Consumer insight platform: why you need one, plus 5 of the best

What are consumer insights platforms? 

This type of platform is a way of gathering information on customer behaviours for your brand, kickstarting a conversation with customers to help you gain real time insights for success. Made up of data, opinions and behaviours, the insights on the platform will aid you in success and improve the company’s decision-making capabilities by gaining customer intelligence. 

Why should you be using consumer insights tools

There are many benefits to using these services to help you make smarter decisions and reach consumers in new ways. Perhaps you need to find a data source for your current assumptions about customers, or are looking for insights and opinions on new products you’re looking to create and want some market research for your company.

Having a service like this can also help with influencing your company’s decision-makers, arming yourself and them with actionable data insights to illustrate your reasoning for product or marketing decisions. Business processes can be slow-moving without tangible evidence, so having valid data collection can ensure you have the facts on your side by utilising online communities.

Here are some of the key areas you can explore with your consumer insight platform. 

Customer satisfaction 

Customer satisfaction should always be a number one priority; having data available to help you understand and prioritise customer needs is integral to maintaining your business’s longevity. These data insights available can also personalise or improve the customer journey, making sure that they receive the best service possible from your company.

Knowing that you’re forming meaningful connections with your customers can aid in their customer loyalty. On the other hand, your studies can also illuminate what your business can do better for the customer, such as pricing, features or marketing messaging. The importance is having those customer analytics available for actionable data insights.  

Customer data

Your ability to glean insights is greatly affected by the depth of your customer data. Demographic data can aid you in zooming out to see who makes up your customer base and how you can better market to those who aren’t currently using your product.

For your future research, you could choose community members or specific individuals from the online community of your customer base to talk to for your studies.

This data can also be integral to seeing how your potential ideas compete. It’s not just about idea contests between your internal teams to see which favourite wins, but a salient way of seeing what new capabilities you can bring to your customers. 

Using your insight tool as a data source will be valuable to establish a process of innovation. By not using consumer insights, you risk losing status as a global leader, or never making it there in the first place; proper data management is a competitive advantage that you need to be putting to good use.

What makes a good customer insight platform?

Being able to examine customer behaviors on your chosen insights platform will present research for future solutions, whether that’s for marketing decisions or new product development. Picking the best platform for the multiple data needs of your company will be key. 

One stop shop

Save time and get a complete view of the data needed; rather than using teams of data scientists or multiple data sources, you need one solution that offers real time feedback. You want to be able to use a tool where you can organise questions, fine-tune your audience, gather feedback in a timely manner and then be able to really delve into the detail of the insight and what it all means.

You should also think about how your customer will access the platform. Be aware that some consumers prefer to use mobile devices to take surveys – making sure you access your consumers in the most comfortable way for them will be key.

When writing the questions, you may need assistance with crafting the wording and survey structure to ensure a consistent flow. If that’s a particular aspect that is crucial to you, look out for platforms that offer tailored services, where they assess your studies and the data you’re about to release.

Machine learning can play a part in adjusting your audience, ensuring that you can tweak your survey if there’s an alternative question type or demographic you could target. The technology is also prevalent when examining insights. Machine learning can also aid you in finding links that wouldn’t be seen usually and offering a helpful example of how to rephrase a question.

Customer insights

The ability to deliver insights and get real-time data on what a customer thinks of your product or service will rely on whether it’s easy to organise the studies and understand the data contained. 

You’re looking to use the platform because you want actionable data solutions, so make sure that the platform is user-friendly and can deliver insights you can explain succinctly. The success of your study will rely on this.

Decision making will also rest on the strength of the data; if the quality isn’t up to par, the insights will be weak. You need to find a platform that is stringent and selective about adhering to your selected demographics. 

5 of the best consumer insight platforms

We’ve done our research, and here are our 5 favourite platforms for doing research to attain consumer insights: 

Consumer insights platform	Key Features	Best for	Pricing
Attest	Multi panel setup for fast and reliable survey data  Designated research support from in-house experts Ready-to-go survey templates	Decision makers dedicated to validating marketing decisions using real customer data	Sign up for free! And then our plans start at $0.50 per response for up to 50,000 responses
Google Trends	Data analytics based on multiple sources Access geographic data and find out where customers are searching for key terms	Marketers interested in geographic customer data, especially trends	Free
Mention	Real-time transaction data monitoring functions Social listening data and sentiment analysis	Competitor analysis and social listening	$41 per month for a Solo plan
Answer The Public	Keyword research Content ideation	Discovering key questions consumers are asking	Paid plans start at $9/month
Heartbeat Ai	AI-powered consumer insights Sentiment analysis Brand perception analysis	Examining consumer sentiment after receiving open survey question responses	Paid plans start at $99

1. Attest 

Of course we think Attest is the best consumer insight platform for you!

Attest is beautifully simple to use, yet packed with powerful functionalities. Whether you’re a marketer trying to understand your audience, or an insights professional looking to uncover the next big trend or opportunity, the platform lets you start to get actionable insights in a matter of minutes. 

Thanks to Attest’s huge global audience of 125m consumers in 58 markets – and a broad range of demographic filters – it’s easy to reach your target audience (you can also survey your own customers for free). Once your survey is complete, analyzing the data is made simple with in-platform visualization tools and AI-driven insights. And if you need support, our Customer Research Team of in-house experts are on hand to assist.

Our clients say that Attest offers the best of both worlds; the data quality, audience and support of a research agency, with the speed, flexibility and competitive cost of a self-serve platform. It’s a combination that’s opening up access to consumer insights across all sorts of businesses, and it’s why Attest has recently secured a $64m series B funding round (read what TechCrunch has to say about us).

2. Google Trends

Google Trends – Google’s consumer insights platform – offers the ability to research trends all over the world.  You can delve into the analytics of trends over time to see a relationship of customer engagement, this level of data analytics is impressive and instead of multiple data sources, it comes from just one.

Though, you may start to wonder how it connects directly to your customers and brand tracking. Finding a platform that offers specialised customer intelligence will always lead to a higher level of insights for your business. 

3. Mention

Mention is an insights platform that gives you the ability to gather real-time transaction data from various social media platforms. The insights platform also features a sentiment analysis to guide your business on how customers are feeling. The customer experience for the platform is simple and allows you to create your own alerts based on certain criteria.  

Another feature is the ability to monitor what is said about other businesses in your field online, helping give you research to stay ahead of them. Ultimately Mention serves the function of seeing what’s going on in a primarily social-media sphere. 

4. Answer The Public

Answer The Public is a consumer insights platform that offers a simplified customer experience, you type in a word and then get back every phrase or question that has been asked around that topic, allowing you to easily research connections between your keywords. 

While not giving you a direct line to your consumers or creating analytics that delve into their habits, it does give you a baseline summary on the deeper associations of the research topics you have. 

5. Heartbeat Ai

Heartbeat Ai is a consumer insights platform that uses AI to find the emotion behind written content. Crafting nuanced insights gives a new perspective on the customer; by having an accurate read on what your customers really believe, you’ll be able to build on brand perceptions.

The service is less suited to the initial stage of research and more for examining the sentiment behind feedback on open survey questions- which can be very late in your process.