• Analytics and reporting

Jira

Jira, widely recognized as issue and project tracking software, can also be valuable in customer research, especially in tech companies.

Thanks to tracking issues in Jira, you can evaluate the most common problems your customers face and what might discourage them from your brand. Jira's reporting tools provide visual representations of progress and bottlenecks.

Integrating with data analysis and survey tools further enhances Jira's utility in customer research, allowing for a seamless flow of information between platforms. By utilizing Jira in customer research, organizations can maintain an organized repository of customer insights that contributes to continuous improvement and customer-centric development.

Additionally, you can use Jira Confluence and Trello to collaborate on content and research projects with your team. This should make it easier to track progress, manage stakeholders and timelines.

Features:

• Reports about project progress and raised issues
• 3000+ apps and integrations

Customer.io

Customer.io is an automated messaging platform that can be a significant asset in customer research. It enables businesses to send targeted messages based on customer behavior, which can be leveraged to collect valuable market research data.

By setting up behavior-driven campaigns, you can reach out to customers at critical moments in their journey to gather feedback or conduct Customer.io surveys. This real-time engagement ensures that the insights collected are relevant and timely.‍

Customer.io's segmentation capabilities allow you to tailor their inquiries to specific user groups, enhancing the data's relevance and accuracy. The platform's analytics features clearly show how customers interact with the messages, offering insights into their preferences and behaviors. These data points can be used to refine user personas, improve customer experiences, and inform product development.

Moreover, integrating Customer.io with other data tools and services means that all customer interactions and feedback can be centralized, making it easier for research teams to analyze and act upon the insights gained.‍

Features:

• Visual workflow builder
• Audience segments
• Profile attributes
• Nested data

Salesforce

Salesforce is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) platform that provides extensive tools for customer research. It enables you to gather a 360-degree view of their customers by collecting data from various touchpoints, such as sales interactions, marketing campaigns, and customer service engagements.

Salesforce's powerful analytics and reporting tools help uncover trends and patterns in customer behavior, preferences, and feedback, essential for making data-driven decisions.

The platform's segmentation capabilities allow for detailed analysis of different customer groups, facilitating personalized and targeted research efforts. Moreover, Salesforce's integration with third-party survey tools like Survicate and its feedback modules can help directly capture customer insights.

By leveraging Salesforce in customer research, companies can improve their understanding of current customers and predict future needs and trends, enabling them to stay ahead in the market and maintain a competitive edge.‍

Features:

• Lead and opportunities management
• AI customer data analysis
• Customer 360 view
• AppExchange 

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a complete analytics platform that excels in tracking user interactions and providing insights into customer behavior, making it an invaluable tool for customer research. It allows you to analyze how users engage with their products by tracking specific events, such as button clicks or feature usage.

With Mixpanel, you can create detailed funnel reports to understand conversion rates and identify where potential customers drop off in the sales process, enabling targeted improvements.

The platform also offers cohort analysis and retention tracking, crucial for understanding long-term customer behavior and loyalty. Mixpanel's ability to segment users based on their actions and attributes enables personalized and data-driven marketing campaigns.

By leveraging Mixpanel for customer research, companies can gain a deep, data-driven understanding of their users, tailor their products to meet customer needs more accurately, and make informed decisions that drive growth and retention.‍

Features:

• Custom Reports, Funnels and Flows
• Monitoring and alerts
• Data imports and exports
• Integrations with Data warehouses, messaging and automation platforms, surveys and many more

HappyScribe

HappyScribe is a transcription and subtitling service that can be particularly valuable in customer research for transforming audio and video data into accessible and analyzable text. By converting interviews or customer feedback sessions into readable transcripts, you can access insights faster and make them easier for your team to consume.

The tool also offers a search feature, so you can easily find a piece of conversation about a particular topic.

HappyScribe's transcription services facilitate the qualitative analysis of spoken word, enabling you to perform content analysis, coding, and thematic data exploration.

The platform supports various languages and accents, broadening the scope of research across different demographics and regions. HappyScribe's speed in delivering transcripts helps you to gather actionable insights and recognize the most important topics quickly.

This tool enhances the accessibility of customer research data, making it easier for teams to share findings and collaborate on strategies to improve customer experience and product development.‍

Features:

• Automatic audio-to-text transcription
• 60+ languages supported 
• Workspaces to manage different projects

Miro

Miro is an online collaborative whiteboarding platform. Its intuitive design and expansive virtual workspace allow research teams to map out customer journeys, create affinity diagrams, and easily organize research findings. This is great solution for brainstorming sessions with your team or presenting research findings at your next training.

With Miro, researchers can collaborate in real time, regardless of their physical location, which is particularly beneficial for remote or distributed teams. The platform's interactive features, such as sticky notes, voting, and commenting, encourage active participation and can lead to more dynamic and inclusive research sessions.

