Introduction
Whether you’re trying to conquer new product development or improve the experience of your workforce, ensuring that decisions are made based on high-quality data has never been so important. Using poor-quality, or biased data will lead to blind spots, false representations of experiences, and an impossible task to extract reliable actionable insights.
Houston, we have a problem (with our surveys)
The key problem with current methodologies to obtain solicited data is the questioning. Asking the right questions is critical, but so easy to get wrong. Surveys are a hassle for most people. They are a mundane and unrewarding task that often needs incentivising. How can we expect people to share their authentic feelings and experiences when they’re faced with the demoralising battle of answering tens of uninteresting and often biased questions?
We can’t, and it’s an issue that contributes towards the well-known survey fatigue that is increasingly diminishing the reach of market research and employee experience.
But, what else can we do?
Conversations are key
One of the richest sources of data is conversational dialogue. Typically, this is not currently captured, as mostly we converse with acquaintances, friends, family, and colleagues on the street, in the pub, at work, or at home. But what if we did start capturing this source of data?
Conversations are often stories. Stories we share of the experiences we’ve had from earlier in the day, last week, last year. They’re engaging, emotional, and sometimes captivating to hear. There are no set questions. Conversations evolve through adaptive questioning based on what’s being heard and thought. This promotes an open discussion about the subject matter at hand.
The era of voicebots
With the rapid advance of Artificial Intelligence, we’re entering an era where AI can be used to capture and leverage conversational data in ways that mirror human-to-human interactions. The most powerful technology to achieve this are voicebots. Voicebots are a common occurrence in basic and formulaic customer service functions. However, they remain underutilised for research purposes. For the forward thinking amongst us, it has long been known that voicebot technology can provide a step-change method for obtaining rich and insightful data.
Here’s how.
Leveraging voicebots will empower research
Firstly, it is natural that humans are more engaged during a vocal conversation. We speak three times faster than we type and therefore have less time to craft a response, removing the opportunity for conscious filtering of the answer, which promotes a stronger link to our more genuine subconscious thoughts.
Staying with the natural element of communicating, we speak more than we type. Typing on a keyboard or on a phone can seem like an onerous task, especially after a tiring day or whilst on the move – we naturally condense what we’re trying to say on a text, for example, compared to speaking into a phone’s microphone. Just face it, it’s easier.
Secondly, surveys have their place, but we can’t probe answers. Questions are set in stone and it’s a case of hoping there’s a high response rate and engagement. Through voicebots and AI developments, specifically real-time data analysis, voicebots are capable of generating probing questions to dig deeper into topics that have been identified as an interesting talking point to the interviewee, through recorded high levels of positive or negative sentiment as they’re talking. By generating questions according to what’s being said, we can create a human-like conversation resulting in a significantly valuable dataset.
Thirdly, conducting interviews produce valuable insights but they are time consuming. Hiring an interviewer to conduct even 30 interviews can take weeks to complete due to various factors such as availability and preparation. By deploying a voicebot, organisations can interview those 30 interviewees simultaneously, significantly reducing field work time from weeks to hours and no doubt producing cost savings along the way.
Conclusion
Leveraging voicebots to obtain deep, actionable insights could start a new era for research, an era where we base decisions on rich and valuable data mimicking human conversations, empowering organisations to improve and innovate with efficiency and confidence.
About Web XB
At Web XB, we aim to be always at the forefront of new technologies that we know provide maximum value to our clients. Voicebots are one of these. Get in touch to learn more.
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