4 Customer Experience Analytics Tools That You Should Know About

Analyzing customer data is chaotic, especially if there’s a lot of it coming from different sources. You first need to collect this data effectively, then process, cleanse, and finally analyze it to derive meaningful insights. This process, known as customer experience analytics, can take up a lot of your valuable time. 

Customer analytics tools can help. These tools make it a breeze to collect and analyze customer data in the most effective manner possible. 

However, with almost every other company claiming their “customer analytics tool” to be the best, who should you trust? And which tools should you actually add to your tech stack?

In this guide, we’ve listed down the four best customer experience analytics tools for you to consider along with what they’re best suited for. 

But before we dive in, let’s first understand what customer analytics tools are.

What are customer experience analytics tools?

Customer analytics tools are platforms that empower businesses to gather, process and analyze their customer data. These tools can further help companies better understand their customers, make well-informed decisions based on data-driven insights, and spot trends that might otherwise go unnoticed. 

For example, Hotjar, a popular customer analytics platform, can help you understand how your users are interacting with your product. Using one of their core features called “Session Recordings,” you can get a complete playback of a user’s mouse movements, including clicks, hovers and turns. You can use this information to identify blockers that might be hindering the user experience, discover areas of the website or application that are confusing or not intuitive, and gain insights into how different design or content elements are being perceived by the users.

Source: Hotjar

Another example is Gigasheet, our big data cloud spreadsheet platform and a widely popular customer experience analytics tool. You can use our platform to analyze big data with the simplicity of spreadsheets. So for example, you run an eCommerce store and categorize your customers into different segments based on their purchase behaviors, demographics, or interaction with your marketing campaigns. With Gigasheet, you can upload the raw transactional and customer data in the form of spreadsheet, potentially running into over a billion rows, and start analyzing it almost immediately.

Source: Gigasheet

Different customer analytics tools serve different purposes. For instance, Hotjar and Gigasheet are completely different products; however one of their strengths is helping companies collect, process and analyze customer data.

Hence, we’ve put together this comprehensive list of different customer analytics tools that can make analyzing customer data a breeze.

4 Best Customer Experience Analytics Software in 2023

 To help you find the right fit, we have curated a list of four best customer data analytics tools along with their pros and cons. Let’s dive straight into them.

1. Gigasheet - Best for analyzing big data with the simplicity of spreadsheets

Gigasheet is a big-data cloud spreadsheet platform that makes it possible to work with large spreadsheets, even ones with over one billion rows. The platform offers a user-friendly and intuitive interface, and can help you crunch big numbers without the need for specialized data expertise.

Some of its key features include:

• Ability to upload spreadsheet files in different formats, including complex ones like JSON, Parquet. Or import them from other platforms like Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. 

• Advanced data analysis features like filters, grouping and pivot table. 

• Other features like enriching your data, merging and splitting your CSV files, converting spreadsheet file, no matter the format, to CSV, etc. 

• Ability to save filters to simplify recurring analysis. 

• Makes it super-easy to collaborate with others. 

Gigasheet Pros & Cons

Pros

• Intuitive data analytics solution for both beginners and experienced users. Supports advanced data analysis features like filtering, grouping, enrichment,  pivot table and more. 
• Can support over a billion rows and spreadsheet files as large as 140 GB. 
• Frequent updates show commitment to continuous improvement.
• Seamless integration with different third-party tools. And ability to import spreadsheet file in several formats, including complex ones like JSON and Parquet
• Free to use. 

Cons

• Additional features required. Our team is continuously working on adding more features and improving the product. 

 2. Amplitude - Best for analyzing customer engagement and behavior

Source: Amplitude

Amplitude is a product analytics and event tracking platform that provides deep insights into your user journey. The platform does this by tracking user interactions with different elements of a product or website. 

By aggregating this data and presenting it in an understandable manner, businesses can identify key behaviors, patterns, and trends among their users.

Some of its core features include event tracking (to track specific user actions), funnel analysis (to dive into user conversion steps), retention analysis (to measure user return rates), cohort analysis (to compare user group behaviors), and more.

