Written by Magnus Olander, CTO, Quicksearch
New technology has always given rise to new behaviors and the research industry has always been quick to respond to new channels. To be honest, the industry has not been as quick to adopt the new behaviors that have come when people have adopted the technology.
A clear example is how surveys at the turn of the millennium went from paper to digital surveys, but the industry still continued to send out a single giant survey to customers and employees once a year. With paper, you asked everything you needed on a single occasion because the administration around the measurement was so circumstantial that you took the opportunity to ask when there was an opportunity. The behavior also continued on the web even though the cause no longer existed.
Nowadays, however, there are very few organizations that rely on a 10-month-old report on what the customers thought, without having a daily or at least weekly check on the customers, and surveys are ongoing all the time in one way or another. Either based on an event or an ongoing NKI/Relationship measurement where you ask a few customers at a time to keep your ear to the rail.
If we look at the current situation, the latest shift we have already passed is that surveys are now completely mobile. A few years ago, it was still a majority who responded to surveys via a regular computer, but about a year ago mobiles took over and right now over 60% of all surveys are answered via a phone or tablet.
The current situation – Mobility
It poses several new requirements, partly the old "paper questionnaires on the web" format no longer works, where you try to imitate a paper questionnaire by putting the questions divided into several questions on a page that you then flip between. It becomes very illogical flow in a small device like a phone.
You get answers that are collected on the go. Questionnaires are answered on the bus, at dinner, in front of the TV and at dinner. It becomes important to keep things short and focus on what is important. Answering in front of a computer or at the kitchen table is something completely different than in the bus queue. Which in itself requires that you have to focus more clearly on what you are asking for and make it simple.
Long scale questions or matrices become too cumbersome and are not always easy to fiddle with with a cold thumb while waiting for the bus.
It will not be worth the effort to answer if the way of asking questions is not mobile-friendly.
We also see that Email as a delivery method still works, but is no longer the most effective for getting attention. The mobility instead gives the opportunity to change the channel for the examination if you cannot reach it. You first try email, if that doesn't work, you can send an SMS.
As a step in mobility, SMS messaging has become a more active channel to collect feedback, not just to send out the link to a survey, but to collect feedback as a dialogue.
Tomorrow - The Human Machine
After a few years of experience with open dialogues via SMS, we have seen how that channel has developed as we humans have changed our behaviour. What a few years ago meant answering questions quite clearly and directly in the dialogues we sent out, the answers have now been spiced up or replaced by emojis, which have grown in use in that channel.
In a human dialogue, it is of course completely natural to answer the question "Did everything go well?" with a thumbs up and a happy smiley, clear system should be able to do that too.
As a step in collecting feedback via SMS, structured dialogues, very similar to the web and paper surveys, were first used. Slightly stilted expressions that don't quite fit in that channel.
But it allows functions such as "If you answered NO to question 7, skip to question 13". That kind of logic is very easy to create in structured collection.
Either the person answers YES or NO to the question if they have a dog.
But in a dialogue where you can answer anything, how should a structured dialogue handle when you answer the question with a cat emoji? What will be the next question on that? How should that answer be interpreted in the analysis?
It places new demands on the industry to absorb the feedback, to understand what the person who answered meant and realize that you are talking to a cat owner.
How do you quantify it in a report?
As an answer to this, we have worked with text analysis to try to understand the content of the answers that come back.
- Is the answer positive or negative?
- What is it about?
Is it relevant to deepen and ask more about that topic or should we continue the dialogue?
Text analysis therefore enters not only into the analysis of data, where it is already used today, but becomes a natural part of data collection.
When you get to that stage, you have effectively left the traditional survey and have created a bot, a small robot that interacts with a human based on what the human wants to tell about, when it is relevant for the human to tell about it. Such a bot works just as well on Facebook's Messenger as in SMS, Skype or other channels where we humans nowadays interact. The opportunity will be to collect feedback in more human digital channels, in a way that is human where the person we are talking to can tell us about what they think is relevant and when they think it is relevant.
The pendulum has thus swung from the questioner controlling the entire dialogue to the opportunity for the respondent to control it. It is actually with the vision that Quicksearch was founded with already 20 years ago. To develop the survey industry and methods for ongoing feedback. Even then, Quicksearch was the first in the world with intelligent dialogs/surveys and web surveys.
It will be exciting to see how the industry embraces the new opportunity.
