A fantastic way to lose potential customers is to give them a terrible buying experience.
That experience starts with the first contact with your lead and extends all the way to a closed deal. If your customers experience unnecessary difficulty during their journey then there’s a good chance they’ll become unengaged with your business and look elsewhere.
Part of the process for optimizing your sales is to ensure your user experience (UX) is as simple and easy to manage for your prospects as possible.
But how can you determine customer insights about your sales process? What may seem like a perfect process from your end might not translate to the user, but without insights into your UX, you won’t be able to make the changes you need to convert more of your leads.
In fact, while a study by Gartner found 90% of customer-facing staff said they understood the needs of their customers, a study by PWC found only 38% of customers felt that the business they interacted with understood their needs!
Perhaps the best way to reconcile your sales process with your customers’ needs is to conduct some market research, but this brings its own set of complications: how should it be organized? Who will conduct the sessions?
Fortunately, there are some excellent customer insights software tools out there that take care of all this for you, and in this post, we’ll bring you the three best-rated apps on the market, according to our community of users on Serchen.
We’ll also be looking at how you can use the data from your CRM software to feed into the customer insight process, as well as what can be fed back into your CRM for improved analytics about your sales process.
What is Customer Insight Software?
Customer insight software tools are designed to help businesses understand how their customers feel about their buying process.
Traditionally, conducting market research was a lengthy, time-consuming and expensive process; businesses would need to gather participants in one place for a set time and either run or hire an agency to run a session, looking for audience feedback.
But being limited by time meant you could only hear some of the feedback, and a large focus group doesn’t always get the best out of customers who might be nervous about speaking in front of a group.
Customer insights can also be gathered from what people are saying about you, such as social media posts or reviews. However, collating all the different customer opinions and turning those opinions into actionable insights is tricky, time-consuming, and information often falls through the gaps.
Customer insight software brings solutions to businesses by allowing each customer to fully express themselves in the forum they feel most comfortable in, without the traditional time constraints of traditional market research, or the difficulties in gathering the insights of web-based reviews and opinions.
Some customer insights software tools focus on the collection of data from your customers (think hyper-powered surveys accessed through an online portal), and some function as a way to consolidate all your feedback data from across your communication channel into one database purpose-built to handle feedback and generate reports on it.
This means there’s no longer any need to gather your customers in one place, or need dedicated staff to manage their sessions. Customer insight software is completely remote and allows customers to complete the activities at their own pace.
How Do Customer Insight Tools Work With Your CRM Software?
One of the most powerful features of CRM software is the reporting it can provide about your sales pipeline. And in terms of how this relates to your UX, think of the insights your CRM gathers as the resulting actions of your customers. Your CRM gathers up what your users do, but it can’t tell you why.
It might be that you’re seeing a bottleneck in your pipeline where your chance to progress a lead to the next step in the buyer journey is dramatically lower than the other stages in your funnel. Your CRM can show you this, but it can’t tell you why your customers aren’t as engaged.
By using customer insight software with the data reporting from your CRM, you can pinpoint where you need to refine your sales process and then learn from your users exactly what it is that needs to be changed.
The 3 Best Customer Insight Tools For 2022
Let’s take a deeper look into customer insight software, and see what makes these three tools the best-rated on Serchen.
EnjoyHQ (formerly NomNom Insights)
Price From: Free!
EnjoyHQ is a customer insight tool designed to take all the hassle out of managing the feedback you’ve received about your selling process and sharing the insights with your team.
By centralizing all your feedback on their database and streamlining the insights process, you can make sure none of the valuable customer insights you’ve gained get lost, and all your teammates can easily find the data they need too.
Plus, with useful collaboration tools to help your team understand the insights, and the ability to search your insights with customizable filters, you can quickly put together reports on specific feedback and get the insights to where they need to go.
Highlight Features:
Centralized database — with all your data in one place, you no longer need to worry about information being siloed away within your communication channels or in teammates’ folders. The centralized database means all your team can access the information they need, and with unlimited storage, you don’t need to worry about losing important insights
Integrations — with a host of integrations, including CRM software, document sharing tools and more, you can keep your workflow running smoothly by automating the way data from EnjoyHQ interactions with the rest of your software stack
Cross-project analysis — search for any piece of data on any project and connect it to any other piece of data from any other project to create custom insights and new ways of visualizing those connections
Classification automation — instead of spending hours manually analyzing your data, use automation with EnjoyHQ to save you time
Free transcription — instead of having to spend time and money transcribing your video and audio interviews, EnjoyHQ can transcribe anything you upload, meaning you can make your audio and video files searchable through text
Review translation — access all your reviews left in different languages and translate them to English for free with EnjoyHQ
Reports — Analyse your feedback and insights using the EnjoyHQ knowledge and graph visualization feature to build helpful reports you can share with your team and decision-makers
Sentiment analysis — detect what your customers feel about their experience with your business by analyzing their feedback sentiments across any communication channel
What our community says about EnjoyHQ:
John — “We’ve been using EnjoyHQ for a while now, and it has been great at helping us centralize all our customer feedback. Quantifying qualitative data became a lot easier, especially when trying to prioritize work in our product roadmap.”
