Forrester recently released its Consumer Intelligence Platforms Landscape Report, helping research and insights professionals navigate the variety of available tools to help better understand their current and prospective customers.
Forrester defines Consumer Intelligence Platforms (CIPs) as:
Platforms that derive real-time insights and reporting from data sources outside of their company (e.g., social media, web, or consumer data) using proprietary analysis techniques to enable consumer-driven decisions.
This definition underscores a pivotal shift: the market is moving away from fragmented, single-purpose data tools toward unified platforms — driven by the industry's need for real-time data to maintain pace with consumers. Specifically for insight professionals, a CIP acts as a critical hub, transforming raw, external market signals into actionable business intelligence that informs everything from crisis management to long-term product roadmaps.
As a market research technology helping brands gather real-time insights about their consumers, we’re so excited to join in on the CIP conversation!
Key Takeaways:
- Expansion of CIPs: CIPs are moving beyond social listening to unify diverse data streams (such as social, web, survey, and transactional data) to provide brands with a holistic view of their consumers.
- Real-time action: The primary benefit of a modern CIP is the shift from passive, retrospective reporting to real-time, actionable insights. This allows brands to manage reputation, optimize offerings, and refine strategy much faster than traditional methods of research.
- CIPs as a centralized insights hub: CIPs help reduce the number of tools and solutions needed in a tech stack, allowing researchers to get more done and make better decisions while balancing fewer touch points and siloed timelines.
Table of Contents
- Types of consumer intelligence platforms
- How brands are using consumer intelligence platforms
- Integrating a consumer intelligence platform into your existing tech stack
- quantilope's Consumer Intelligence Platform
Types of consumer intelligence platforms
Forrester’s report sheds light on how CIPs are reshaping how businesses capture and act on consumer insights. While these types of platforms have traditionally been used for brand monitoring, competitive intelligence, and social listening, they’re growing and expanding into new areas of market research to help brands monitor, track, and predict consumer trends.
Below are a few types of CIPs today’s businesses can lean on for their insights process:
Social listening platforms
Again, one of the more traditional forms of a CIP, social listening tools automatically monitor and analyze massive amounts of unsolicited public data from social media, forums, and reviews. Their primary function is to provide real-time insights into what consumers are saying about brands, topics, and trends, focusing on sentiment and topic volume.
Experience management platforms (XM/survey platforms)
These are centralized systems used to gather and analyze solicited feedback directly from customers and employees, often through simple online surveys. Their goal is to manage and improve core experiences (customer experiences and employee experiences) by quantifying why people feel the way they do.
Behavioral and customer data platforms (CDPs)
These platforms focus on collecting and unifying observed data by aggregating user actions from websites, apps, transactions, and CRM systems into a single, comprehensive customer profile. Their purpose is to optimize and personalize marketing messaging and other aspects of the customer journey.
End-to-End Research Platforms
These integrated systems seek to merge multiple research capabilities (e.g., qualitative video tools, quantitative survey programming, fielding capabilities, and advanced analytics) into a single workspace. They empower market research teams to design, field, and analyze complex studies without needing multiple disconnected tools or siloed teams.
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How brands are using consumer intelligence platforms
Brands shifting to CIPs are realizing they can accomplish much more, in less time, and with greater efficiency — especially as it relates to market research and insights.
For example, instead of a Consumer Insights Manager sending a survey off to a programming team, then to additional fielding, analysis, and reporting teams, they’re the ones in their CIP managing the entire process. They have direct access to their survey to make changes, add questions, collaborate with teammates, and launch/pause fieldwork — all on their own schedule. Many platforms, like quantilope, offer real-time access to insights so that you can begin digging into your findings before fieldwork is even complete. All this leads to a faster, more streamlined insights process that shortens the timeline between business questions and business decisions.
Despite the easier usability, brands are using CIPs in the same ways they might use a traditional agency or other type of software; they can run the same ad-hoc, tracking, and advanced method studies they’re used to, but with more flexibility, customization options, and automated features. It’s in this hands-on nature of CIPs that brands are able to be more involved in their insights process. Because insights professionals are the ones setting up, running, and analyzing data on the platform, they’re better able to explain the value and implications of their insights to stakeholders or key decision makers.
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Integrating a consumer intelligence platform into your existing tech stack
With so many research tools and solutions on the market, it can be overwhelming to choose which one will be most beneficial to your organization — and choosing is the easy part! You then have to convince internal stakeholders that the investment is worth it. The best consumer intelligence platforms don’t become ‘yet another tool’ to manage; they serve as a highly valuable insights engine so you can actually do more with less.
Consider a research team that currently balances four different software tools or providers for survey creation, panel outreach, consulting, and reporting. All those services could move to one CIP where teams can set up their survey, connect to any panel provider of their choice, collaborate with a dedicated research team in real-time, and lean on AI to instantly generate reports, dashboards, and key takeaway summaries. Many CIPs (including quantilope) even integrate with third-party solutions like predictive analytics software or existing typing tools, creating a true one-stop-shop for researchers.
When choosing a CIP, confirm how it will integrate with existing tools (e.g., CRMs, internal data systems, marketing automation tools, etc.) to be sure it will streamline your workflow, rather than add additional steps. Despite where your business is now, you’ll also want to make sure your CIP can scale alongside any future business growth; check for limitations in data capacity or other capabilities that would become a hindrance down the line (if you expand globally, can your CIP support all languages?) Lastly, ask for a demo or trial to make sure you’re comfortable with the interface. The last thing you want is to shift to a CIP and then find it’s frustrating or confusing to use day-to-day.
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quantilope’s Consumer Intelligence Platform
quantilope is one example of an end-to-end CIP helping researchers streamline their traditional market research process through automation. From automated survey creation to advanced methods, AI-driven analytics, and automated reporting, quantilope users are able to significantly shorten their end-to-end insights process without sacrificing speed, cost, or most importantly, quality.
With the release of Forrester’s new report, we’re eager to see how the insights space continues to shift to more streamlined and efficient means of working. What used to take weeks or even months with traditional agencies or siloed research tools, can now be done in a matter of days (sometimes even hours!) with a centralized CIP. That’s what we call working smarter, not harder.
To learn more about quantilope’s Consumer Intelligence Platform, get in touch below!
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