Collect Qualitative Feedback in the Agile Market Research Realm

Posted Aug 09, 2019

Tiffany Mullin

Market researchers strive to connect their products to their target markets faster, especially in an economy where consumers want their products essentially on-demand. In order for businesses to stay relevant with target consumers, we make it easy and quick to collect qualitative data within a quantitative survey. Instead of interviewing hundreds of individuals face-to-face for qualitative feedback or only collecting quantitative data, the AYTM platform has solutions that give you richer insight into your consumer profiles and can support companies being more responsive to their market.

We have the recipe where you can bake your cake and eat it too; utilize our online survey platform to ask respondents both quantitative and qualitative feedback all in one survey.

Qualitative research is invaluable when you are able to observe your respondent’s personal environments, their gestures, facial expressions, and their frequent behavior without traveling to sit face-to-face for an interview. The fast insights you receive by collecting qualitative feedback helps you to be more actionable as a researcher.

You’ll be able to build a better profile of your consumers using open-ended, video response and image response question types.

On the AYTM online survey platform, these 3 question types will allow people to share their emotions and body language in their own words. In most cases, we guarantee delivery of survey results in a matter of hours, so you’ve got the qualitative and quantitative data you need from your consumers to move forward with your research team.

1. Open-ended question type:

Open ended questions are used when the objective is to learn something beyond your expectations, without biasing respondents with a predetermined set of answers.

It can help you gather the expressions and thoughts of your target market in their own words. These questions should be upfront and easy to answer as respondents are more inclined to answer honestly.

Instead of: “Do you like to travel?”‍

Use: “Please describe the best vacation you ever took and why.”

2. Video response question type:

The way we receive and share information is moving away from the text space and moving towards media driven responses. We encourage clients to use the video response that leverages the familiarity and comfort that respondents have with capturing information on their phone or computer webcam. This question type gives you more time to do what you’re best at: Storytelling using respondent’s data.

The video response allows you to humanize your insights when you are presenting an advertisement or concept to your audience. Imagine showing your team the exact facial responses and emotions a person has when viewing your stimulus--observing your participants’ video responses is a powerful way to make decisions that are directly connected to your consumers.

Make sure to be specific and add “Talking Points” to focus on the type of stories and answers you want to collect so the respondent stays on topic. Engage and observe your respondents. Watch the way people emote and provide feedback rather than reading a text feedback response.

While this question type is a small part of your total feedback, you’ll want to make this question optional. Remember, not all respondents will be prepared or have the technical skill to record a video of themselves. Respondents will go through a simple checklist before recording a video response. This ensures that they don’t try to record themselves during an orchestra performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture--which although beautiful, could be too loud and distracting to gather insights from. If you really want to understand how your consumers feel and what they think, then the video responses will be your ultimate feedback.

3. Image Response question type:

We are so comfortable now with taking pictures of the delectable dessert we are eating or our pets being doofy; we’ve incorporated that ease and familiarity of picture taking and selfies into our image response survey question. Adding an image response question to your survey will help you understand the environment or personality of those respondents who are answering your survey.

You spend a lot of time and energy creating surveys to receive useful data. Be explicit as possible with your questions so you prevent receiving useless data.

A bad instruction: “Did you catch a tan on your vacation?”

The good question to ask: “What types of pictures did you share on social media from your favorite vacation?”

Here are some top tips for getting the most out of AYTM’s qualitative question types:

If you are trying to build consumer personas, do a panel survey and include research tests like Conjoint with segmentation or MaxDiff with your qualitative questions. You’ll have the tools in Personality Radar and Persona segmentation to combine with the insights from the open-ended questions, video questions, or image questions. You’ll get a deeper understanding of who your consumers are.
Use the Word Cloud from your open-ended responses combined with ranking or reorder questions to understand the emotional sentiment respondents. Ask them to rank/order the same stimulus by attributes you define after you ask them to respond to in their own words.
Think through the order of the questions you ask in the survey. Asking a quantitative question before a qualitative one can influence how a respondent answers and what they say/do. Use the qualitative questions first to mitigate creating bias.

The Takeaways

Qualitative data adds an additional layer of insights to your survey. So advanced, but it’s easy to collect. Next time you create a survey online, see what you discover from your target market and the AYTM survey tools.

Add in an open-ended question to ask your respondents for their comments, feedback and suggestions that aren’t as easily classified and tallied as numbers can be.

Add in a video response question to pick up the frequent behavior of your respondent to gather more observational insight with facial expressions and body language.

Add in an Image response question type for the interactive approach of understanding respondent’s experiences by taking a picture in their own environment.

Check out our Webinar: “Collect Qualitative Feedback”

Next webinar announcement:

“Trust, Transparency and Tools”

Tuesday August, 27th, 2019

As a researcher, do you find the lack of transparency with most self-service research tools?

Pull back the curtain to reveal where your data is coming from. In this session, we will discuss the quality of our proprietary panel, optimizing survey lengths and how pre-qualification questions and incidence rates are important to survey UI. Discover the transparency and empathy behind survey design with AYTM. Click here to register.