Consumer Research: How to Increase Respondent Engagement with Online Qual (Video)

Online qual is obviously technology-driven. You got to bring a human element to it, and there’s a lot of different ways to do that.

The key thing really in the whole humanizing and online technology study is to have the moderator get involved right up front. A video presentation, introduction, hey, here’s who I am, here’s what I’m trying to do, this is my job, this is what I need you to do, very, very important in creating that human element right at the beginning.

Another key tip that we love to see moderators do, and we see it happen all the time in real successful studies, is when that first day’s activity is posted, you’ve got the ability as a moderator to probe or say hi, and it’s great in that day one to have them post a picture of their family or them doing something they like to do or their intro video of themselves, and then the moderator pops in with a little probe and just says “Hey, Carrie, so nice to meet you, this is awesome, you have a beautiful family. I’m really looking forward to you participating in this study. This is very important to us and your ideas are awesome. Thank you.” That is huge, that sets the tone.

Daily notes, every morning, it’s phenomenal for a moderator or project manager to send out a daily note that basically just says “Hey, good morning. Here’s what we’re doing today.” I call it a little bit of cheerleading and housekeeping, so to speak, so you kind of give them some props for what they’ve done, a little housekeeping, “Hey, here’s what we’re going to do today, here’s what we need you to do,” and then if there are a few people who haven’t really engaged yet or are a little bit slow to get going, it’s always nice to say something like “Hey, if you’ve fallen behind, don’t worry about it.” You want to rehabilitate those people. It’s expensive to recruit people, so you don’t want to lose them. You pick up the ones that might feel like they’ve fallen behind maybe they’re feeling bad and they want to drop out, give them a little prop, little kick in the seat of the pants to kind of move along.

So that human touch on an online study is critical to the success and to the high completion rates that we often see on platforms. By humanizing your studies, you’re going to get a deeper level of connection with your respondents. They’re going to give you richer responses that they spend way more time on than you even planned based on whatever incentive you’re giving them, you’re going to get a deeper level of insight because of that amount of data and that connection, that emotional sharing with you, as well as leading to higher completion rates. You’re going to see completion rates, on a well-run, humanized study, at 90, 95, even 100% of the people recruited to a study actually complete everything beyond your expectations. So humanize your studies.