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Digital qualitative research tools have exploded on the market over the last five years, and they are quickly becoming a must-have in your insights toolkit. But to succeed with these new technologies, you need to understand where they are most helpful. Find out in the below list of five ways to use digital qual.
1. Optimize Your Consumer Journey
You likely have enough data points to discover what steps make up your customers’ journey, but do you know why or how they got there? Using a tool such as QualBoard, Sago’s digital discussions platform, or Over the Shoulder, Sago’s mobile ethnography app, allows you to quickly and efficiently dig deeper and optimize the journey. Discovering how customers found your product or what their key considerations were before purchase enables your organization to make the customer experience easier and more positive, which in turn helps drive growth.
2. Improve Products or Services
Understanding why customers love (or hate) your product or service is essential to continued growth and success. However, conventional qualitative methods are often too slow to provide the rapid feedback needed to make improvements. Use a digital qualitative approach instead to quickly and accurately hear from your customers. Have respondents record videos of themselves using your product to understand how it functions in real life. A tool such as QualBoard allows participants to easily upload videos on their own schedule, making it a win-win for both parties. Over the Shoulder provides you the opportunity to go along with your participants as they engage with your service—no matter where each of you is located. Digital qual helps you get the critical feedback you need on tight timelines.
3. Enhance Your Ad and Concept Testing
When doing ad and concept development, it’s beneficial to understand why your target audience likes or dislikes your options. Unfortunately, project timelines rarely leave much room for lengthy qualitative interviews. The solution? You guessed it—digital qual. Create a digital discussion board using a tool such as QualBoard to understand how participants react to new packaging or ads. See reactions to messaging for yourself and probe deeper with virtual video interviews on a platform such as QualMeeting. Either way, you’ll not only gather helpful information before moving forward with development, but you’ll also have key insights to inform future projects.
4. Boost Your Brainstorming and Creative Ideation
Bringing the voice of your customer into your ideation processes early on ensures that what you are developing actually meets a need or desire in the market. Before sitting down to brainstorm, use a qualitative tool such as QualBoard to run digital discussions or video focus groups to hear from your target audience what their current challenges, pain points, or wishlists are. These don’t have to take much time and will keep your work truly customer-centric from the get-go.
5. Understand Consumer Habits and Practices
Understanding what customers’ day-to-day lives look like or how they go about certain tasks provides important insights, but traditional self-reporting methods aren’t always reliable. A mobile ethnography tool, such as Over the Shoulder, makes it easier for you and your customer to track behaviors for key in-the-moment insights. Take it a step further and discover how customers actually use your product and whether there are opportunities to make it more useful.
The number of uses for digital qualitative research tools is truly infinite, but these are a great place to start. Whether you are looking to improve your customer experience, develop better products, or produce ads that resonate, there’s a digital qual solution to help.
Learn more about Sago’s Suite of Digital Qualitative Tools
Speak with our team to get started with QualBoard or QualMeeting.
