At Discuss.io, we’ve crafted software for qualitative market research faster than outdated manual methods. In days rather than weeks, Discuss recruits respondents in over 30 countries for webcam-enabled individual in-depth interviews and focus groups.
Fueled by the addition of capabilities in Africa and Southeast Asia, Discuss experienced growth of over 400% since October 2015. June was a record-breaking month for us. Our staff operated at record high efficiency, setting new bests for the number of interviews executed within a day, a week, and month!
We leveraged recruiting automation, next-generation streaming technology, and the support of a fantastic staff at every point in the qualitative research process. Together, we achieved a level of unprecedented speed and reliability, and set three records in as many weeks—any one of which a global research agency would be proud to claim—with the support of clients like Clorox and Unilever and Logitech who continue to value the Discuss platform.
Read on to learn more about the problems we addressed and the solutions we implemented in order to create an online qualitative market research tool for those who don’t want to wait for insights.The Need for a Faster Insights Process
In today’s market, smart marketers move quickly to stay in step with the desires of consumers, and face-to-face interviewing offers insight into those minds and to the story behind the numbers.
It’s a surprise, then, that only one in ten Fortune 500 companies conduct qualitative research. We should, as marketers, question the causes of weak penetration when a methodology that is essential to the market research space is overlooked by nine out of 10 of the world’s most successful businesses. As entrepreneurs and software developers, we asked which can factors can be optimized? What would a holistic solution to these problems look like?
When you add the time and trouble of travel, facility fees, honoraria, and related expenses, then the need for a cheaper, faster, and deeper tool becomes evident. We discovered qualitative market research means a lot of potential complications in recruitment, scheduling, translation and moderation needs, like capturing the interview itself and reporting the results. Traditionally, this raises the cost of qualitative research in time and money, and return on investment may not be realized for months due to long production cycles caused by technologically-limited parties, often siloed away from each other.
Existing arrangements not only invite inefficiency, they also fail to provide the missing factor: scalability. Technology can take qualitative market research farther, not simply make up for deficiencies. At Discuss, we have purpose-built a platform that has significantly reduced the time and cost of recruiting and conducting qualitative market research interviews for our clients.Smart Automation Meets Global SaaS
Our market research platform provides the scalability crucial to move from a limited-capacity focus group facility-based model to one that works seamlessly online.
We have moved processes as different as recruitment and video editing into one platform, disrupting the boundaries that once slowed access and production within the market research landscape.
In order to do so, we had to learn how to automate and assist manual processes, and then create a platform that brought those capabilities together, to create scalability. In the process, we learned how to save our clients on administrative and logistics costs by 40-60% compared to traditional market research arrangements.
Take, for example, the record of 38 interview sessions in a day. Traditionally, 38 in-depth-interviews would take weeks, not a single day.
We facilitated so many in a day because we were able to create a platform with programmable access to millions of panelists: in the 90 days, we’ve connected researchers to panelists in 15 countries including Nigeria, Morocco, South Africa, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, all online.
With webcam-based teleconferencing that eliminated the need for travel to a specific place, we enabled our clients to reach out to more people, rely on built-in capabilities for transcription, translation, and moderation to bridge the gap between researchers and consumers, and use the drag-and-drop ClipMaker to synthesize “Aha!” moments into a memorable, searchable video in just clicks.
While the typical market research team might complete one project per month, marketers using our platform have significantly reduced the time and cost of recruiting and conducting qualitative research interviews, so that we can all get more done, faster, and with fewer dollars.
Join a live training with our sales staff to learn more about how Discuss can save your business time and money.