Amplitude Pros & Cons

Pros

• Amplitude's interface is well-designed, visually appealing, and facilitates easy navigation and understanding of vast data.
• Advanced cohort analysis tools empower users to track and compare user cohorts effectively over time.
• Built-in A/B testing capabilities streamline the process of running experiments, making optimization straightforward and efficient.

Cons

• Limited dashboard customization options restrict the creation of highly personalized views.
• New users might face a learning curve when delving into the platform's wide range of advanced functionalities.
• The pricing model for Amplitude can be on the pricier side, potentially burdening startups and medium-sized businesses.

 2. Google Analytics 4: Best for monitoring website and app traffic and user behavior

Source: Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 is Google’s web analytics platform used by millions of people worldwide to monitor user behavior on their website and app. This tool can provide you with information like how many people land on your website over a specific time period, which pages get the most traffic, where is this traffic coming from, and more.

Recently, Google made it mandatory for everyone to switch from their old analytics platform called “Universal Analytics” to the upgraded one called “Google Analytics 4.” Some people have loved this upgrade, whereas some despise it (we’ll talk more about this in the Pros and Cons section).

Some of Google Analytics 4 key features are:

• Get detailed information about users, including their geographic location, device used to access the site (e.g., mobile vs. desktop), browser, etc.
• Classifies website traffic into different channels, such as direct, organic search, paid search, social, and referral
• Provides you with numbers like which pages get the most traffic, where this traffic is dropping off and more. 
• Automatic event-based tracking without the need for custom code or Google Tag Manager.
• Customize automated tables and save time on juggling metrics and custom dimensions.
• Ability to measure time between actions, an improvement over UA.

Google Analytics 4 Pros and Cons

Pros

• Free BigQuery Integration: Send raw data directly to the cloud for ML insights.
• Funnel Feature: Accessible to all users for building segmented custom funnels.
• Event Tracking: Automatic event-based tracking without the need for custom code or Google Tag Manager.
• Custom Reports: Create visualizations of cohorts, paths, funnels, or segments.
• Custom Tables: Customize automated tables and save time on juggling metrics and custom dimensions.
• Anomaly Detection: AI-driven tool to identify and notify of anomalies in metrics over time.
• Improved Audience Builder: Enhanced options including event scoping and time-based sequences.
• Better Debugging: Debugging view to improve troubleshooting.
• Attribution Measurement: Update within the platform to options like data-driven and position-based.
• Time Measurement: Ability to measure time between actions, an improvement over UA.

Cons

• New program is substantially different from Universal Analytics.
• Need to use separate tools for reporting, data collection, and analyzing.
• Loss of some old pre-defined reports like landing page and site search.
• Data organization tiers changed: From Account-Property-View to Accounts and Property.
• Absence of GA4 filtering mechanisms for certain tasks (e.g., updating URL cases).
• Data collection based on data streams can be confusing initially.
• Tracking goals has changed and might not align with old practices.
• Ecommerce tracking is more intricate and potentially confusing.
• Absence of the annotation feature in GA4.

4. Hotjar: Best for collecting and analyzing website and product feedback

Source: Hotjar

Hotjar is a behavioral analytics and user feedback platform that helps companies understand how their users behave on their website and product. Some of its core features include: 

• Heatmaps: track where users click, move, and scroll on a page
• Session recordings: live playback of users navigating through the website.
• Surveys: to collect feedback directly from the users. 

Hotjar Pros & Cons

Pros

• Provides valuable insights into how users interact with your website.
• Heat mapping allows you to visualize user engagement on your website
• Session recordings offer a real-time view of user interactions on your website.
• Allows you to collect direct feedback from users through surveys and polls.
• Easy to set up.

Cons

• Learning curve. 
• The abundance of data collected by Hotjar can sometimes be overwhelming.
• Some users on G2 have reported issues with Hotjar's customer support.

Final thoughts on Customer Experience Analytics Tools

Customer experience analytics tools make it super-easy to analyze your customer data, helping you reduce churn, identify upsell opportunities and increase your retention rate. 

No single tool can help you get all the insights you need. Instead, it’s a good idea to understand your specific needs and requirements, and based on them, you can pick tools to add to your tech stack.