If you walk into any market research conference and pick up the schedule, you’ll see plenty of AI content. There is no denying that there is huge interest in how AI tools can help companies dive deeper into the results and drive efficiencies. The truth is, AI is still a nascent tool in market research. Does it have great upside and potential? Absolutely! Are there potential obstacles? You bet!
Our challenge at ResponsivMR is to ensure we’re harnessing AI without losing sight of the human, emotional elements that are critical to our clients’ research.
How much value are you getting from your open ends? Enter: Intelligent probing with AI conversational agents.
Research agencies are challenged to uncover rich insights on tight timelines and tight budgets, and can’t always commission a full-scale study that includes qualitative and quantitative phases… It’s a lot.
In situations like these, a survey offers opportunities to collect data, along with open-ended questions that provide insights into what the respondent is thinking. However, surveys can feel very scripted and mundane to the respondent. AI presents us with unique and powerful ways to make the survey experience feel more conversational and human.
AI conversational agents simulate human interactions to achieve more nuanced and dynamic responses in surveys and interviews. We’ve tailored our approach to focus on the client’s activation goals, eliciting deeper insights from respondents through “intelligent probing.”
The agents ask respondents questions based on their previous responses, encouraging them to elaborate on why they answered as they did. We build laddering techniques into the survey to uncover higher-level conceptual insights and custom probing personalities to engage different target audiences.
The ability to develop specific queries based on the respondents’ survey answers brings more value to the survey approach by providing a more comprehensive understanding of consumer motivations. This is especially true when trying to better understand the ‘why’ behind a critical question.
For example, if we’re conducting a survey about wine preferences, we can ask the respondent to rank wines from favorite to least favorite. Then, the AI agents can ask additional questions to delve into the emotional reasons behind respondents’ preferences. The agent might ask, “I notice you have a very strong preference for Merlot; can you tell me more about that?” which might elicit a deeper response such as, “My husband and I fell in love over a bottle of Merlot, and it’s still our go-to splurge on date night. Strange to say, but that first sip always brings me back to our first conversation.”
An extension of intelligent probing that has benefited our clients is a quantitative and qualitative integration. In these use cases, clients have quantitative surveys and add-on short qualitative exercises utilizing intelligent probing. This allows research teams to dive deeper into key motivations / emotional drivers to complement the quantitative data.
This approach has had many benefits for our clients:
- Broad scope + Depth – Quant provides statistical validity, while qual offers deeper and contextual understanding of respondents’ perspectives, experiences and beliefs.
- Explaining the unexpected – Qual data can help interpret patterns observed in quantitative data, i.e., if a survey shows a drop in customer satisfaction, interviews can reveal the underlying reason.
- Addressing complex questions – Helps teams understand the prevalence (quant) and lived experience (qual) of a new behavior.
- Time saving – Streamlines the process compared to running two separate studies
- Meeting diverse stakeholder needs – Brands typically disseminate their research across different parts of the organization to help inform decision making. Some departments find quantitative data more aligned with their functions, while others resonate more with deeper / human-centric insights.
If you’d like to learn more about utilizing Intelligent Programming or Combined Quant / Qual with AI, please contact me to discuss. I’d love to learn more about your business, research goals and how this new / exciting technology can enhance your insights.
Connor Duffey
Vice President, Client Services
cduffey@responsivmr.com