Surveys have long served as a vital tool for businesses seeking to understand their customers. Yet the landscape of survey analytics has undergone rapid transformation lately, with new innovations offering unprecedented depth of insights. This guide explores key trends reshaping survey analytics today and tangible ways organizations can tap into these advancements.
Surveys – An Essential Instrument for Customer Intelligence
Well-designed surveys provide a direct pipeline for capturing Voice of Customer (VoC) feedback. They elucidate customer perceptions, preferences, pain points and more across every stage of the customer journey. These powerful insights enable organizations to enhance experiences, tailor offerings, strengthen loyalty and drive growth.
Yet changing consumer attitudes and fractured attention spans pose growing challenges for surveys. Response rates have declined industry-wide by over 25% since 2014 based on American Association for Public Opinion Research figures. And consumers increasingly desire more personalized, engaging survey experiences aligned to their preferred contact channels.
Fortunately, a revolution in analytics now empowers researchers to overcome these hurdles – collecting higher quality data, achieving deeper insights and applying findings with greater agility than ever before.
Key Innovations Reshaping Survey Analytics
Sophisticated Experimental Design
Careful experimental design and continuous optimization is essential for maximizing survey effectiveness. Specialized tools like SurveyMonkey‘s TechValidate now enable advanced techniques like adaptive choice-based conjoint using Bayesian algorithms. This allows researchers to refine product features, pricing and other attributes in real-time based on respondent preferences to optimize outcomes. Researchers can also readily test how modifying survey questions, flow, incentives and other variables impact key metrics like completion rates. AI assists by automatically ensuring surveys follow statistical best practices around sampling procedures, significance testing and mitigating bias.
Omnichannel Data Capture
Leading survey platforms like Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey and QuestionPro facilitate seamless data collection across web, mobile, social media, IoT devices and more. This omnichannel approach boosts convenience for respondents while capturing insights from natural customer environments. Location-enabled mobile surveys, for example, now gather first-hand field intel like shelf inventory or in-store displays. Consumer goods leaders like P&G run over 150K surveys annually across channels based on Qualtrics data.
AI-Powered Text & Image Analytics
Cutting-edge text analytics applies natural language processing to open-ended survey comments, call transcripts, chat logs and other unstructured text data. Sentiment analysis, topic modeling through latent semantic analysis and other techniques automatically extract hidden insights from language using SVM, LSTM and CNN algorithms. Emotion AI like Amazon Comprehend disambiguates subtle emotional cues within text using lexicon-based techniques, machine learning and vocal analysis. Gartner predicts over 50% of large organizations will be using these advanced NLP techniques by 2023.
Meanwhile, computer vision analyzes images from surveys, social media or other sources to gather visual intelligence. Google‘s TensorFlow machine learning library offers pre-built image recognition capabilities allowing brands to readily classify objects, landscapes, physical spaces and user-submitted photos. Forbes notes that 60% of consumers now prefer visual content over plain text.
Dynamic Interactive Visualizations
Specialized analytics dashboards allow researchers to explore findings, identify patterns and create impactful data stories in real time without IT help. Custom views can be generated on demand for any audience. Embedded self-service analytics place insights directly into stakeholders‘ workflows to drive faster decisions. Per a Bold BI survey, self-service analytics improves productivity for over 70% of organizations by allowing business teams to iterate without IT requests.
Continuous Active Surveying
Proactive, always-on surveys powered by automation gather longitudinal insights to track metrics over time. Instant analysis maintains data recency rather than relying on periodic snapshots. This agility allows organizations to monitor performance daily, detecting anomalies and significant event changes using predictive analytics. Researchers estimate actively surveyed consumers demonstrate over 80% better recall accuracy compared to single-instance surveys.
Micro-Targeting of Niche Segments
Precision targeting capabilities now enable surveys to home in on very specific sub-groups within a population to any desired degree of granularity. Researchers can isolate micro-segments like left-handed golfers under 30 in Florida interested in eco-friendly products based on behavioral, financial, locational and marketing category data. This drives more relevant findings tailored to niche Needs. A Pedowitz Group study found 72% of marketers rate enhanced audience targeting capabilities as highly valuable.
Continuous Behavioral Insights
Innovations like experience sampling method (ESM) and smartphone-based diary studies enable continuous in-situ insights rather than periodic snapshots. Respondents receive occasional brief surveys to capture feedback in their natural environments in the moment on an ongoing basis. This reduces recall bias and reveals more contextual behavioral insights aligned to specific activities. Media giant WPP recently acquired a major ESM provider to expand these capabilities.
Further, smartphones and IoT devices offer new passive data collection opportunities for observational behavioral insights without surveys. Spatial telemetry, clicks, scroll depth and sensor data like step counts can indicate usage, engagement and context. McKinsey advocates integrating these observational inputs with traditional surveys to achieve a more well-rounded perspective.
Real-World Applications
Leading global enterprises across industries are actively harnessing these innovations to transform their survey analytics. For example:
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A specialty retailer uses computer vision to analyze images shared on social media for observational data about how customers interact with their products. This provides authentic in-context insights that structured survey questions could miss.
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A software firm employs natural language processing to parse open-ended feedback and gain a nuanced perspective of user sentiments beyond quantitative ratings. Topic modeling helps reveal latent themes across customer comments at scale.
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An insurance provider monitors customer effort scores daily rather than quarterly to catch emerging CX issues faster, enabled by automated cross-channel surveys. Predictive analytics alerts service agents to members at high risk of churn.
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A CPG company performs adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis through online surveys to optimize new product features pre-launch by continuously adjusting product attribute combinations based on real-time respondent preferences.
Innovative vendors like Gavagai, H2O.ai and SurveyMonkey offer leading-edge capabilities to meet needs across these areas. Our comprehensive analytics software directory profiles 30+ top providers. Over 85% of Fortune 500 companies now partner with advanced analytics consultants to accelerate capability building per IDG research.
Best Practices for Implementation
Transitioning to a modern survey analytics approach involves careful change management. Researchers play a pivotal role in educating stakeholders about new techniques and advocating for resources. Gaining buy-in and aligning analytics to strategic goals is essential. Firms should also form cross-functional teams combining survey experts with data scientists and UX designers to integrate methods holistically. We recommend an iterative rollout focused on high-impact use cases first before expanding organization-wide.
The Future of Surveys is Here
As this guide has illuminated, survey analytics sits at the cusp of a new era unlocking unparalleled customer intelligence. Incumbents who neglect advancing their analytics risk losing touch while progressive brands reap the benefits. The robust innovations examined – from frictionless omnichannel data capture to AI-enabled text analytics and beyond – grant profound visibility into the customer experience paired with agile capabilities to instantly transform insights into action. Organizations prepared to make this analytics leap will gain an unassailable competitive edge. The future starts now.