Technology has been at the helm of every industry for over a decade. Especially since most businesses have gone digital in the last few years. And as AI has immensely evolved, how can qualitative market research remain aloof of its charm?

Whether your respondents fill out online surveys to make money in India, the US, and other regions or participate in one-on-one interviews with market researchers, artificial intelligence aids all the processes.

Let’s walk you through how artificial intelligence trends are catching up with the market research industry.

Current AI Trends in Market Research

1. AI-Backed Text Analysis in Surveys

To generate proper data in qualitative market research, you need your survey forms open for text-based answers with open-ended questions. However, analyzing such long content and coming up with insights for decision-making is neither a cakewalk nor a jiffy. Here, AI proves to have immense potential.

AI-driven tools read unstructured text and capitalize on keywords, hashtags, and phrases. The technology can broadly segregate the content into various categories based on context.

AI-enabled techniques can predict and decipher broken sentences and jumbled words, emoticons, and typos in lesser time if done manually. They can even label a respondent’s answer with a particular sentiment. Without marring the meaning of an answer, researchers can derive opinions from open-ended questions with more efficiency now.

Make natural language processing, sentiment decoding, and text analysis your friend in market research projects.

2. Inclusivity with artificial intelligence in Market Research

We have stressed bringing inclusivity and diversity in market research and online surveys several times. But no efforts are enough efforts in this area.

Want to include a bigger pool of users in your surveys and market research and leverage more opinions for your product improvement and customer experience? Inclusivity is your go-to tool. With increasingly diverse backgrounds filling out your surveys for qualitative market research, your studies are lesser prone to biased data. This makes it rare to miss out on feedback that might not bother a privileged community.

AI-driven decision-making and data collection aren’t prone to biases and prejudices like humans. For instance, uploading a demo video in your form without captions might frustrate users with limited language capabilities or hearing capacity. But an AI-generated script might help such users grasp the ascent, tone, complex expressions, and words.

Likewise, decision-making via analytics can get skewed if executives and stakeholders manually analyze complex and massive data. Technologies like predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, machine learning, etc., can help with accurate insights without partiality.

Remember, the more you include a wider audience, the better your data is. A larger sample will bring better market research results.

 

3. Enhanced Customer Experience

Users should be engaged all the time during their journey through the research methods, whether it’s a focus group survey or an online survey. From the day they enroll with your company or your panel partner to the minute they click on the submit button, your respondents should be perpetually hooked. So, customer experience is highly required.

With an AI-backed system and predictive algorithms, you can evaluate the average stay time for a user on your survey forms. Embed emoticon-based answers in your questionnaires for easy replies. Capture the facial expression in video feedback and users’ sentiments through their texts. Make these data work in your favor. Weigh their engagement and reward users accordingly to keep them coming back.

To render a solid CX to your respondents, you can also bank upon social media listening, which we discussed below.

Customer journey mapping—from where they found you to how they made a purchase—helps to learn a user’s behavior and motivation. AI can help you learn more about your users and help you identify their pain points and gaps in the market.

4. Social Media Listening

Monitoring your users on social media and listening to their voices are key factors in improving your services and your relationship with users. Several social media listening and monitoring tools backed with AI exist in the market—Talkwalker, YouScan, NetBase, etc.

These tools help you sift through posts and comments on social platforms to identify your brand mentions, hashtags you follow or care for, and images by your audience. Pinpointing your brand mention and product with the sentiments of the respondents aids in learning the deep and hidden meanings of your audience.

You can start a real-time chat with the people and assess their needs and pain points. Explore new audience segments through social media that you might be completely unaware of. Analyze your peers in the industry and embrace the sweeping trends.

5. Desk Research Made Easy

You can use AI in your secondary research too. It’s the process of collecting insights already available in the market via old surveys, government studies, and existing reports in public domains.

With the help of AI, you can sit back (hence, desk research), avoid going to the field, and still explore hidden data. With old data, you can combine some new research and generate novel facts and numbers.

AI algorithm can scour the long articles in magazines and newspapers that are not in the right format for your research and can generate contextual meaning with numbers and perceptions. No need to go through epic-length government-fulfilled articles and research papers.

You can even analyze the trends in pricing, improvements, and revolutions in your industry and quotes by the visionaries to make research better sense.

 

Partner with Opinionest to Ace Market Research with Advanced Tech

Opinionest, a panel partner with the market research brand Track Opinion, has been serving several industries for 14 years. We specialize in customer-centric online surveys and CATI-based research methods utilizing technologies to the fullest. We pride ourselves on owning one of the best online survey sites in India. Please approach us here to foray into technology-backed surveys and market research.