6 Best Customer Research Tools to Try in 2024

No matter what you sell, finding out what your customers think about your offer is crucial. It allows you to improve your product, decrease churn, improve customer satisfaction, make your employees happier, and in the end, put more money in the bank.

Nowadays, researching your customers seems to be easier than before. We are swamped with tools that can give details on our customers we never could have imagined before. However, choosing the right tool and the right data can be overwhelming.

With that in mind, we prepared a list of the very best customer research, along with their best features and how much they’ll dent your budget.

FeedBear

If you wait until customers churn to find out what they think about your product, you’re setting yourself up for trouble. With FeedBear, you can learn how customers feel about your product before things get unfixable.

FeedBear allows you to pool different types of feedback into one place, making it easy to organize things and avoid duplicate entries. Website, emails, forums, live chat - it can all go into one feedback board.

At this point, you can categorize and tag all feedback and requests to keep things neatly organized. As mentioned, this prevents making double entries, as your customers can see that someone already requested the same or similar feature.

What’s even better, they can discuss the feedback in public and voice their opinions. Your team can participate too and nothing is more encouraging than seeing the company employees responding to feedback promptly.

Last but not least, a feedback board lets your customers vote. You no longer have to guess what they think - let them say it through quantitative and qualitative output.

And once you’re ready to show the world what you’re working on, you can create a public roadmap. Show the customers (current and potential) what you’re working on and when it should be live.

Once a feature or a product update goes live, you can impress your customers by letting them know about the change immediately. With FeedBear, you can notify anyone who’s requested or discussed a certain request that it’s been fulfilled. You can send an email to everyone involved in making a feature go live and effectively close the feedback loop in a few clicks.

All of these aspects of FeedBear have one thing in common - putting the customer as the number one priority. Find out what they think, what they value, and what they dislike, act on the feedback and let them know you’re working on their suggestions.

You can try out FeedBear for free today and find out why both customers and business owners love it so much. The basic plan starts for $49 per month giving you access to all the features, unlimited boards, and unlimited users.

Sign up for free to get started today!

Hotjar

In the world of UI and UX research, Hotjar is a household name. This tool has helped many designers, product managers, business owners, and others improve their website and user experience.

The number one feature Hotjar is famous for are the heatmaps. Simply put, Hotjar records your customers’ behavior on your website at all times. If they spend a lot of time in an area, it glows red. If the area gets no visitors or clicks, it stays green.

The “hotter” the color, the more people spend time there. If you’re looking for a way to learn about what customers do, as well as what page elements present roadblocks, this is the #1 tool to rely on.

On top of that, Hotjar lets you record customers’ visitor sessions. You can get into individual session recordings to find out what a specific user does on your website. It’s perfectly legal (if you let your customers know you’re doing it) and it can give you great insights without asking your customers for feedback individually.

Then there is the Incoming feedback feature. This lets you add small popups to your website, asking customers to say how they feel about a certain page. Besides rating their experience with a smiley face, they can also write up their feedback and even select the part of the page that they love or hate.

Last but not least, Hotjar has a basic survey feature. You can grab a list of questions from their question bank and ask your customers what they think about a certain page, feature, or aspect of your offer.

There is a free trial which is rather limited and the most affordable plan is $39 per month. It only allows for up to 100 sessions per day or 3,000 recordings per month. If you have a large website with a lot of visitors, you’ll have to jump for the more expensive plans, priced at $99 and $389 per month.

Mediatoolkit

Finding out what your customers think can be as simple as following them on social media. All it takes is being present all the time and finding out what they say about you specifically. Right?

Easier said than done, of course.

Mediatoolkit offers a range of tools for social listening. If you want to find out what your customers (and everyone else) say about you online, this is the tool to try out.

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Once someone mentions your name anywhere online, be it a website, blog, forum, or any other page, Mediatoolkit sends you an analysis. Just type in your brand name as the search term and you’ll get updates for all mentions.

