Your customers and clients are anxious to be heard right now, and you owe it to yourself (and them) the chance to hear them out. If you want to truly understand what you mean in their lives, now is the time to get ahead of that in light of the new realities they're facing. There are a number of different methodologies available to hear them out, and we'd love to help you be of service to them.
SURVEYS
Research shops are going full-out right now, as brands want to find out what’s going on with their customers in this crazy time. Online surveys can be a great way to get in front of them, but there are a few limitations to keep in mind. There might be other ways to make that happen that you should think about.
The main drawback with surveys at this point is that it’s tough to be exploratory. When there’s lots of unknowns, sometimes just asking point blank questions with no follow-up isn’t the best way to get at what’s going on with folks. You can’t really pivot for deeper insight into their answers, and oftentimes folks don’t necessarily have the self-awareness to really know what’s going on in their hearts and minds. That’s especially true when a situation is so new for them, like we’re facing with Covid-19.
If you do a survey, consider adding in as many open-text answers as possible. That at least gives folks a chance to wax eloquent about what they’re thinking. The challenge, however, is making sense of all the answers when it comes time to report. It’s pretty straightforward to tally up countable answers, but it’s a different skillset to deal with qualitative themes. That gets even trickier when you’re dealing with a high volume of answers, because coding all those open-text answers is time-consuming.
We recently did a survey that had several open-text questions and over 18,000 responses, and there’s no way to do that without the help of AI-assisted coding. The way that works is pretty straightforward. You code the themes for a few hundred responses and the AI learns how you like to code them. Then you turn the AI loose on all the rest of the uncoded responses and it codes them for you. It’s as much an art as a science, but once you get it working it’s a real time-saver. The result is you can mine surveys for more exploratory data than you might otherwise think possible.
EXPLORATORY RESEARCH
If you want to purely exploratory research, direct-to-respondent is a great way to go because you can ask a question, listen, probe for more information, and pivot your approach in the moment. There is no end to the options here, so I’ll just cover the ones I always gravitate to, and adjust it for a Covid-friendly approach (i.e. not in-person).
In-depth Interviews: This is when you chat with one person at a time and basically act like Larry King to find out the inner workings of their thoughts and emotions. It’s a great way to go deep and explore around ideas and themes. These can be done on the phone, but Zoom, TeamViewer or other video chat platforms work well too. Be sure you can record them for future analysis.
Online Video Diaries: These platforms enable the respondents to answer your questions in a more robust way. It’s not just writing down their answers, they video their responses so you can see the non-verbal cues. You can also ask them to do tasks for you and record them doing it - online or in real life. It’s a great way to hear directly from them. I love using dscout and Instapanel for this, because they’ve got a wide range of respondents ready to go. If they can’t convene the panel you need, then you can recruit them like you would for any focus group or survey. The best part is the output. There’s nothing like having your client experience the thoughts and emotions of their customer right from them directly. It’s very powerful. As a researcher you have to be extra-careful, because if you misrepresent what’s actually going on with people you run the risk of sending the client in the wrong strategic direction. But as a researcher you’re trained to prevent that.
AI Discussion Groups: One of my other favourite approaches to gathering qualitative is AI-facilitated discussion groups. These start as normal surveys, except they feel like you’re texting with the researcher. The respondent is asked questions in a texting format and they answer like any other survey. But then it gets weird, because they're actually interacting with a specially-designed chatbot. After a few answers, the bot stops you and tells you other people answered the same question slightly differently, and was that what you meant to say? It cycles through that answer-triangulate with others process for awhile. At the end of the survey, they’ve not only given their answers but they’ve commented on and engaged with other answers too. As a result, you’ve got a very useful combination of unique answers and group consensus. The output is qualitative in nature, but it’s not a quantitative rigour that should satisfy most of your insight needs. My go-to for this is GroupSolver. Here’s an article I did recently that goes into more depth: AI-Powered Surveys: Hyped or Helpful?
There is lot more to say on this topic (don’t get me started), but suffice it to say that there are plenty of ways to get insights from your clients, stakeholders and detractors in the post-Covid world.
Happy to help out at any point! mszabo@ansticecom.com