UserTesting
Built around getting the most out of your customer insights via video, UserTesting provides businesses with real-time user experiences of set tasks, with powerful AI software tracking the key moments of customer interaction.
UserTesting is focused on the real-world and digital interaction between your customers and your business. By using their roster of testers, businesses can interact with a diverse network of customers via videoed scripted tasks or through video calls to review the customer experience of how they interact with your business.
Plus, you can also use reporting look at how your testers interacted with your test material, and compare this across everyone who took that test to see where trends lie, and how customers navigate your buying experience.
Highlight Features:
Video analysis — get videoed records of how your customers interact with your business, so you can see their physical as well as digital reactions. With AI that detects key moods from your testers, you can easily find the important customer insights that you’re looking for
Ask any question to anyone — create your own tests to find customer insights from any area of your sales process, target a segment of the UserTesting Contributor Network of testers, or connect your own audience
Reporting — gather the key points from your customer feedback with visualizations, metrics and transcripts of their insights
Collaboration — export and share your customer insights across a host of integrated apps (like Slack, JIRA and Trello), and even create custom reels to highlight specific attitudes
Templates — use pre-made templates to discover important insights about your business, such as your customer journey stages, customer needs discovery, website conversion, ad testing and more
Recollective
Price From: $625 per month
Recollective empowers businesses to create insightful online research projects by using a suite of great features to gain user feedback.
By centralizing tasks and feedback on their platform, Recollective provides a simple and convenient way for both businesses and users to access and interact with the platform.
By creating a range of tasks, you can capture all your customers’ insights, no matter they prefer to express themselves. And with Recollective, you can easily scale your research to reach just a few people to as many as you want within just a few hours.
Then, with your customer insights gathered, Recollective gives you the tools to understand the information through an interactive analysis tool, meaning you can create an actionable plan from your insights.
Highlight Features:
Tailored research — create a research strategy that addresses the different segments of your audience by using asynchronous tasks and discussions, real-time chat and live videos. Plus, connect your tasks and tools together with sequences and logic flows to get the full view of your users’ experiences
Gather insights —use Recollective’s huge array of feedback tools to gain qualitative responses to your questions. Choose to get your feedback via text, photo, video, image and video markups and many many more!
Social interactions — respond to any of your users’ feedback with private questions to probe exactly what they mean, or encourage deeper group discussion as and when you need to
Participant management — track your community interaction and activity progress to make sure you’re giving your users the best testing experience, and track participation and completion rates while automating follow-up notifications to ensure your questions get answered
Reporting — filter your insights by task, segments or person, and review your customer insight streams, charts, word clouds and tables to spot key themes and trends. Plus, download curated content and the most important information with one click
Transcription — create transcripts from your respondents’ videos and create highlight clips of your key data
Advanced connection — connect to users on mobile without the need for a dedicated app, and with over 25 languages supported, you can gather feedback from across the world
What our community says about Recollective:
Vince — “Overall positive experience as a user and also from the participants. Also very much appreciated the online support. They answered any question very fast and offered a project pre-launch check to make sure we had no issues.”
Should You Use Customer Insight Software Alongside Your CRM?
If your business is at the stage where it’s ready to start refining its selling process based on sales data you’ve already started gathering from your CRM, then it might be the perfect time to take on one of our top-rated customer insight software tools to hone in on the specific parts of your sales process and how they might be improved.
For smaller companies, we recommend trying EnjoyHQ’s free version, as the costs for premium tier products can be prohibitively expensive. Larger and enterprise businesses should definitely look into the paid options though, as any way to wring out improvements from your sales process is magnified by the number of customers they’ll be dealing with.
In a world where more and more purchasing is being done online, it’s vital for companies to make sure their online presence, from user reviews to their purchasing process, is as attractive to new and returning customers as possible.
We all know how frustrating a poor buying experience can be, so make sure you’re not falling into the trap of putting off your customers by using customer insight software and reports from your CRM software to find out what your customers really feel about their buying experience once and for all.
