Gaining deep insights about the customer has always helped businesses gain market traction. Even with so much “digital power” in our hands and tonnes of data, most companies, even now have miles to go, in terms of understanding their customers. Here is our take on the top 5 trends that we see transpiring in 2023.
- Data Data everywhere, but insights still don’t help!
Dealing with data explosion is still new for many companies. They are building their capabilities to handle the mountains of data, however, more than 60% of CMO’s even now feel, their team would end up spending most of their energy in sifting through murky data in comparison to analyzing them. We anticipate this trend will continue throughout 2023.
- Respondents’ vs Participants
In qualitative studies Participation is the key. Yet, on the street, we have commonly seen businesses engaging with respondents and using survey data in their qualitative research initiatives, owing to lack of budget, access to participants and more. From 2021, we saw this trend change, and companies began working closely with “participants” contrasted with “respondents”. Thanks to Covid Lockdowns and advent of virtual engagement tech, companies were able to engage with their research participants online, continuously. We expect similar arrangements to accelerate throughout 2023.
- Recruiting Research Participants is getting tougher.
In a recent research study, it was found that less than 20% of the eligible participant pool choose to participate. Additionally, more than 1/3rd of research activities recruits only 60% from their desired research pool. From Crowdsourcing through micro-targeting, innovative approaches for recruiting and compensating are likely to double this year.
- Increasing importance for Empathy in Qualitative Research
The researcher’s inherent ability to empathise with participants allows them to truly appreciate how they feel and think. 2023 will see a sharp increase in the need for empathetic listening, laddering, and mapping. Be it online or offline, research requires the interpersonal connect for a cohesive understanding of customer realities to build a sense of familiarity so that they arrive at valid results.
Going beyond having programmatic connections between systems, ResTech has evolved to a much larger degree. Tech that helps recruit, manage, and monitor participants and analyses responses are table stakes. Automating repeatable processes in data handling and analysis are seen to add agility to the process.
While AI and ML models will still need time to mature, in 2023, we foresee companies will modernize their ResTech stack to a large extent with software as a service (SaaS) offerings, getting ready to embrace AI.
