Customer intelligence (CI) keeps your business moving forward, protects your brand health, and encourages brand loyalty. It’s basically everything. And we are going to explore the top 15 customer intelligence tools that should be on your radar to keep this capability in top shape.
Here are some statistics that support the absolute need for CI:
Customer intelligence is the gathering and analysis of customer data across many data sources including – social media, customer reviews, product reviews, forums, blog posts, news articles, surveys and more – basically anything and everything on the social web and news media sites.
The goal of gathering this intel is to better understand how to effectively engage with consumers and develop products and services they want. CI reveals a customer’s experience with a brand or product from the beginning stages and follows it through to after purchase. It pinpoints influences that drive their behaviors, sentiments and engagement across various channels.
Customer intelligence has become so relied upon by companies that Forrester predicts that 25% of companies that are only using product research will pivot to consumer and market intelligence.
Quid is what many brands consider a foundational tool, offering AI-enabled consumer analysis to deliver a more intimate understanding of consumer likes, dislikes, wants and needs. This allows brands to create more impactful marketing strategies and get their messaging just right for the greatest gains. NetBase Quid’s customer intelligence tools can be used for every brand need, including:
Consumer intelligence is more than demographics such as gender and age. It also captures psychographic intel, like interests, professions, ethnicity and bio terms (how consumers self-identify).
Social media has encouraged the consumer to let everyone know what they feel about life, politics and more to the point, brands and products. Understanding what drives these emotions with Quid’s sentiment monitoring and using consumer predictive insight brings understanding on how to meet consumer demands -often to their surprise and delight.
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Konnecto is perfect for visualizing your entire consumer funnel. This reveals opportunities for engagement and pivotal touch points that may have been missed if not for this customer intelligence tool. Konnecto helps you walk with your consumer along their journey, acquainting you with their behaviors, revealing any funnel gaps, and keeps you aware of any obstacles so you can remove them from your consumers pathway through the purchase funnel
Get the skinny on what customers really think with Alida’s customer surveys. Their customer intelligence tool allows you to choose from 25+ survey type questions, which provides businesses the opportunity to be as direct as they need to be to get to the bottom of what customers want from them as a brand. And since 96% of customers don’t complain, surveys allow you to gauge customer satisfaction. These actionable insights bring you closer to your consumer if they are analyzed and put to good use.
This one makes our list a lot. And that’s because it is a very useful tool when it comes to time management of your multiple social media platforms. Keeping track of them in one area allows brands to see how their messaging is being received on different social outlets. A business can view all comments and even messages in one area, even responding from Hootsuite’s customer intelligence tool itself. Tracking how your brands voice is heard across multiple channels is critical if you want to maintain a consistent tone, as well as compare how for example, Instagram vs Facebook views your company. And if you want a deeper dive, Hootsuite integrates with NetBase Quid fully.
This customer intelligence tool offers something called Customer DNA. And it’s exactly what it sounds like. It locates all the elements that make your customer your customer, and reveals them to you so you can make more informed choices which will keep them a fan forever. It segments your consumers into categories according to their age, gender and geographical location. It tracks not only recent consumer behavior, but it tracks and stores historical data as well to give you a 360 view of your customers. Understanding your consumer goes hand-in-hand with profits. This tool can help you have a better relationship with your audience while simultaneously aid in higher ROI.
If you could see which consumers were about to abandon your brand, would you want that power? Of course, you would! Keep your consumers when there is threat! Zeotap has Predictive Audiences which gives brands the power to see when consumers are about to jump ship. By segmenting audiences into like categories, this intelligence tool identifies which segments are at risk of a churn. It doesn’t take much as consumers make purchase decision based on emotion and with 92% of consumers trusting peer recommendations over advertising, one negative review could cause a break-up. Having the power of prediction can be applied to a fresh campaign that will keep those customers from bailing and strengthen your brand/consumer relationship.
As far as customer intelligence tools go, this one has a little bit of everything. Its goal is in helping businesses strategize, win and keep their consumers. It covers consumer behaviors and tracks their trends and changes, keeping you up-to-date on any fluctuations. This will help you create tactics that are more impactful and meaningful for your audience, driving engagement and sales. And Lifesight tracks all of this across multiple channels at once, saving your brand time.
Oracle is a database platform that offers customer experience tools. Though this platform isn’t engineered specifically for customer intelligence, it contains applications that can be used to enhance your own insights. For example, Oracle Customer Intelligence is one tool which gives the user access an enterprise-wide view of customer information. You can search for a specific customer, or a group of customers. Intel includes customer profitability measurement, acquisition, retention, satisfaction, lifecycle and loyalty. Understanding all of this data as a whole is critical to increasing profits and improving your return on investment.
This is another tool which is not specifically engineered for Customer Intelligence, but aids companies in those efforts. It analyzes the data that you’ve already gathered. Because it uses conversational AI, this allows your brand to gain customer intelligence insights by actually asking conversational questions of the data. It’s a unique approach, and with AI becoming central to most of our universe, it will only become better and more intuitive for your purposes as time passes.
Microsoft didn’t get to where it is by being sub-par. And they didn’t cut corners when they developed their customer intelligence tool either. It gives you the ability to keep an eye on who is using your brand’s mobile app and how they’re using it. This will guide your company in tailoring a better in-app experience. Afterall, 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last 6 months. Making sure their experience is seamless is critical.
This company offers a free audience discovery dashboard for their clients. It’s armed with some basic consumer intelligence tools such as audience size and demographics. However, one nifty feature is its ability to capture competitive shoppers by identifying brands most visited by your customers. This little bit of knowledge will help you create campaigns which will catch the eyes of your competitive shoppers, as well as those of your competitors.
Infer has a tool called Fit Scoring. It connects fully to your marketing platform and enriches your data with their own data. So, your customers are no longer just names, but an audience full of individual people and companies segmented according to whether or not they’re ready to buy. Fit Scoring predicts whether a lead is ready to take the plunge and then assigns it a “fit score” which allows brands to focus on the leads that are ready to move forward.
This one is focused on consumer intelligence in a different way. It breaks down the most valuable players when it comes to sponsorships and partnerships. And these connections are critical when it comes to connecting with consumers. Consumers will judge an event based on who is sponsoring it – so tracking and evaluating sponsors can play a pivotal role in your consumer/brand relationship. MVP Index allows your company to analyze sponsor performances, dialing in on branded and unbranded content and locating attributable audiences.
Consumer intelligence tools help protect your brand and Kanter Media has a tool specifically focused on protecting your reputation. It tracks and reveals how your brand is perceived by the wider world. Consumers can be fickle and their opinions can often be shouted loudly from whatever social media platform they’re using. It doesn’t take long for a negative opinion to spread. Keeping track of this helps your brand by informing you of any issues so you can be proactive in resolving them.
Personalization is the new way to do business. Increasingly, consumers want brands to know what they want, and then provide it. Growth Intel’s goal is to create a more personalized consumer experience both online and off. They utilize Persona AI, which dives in deep to reveal personalized conversation topics, or campaign messaging for a specific client or clients. Getting your message is critical if you hope to not only reach but draw in your targeted audience.
Consumers make the marketing world go ‘round. If you don’t understand their language, then you’re throwing money and time away. With customer intelligence tools you can be sure you’re hitting your mark every time, nurturing older consumer relationships and creating new opportunities for brand growth. Reach out for a demo and see the power of consumer intelligence in action!