The same works for different social media networks. While you can set up a basic Google filter to send you notifications for new mentions on the web, social media requires a different approach. Mediatoolkit sends you notifications whenever someone mentions you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other network.

One thing that makes it super handy is that it uses AI for sentiment analysis. In other words, Mediatoolkit knows if the customer is happy or angry with you based on the language they use. If you have no time to check your mentions every minute, this is a great way to prevent crises early on.

Last but not least, you can also monitor your competitors’ terms. If their customers have an issue and if they keep complaining about something - here’s your chance to swoop in and save the day.

If you’re ready to give it a go, also be ready to fork out 399EUR per month for the most affordable plan.

TrustPilot

There’s a very slim chance that you have never run into TrustPilot before. This platform was built to encourage and collect customer reviews. Even if your company doesn’t already have a TrustPilot page, there’s a high probability that your customers already left a review there.

One thing that sets TrustPilot apart is that it collects reviews from all over the internet and aggregates them on your profile. One company has one profile and once you sign up for TrustPilot, you can claim it and manage the reviews.

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You can use this newly acquired profile to invite your existing customers to leave reviews or just aggregate great reviews from other places online.

Moreover, you can use the TrustBox review widget on your website to encourage more existing customers to buy. While it isn’t ideal for learning more about your customers, it’s a great social proof tool to get more conversions.

The free version of TrustPilot is rather basic and only once you upgrade to a paid plan do you get access to detailed analytics and paid add-ons. Paid plans cost from $200 per month and up, which is a small price to pay if you depend on reviews to get more business. However, it’s a pretty mediocre tool for customer research.

Typeform

If you’ve ever used Typeform to enter some data or provide feedback, you’ll remember it. For forms and surveys, there is no better-looking or more intuitive app out there. It just works and it looks great while at it.

No matter what information you’re trying to collect, Typeform makes it easy to ask questions and get answers. It’s primarily designed with marketers in mind, but it works really well for customer feedback too.

The most popular formats in Typeform include quizzes, forms, and surveys. In our case, we’re most interested in surveys.

To capture customer feedback, you have a wide array of templates to choose from, such as product feedback surveys, mobile app surveys, system usability surveys, and many others. This way, you get sample questions for each intended use.

You’ll get pretty basic features with the free plan so you’ll be forced to go for at least the cheapest paid plan at $25 per month. This allows you to have unlimited forms and unlimited questions, but you are restricted to 100 responses per month.

Overall, Typeform is a tool that looks and works great but it still doesn’t solve one major problem - what to do with the feedback once you’ve collected it. Overall, Typeform is a superb marketing tool but only a subpar customer research tool.

Userbrain

What do you do when you have no customers of your own? You borrow them from someone else, of course.

What makes Userbrain unique is that instead of working with your own customers, you get to work with their pool of testers. In its database, Userbrain has over 70,000 users. Once you sign up for their product, you get access to that same pool of people.

It works in a pretty simple way - you install Userbrain and set it up to test for a certain task. For example, testing out your signup flow or your product’s dashboard for first-time users. Once the task is set up, you get to choose what kind of people you want to test your website or product and you get the results.

This is an incredibly useful tool in the right hands. However, it assumes that you know precisely who your target audience is. Many business owners had no clue who they were trying to sell to at the very start. Keep this in mind as your results may be skewed.

The good news is that you can invite your own customers to do tests in Userbrain.

However, if you have a good sample already, there are simpler tools out there.

And it all comes at a pretty steep price, too. At $35 per tester, you’ll end up spending hundreds and thousands of dollars before you get meaningful results.

Wrapping up

Spending time and money on customer research is one of the best things you can do for your business. Instead of guessing what customers think about your brand, let these tools do their magic and provide you with actionable data you can use.

Speaking of actionable, if you want to do something meaningful for your business today, sign up for a free trial of FeedBear! Learn what they like and dislike, connect them with your team and close the feedback loop to make your customers feel heard. Sign up today to get started!

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