Using Miro in customer research allows teams to centralize their findings, develop personas, and create actionable insights that can drive product innovation and enhance customer experiences. Its visual approach to organizing data helps uncover patterns and opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked in traditional research methods.‍

Features:

• Editable boards
• Built-in timer, voting, video chat
• Custom templates and Brand center
• Board exports

Calendly

Calendly is an appointment scheduling app that streamlines the process of setting up meetings, which is particularly useful for conducting customer research interviews and usability testing sessions.

By allowing customers to choose their convenient times to provide feedback, Calendly enhances participation rates and reduces the administrative burden of coordinating schedules. The platform's automated reminders help decrease no-shows, ensuring that valuable insights are captured efficiently.

Using Calendly in customer research simplifies the logistical aspect, allowing researchers to focus on the interaction and data collection, leading to more effective and meaningful customer engagements.‍

Features:

• Different event types
• Multiple calendars
• Customized booking page
• Reminders, confirmations and automated workflows

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is a versatile tool for customer research due to its collaborative nature and real-time data processing capabilities. It allows researchers to collect, organize, and analyze customer data.

With Google Sheets, multiple team members can work on the same document simultaneously, making it an ideal platform for aggregating survey responses, customer feedback, and other research data.

Google Sheets can handle large datasets, which is beneficial for extensive research projects. Its integration with other Google Workspace tools and third-party applications streamlines the research process further, enabling seamless data import and export.

By leveraging the power of Google Sheets, businesses can conduct thorough customer research, leading to informed decision-making and strategic planning.‍

Features:

• Importing and exporting data from third-party tools
• Functions like VLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH
• Access and permission management

Segment

Segment, now part of Twilio, is a customer data platform that acts as a powerful conduit for gathering and unifying data from various sources for customer research. It allows you to collect, standardize, and route customer data to different analytics and marketing tools without custom integration work.

Segment enables researchers to construct a comprehensive picture of customer behavior and preferences by providing a holistic view of customer interactions across multiple channels.

Using Segment in customer research helps identify patterns and trends that can inform product development, marketing strategies, and customer experience improvements. The platform's ability to track real-time events and create detailed customer profiles is great solution for segmenting audiences and conducting granular analysis.

Additionally, Segment's integrations with tools for consumer insights, A/B testing, email marketing, and data visualization further enhance the researcher's ability to test hypotheses and measure the impact of changes.‍

Features: 

• Centralized data from multiple sources (websites, mobile apps, various third-party tools)
• Real-time data processing
• Public API

Your choice of tool should align with specific goals, such as understanding your target audience better, gaining consumer insights, or analyzing market research data. Each tool offers a specialized focus, ranging from data visualization to real-time insights, helping you to develop a well-rounded understanding of your customers.

Evaluating and choosing the best research tools

Selecting the right customer research tool is essential for acquiring accurate consumer insights to inform your business decisions. It's important to assess the cost against the expected benefits and ensure that the tools can be easily implemented into your toolstack.

User experience and usability

Evaluate the user experience and usability of the market research tools as they can significantly affect the quality and reliability of data collected. Customer research tool should have an intuitive interface and be easy to navigate for your team and customers.

At this stage, you need tools that offer a free trial of readily available product demos. Thanks to this, you can test the software and assess if ease of use and user experience are things you are looking for.

Additionally, consider the SLA and availability of live chat support. This will help address unexpected questions or prevent issues impacting your team's performance.

Your goal is to minimize obstacles that could hamper data collection and analysis.

• User Interface Clarity: Clear layout, simple navigation
• Ease of Use: Quick setup, minimal training required
• Avaiaiblity and support: SLA, Help Centre and live chat support

Features and capabilities assessment

Before looking for specific customer research tools, decide what your main goal is. This will help you with choosing the best type of customer or market research tool. Suppose you aim to understand your customers' behavioral data. In that case, consider tools offering session recordings, but if you aim to understand their needs and preferences better, surveys are a better choice.

Choosing the right channel of conducting market research is crucial to getting valuable consumer insights. Make sure this is aligned with your business goals and long-term strategy.

• Data type: Qualitative, quantitative
• Customer research method: interviews, session recordings, surveys, product usage

Cost-benefit analysis

To perform a thorough cost-benefit analysis, list all potential research tools you're considering. For each tool, identify both direct costs, such as subscription fees and indirect costs, like time spent training staff and technical implementation. Compare these financial commitments against the projected increase in income and the intangible benefits, such as enhanced customer insights.

• Direct Costs: Subscription fees, One-time purchases
• Indirect Costs: Training, implementation time

Wrapping up

While we cannot make that decision for you, we hope that sheds some light on available customer research tools.

Testing free market research tools will help you understand what market insights, visual data, and information about your target audience you need for a complete competitive analysis and understanding of market trends.

But there's is a quick and effortless way to conduct market research and get reliable data straight from your customers. You can try Survicate without any commitments–sign up for ten days of Business plan trial and continue collecting your insights for free after that. Sign up here and start your customer research today!