What are your favorite platforms/vendors for facilitating customer research?

There are a gazillion tools (free ones if you’re budget-constrained) out there. The choice of tool is a function of what you’re looking to accomplish. But nothing beats sitting with the customer and listening to them. Some of the tools and platforms I keep going back to:

• User Testing, Loop 11, Userlytics: UserTesting has been a very easy and useful tool for my teams for audience recruitment, message testing, usability testing, and even generating live video-based customer narratives. As they say, show don’t tell!  I’ve also used Loop11 and Userlytics for A/B testing wireframe prototypes to assess the usability of product workflows. For example, at Intuit my team ran extensive customer testing sessions on UserTesting (100+) to test out multiple variations of a new platform narrative for the Quickbooks suite and pricing/bundling executions on Intuit.com - these insights informed the selection of design options that were then further A/B tested. Classic example of “go broad, then go narrow”.
  

• Survey Monkey/Google surveys: Customer surveys are hugely beneficial in both B2B (fewer target customers) and B2C contexts (large customer base) to glean the right signals from customers and build informed hypotheses. At Twilio, we used Survey Monkey for messaging and claims testing with existing enterprise customers. 
  

• Hubspot’s “Make my persona”: Make my persona has been quite useful for generating alpha versions of Persona Outlines - auto-generates all essential components of your ICP (ideal customer profile) that you can then use to flesh out contextual details of your target customer. 

• G2 Reviews to keep a pulse on what users are saying about you and more importantly, your competitors. 

I love this question. Customer research is one of the most commonly underfunded areas of a pmm/marketing team yet the one that can yield the biggest insights. A number of companies I've worked for have been willing to invest in pricing research (with expensive external vendors) as guidance on pricing and packaging- but seldom the same investment is made for messaging, GTM, or specialized projects like onboarding, or closed loss interviews.

To get into specifics of vendors and products you can use (with either free or very modest costs and also very user-friendly). As far as incentivizing participants, varies by industry but for SMB $25-$50 is the range amount that reliably gets participants (cash or gift cards), I've also been experimenting with larger incentives such as an opportunity to win $250.

Here are a few that I've used recently,

1. Typeform: It's particularly useful for capturing qualitative data. Pretty intuitive to set up a survey,

2. Google Forms: Straightforward tool and easy to share surveys and collect responses. Because it's part of google workspace, tends to be my go to when I'm collecting info or feedback from internal teams.

3. UserTesting: UserTesting specializes in user experience research- but can be really helpful and Inexpensive to source a panel of users who can provide feedback on your product or website.

4. QuickTapSurvey: QuickTapSurvey is designed for collecting data in the field, making it handy for in-person surveys and data collection at events or retail locations.

   
   
   
   

Customer (as in they’re paying you for your product) research:

• Google forms

• Typeform (there’s a free edition as well as a super cheap team plan)

• SurveyMonkey