Defining a new era of feedback

Over the last several years, the pace of research has increased exponentially as the pace of product and market innovation dramatically accelerated during COVID. As more senior leaders leverage research to make key business decisions, they have increasingly asked the research teams for more color on the people behind the numbers. According to the 2022 GRIT Insights Practice Report, data storytelling was listed as the top focus for insights professionals. 

However, in practice, only 25% of organizations are able to bring both quantitative and qualitative research points together for a full picture of their research projects. This difficulty in connecting often starts with the software reality that many organizations use different tools to conduct quantitative and qualitative research. This slows down both the research and decision-making process. Using disconnected tools can also be expensive, hard to scale, and create unintentional data silos. The name of the game is less tools, more impact. As more teams add qualitative research into their insights toolkit, they find that it enhances the quantitative research they’re doing, by getting to know the person behind the data and bringing their insights to life in a way charts and graphs cannot.  

To keep up in a digital-first world, organizations need to take a human-led approach to create experiences that are impactful but curated for their customers, prospects, employees, stakeholders, and more. The only way to do this is to put human empathy at the center of their decision making – gathering real-life feedback from real-life people. 

At Qualtrics, our vision is to help researchers scale at ease, bringing the power of traditional in-person research methods to the digital world. Instead of relying on expensive and outdated research methods to incorporate experience data, organizations can take a more modern, technology-based approach with the combination of quantitative and qualitative research all on a single platform.

With a combined offering, organizations can quickly and easily uncover people’s thoughts, feelings and opinions to better understand their wants and needs toward a product, service or brand. By bringing qualitative methods online instead of in-person, researchers not only save time and money but can access new target audiences they wouldn’t normally reach. Imagine receiving more executive insights because you can record their feedback in a minute or reaching a new population of people that wouldn’t normally have the resources to drive to an in-person interview. 

Combining qualitative and quantitative methods will allow researchers to not only add more depth to their data but also gain a deeper understanding of the feedback provided. These new capabilities will harness the power of emotion and sentiment to help researchers gather deeper insights.

Bringing customer insights to life with Video Feedback

While qualitative research methodologies have always complemented quantitative research, in recent years, qualitative research has gained prominence due to the shift towards a remote world. This has changed consumers’ attitudes toward video interactions, normalizing video as a tool for researchers. 

This is why we’ve launched Video Feedback, a new way to collect qualitative feedback that includes video recording as a survey response option. Researchers will have the ability to collect responses, analyze, share and act on video feedback in a single platform with the rest of their experience data. This will make it easier to turn volumes of video research into insights to provide organizations with immediate actions, without ever having to leave the Qualtrics XM platform. 

Additional Video Feedback capabilities include:

• Video transcription - Automatically transcribe audio for analysis, saving researchers time to transcribe and analyze data
• Text analytics - Quickly surface topic and sentiment themes from video for analysis with sentiment scores, trends and automated alerts
• Video editor - Directly in the Qualtrics XM Platform, users can pull together the best clips to show and tell empathy-driven data stories
• Highlight reel - The ability to add music, text and transitions to bring stories to life
• Customizable dashboards - Present response clips or highlight reels so anyone in an organization can easily understand XM data

By being able to segment different themes and sentiment, researchers can find that the feedback originally requested for something can actually spur additional insights and commentary on something unrelated yet valuable. For example, a yogurt company requests feedback on a new flavor and actually finds a high demand for dairy-free yogurt alternatives. With video feedback, the yogurt company is  able to uncover an entirely new target market–the dairy-free community–and has real-life feedback they can utilize to get buy-in from stakeholders to shift their business priorities. 

For more information on Video Feedback, check out the press release.

Putting human feedback at the center of design and research

In today’s fast-paced environment, organizations must act swiftly in order to meet consumers where they’re at and not where they expect consumers to be at. As a new generation of consumers turn to video-based social platforms to share their feedback and experiences, it’s caused a much bigger push on research teams to capture customer empathy in their feedback programs.

However, there’s a disconnect between people’s expectations of real-world feedback today and what it actually entails. Many people envision sharing feedback as clicking through surveys or attending in-person focus groups when in reality, it’s become every-day people turning to social platforms–TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, etc.–to share their raw and honest feedback on a brand, product or service. We’re calling this the consumerization of feedback. It’s the idea of capturing feedback at scale across several platforms to better understand the people and “why” behind insights - versus just seeing data as numbers and charts.

This concept becomes even more important when you consider a report from Deloitte suggesting 67% of executives lack confidence in accessing their data, increasing the importance of bringing customer empathy to their data. By leveraging modern mediums that consumers are already using on a daily basis, researchers can feel more confident in bringing in-depth and authentic data along with immediate actions in order to receive executive support. 

The fact is, everyone wants more personal and customized experiences. It’s not just about addressing needs after the fact, but more about hearing and understanding customers in the moment. And at Qualtrics, we’ve set out to provide the right tools to help organizations capture holistic feedback from a new generation of consumers. With qualitative and quantitative insights integrated on the Qualtrics XM Platform, organizations can feel at ease about consolidating their tools and connecting their experience data in one place so they can gain deeper insights and take immediate action. 

In the coming months, we’ll be introducing more qualitative research capabilities to further support our customers and movement into this space.