Options to optimize your company use of qualitative data.
I have seen many companies struggling to put together a hard data strategy. Hard data is quantitative data generated by company systems or company products. Examples are web page visualizations, landing page conversions, customer usage, sales per product, cancelled products, and so on. Some companies lack the systems to collect data, don`t have a strategy, or both.
Using hard data is easier with digitalization, where everything can be tracked, and, with the benefits of cloud technologies, it is very efficient (high-speed, reliability, mobility, unlimited storage etc). Before digitalization, it was much harder to obtain data from physical products or physical channels.
However, I came across with even more companies without a qualitative data strategy (soft data), which is qualitative information about customers. This is true for both startups and big companies alike. Soft data answers questions such as “what is the company customer behaviour profile?”, “what do customers value?”, “why are customers not engaged?”, “what do consumers dislike in a company user interface?”, “what are consumers saying about the company?”. Most companies don`t have a continuous, structured process to gather and store this type of data.
Naturally, this information is mostly exploratory, time consuming and harder to get. Founders and managers must be creative to recruit potential customers, make interviews, observe customers making choices in their daily lives, listen to their opinions and process data. Design and user experience professionals are quite helpful in these tasks. Most of this data is stored in powerpoint presentations, excel datasheets and notes or recorded in videos, audio, etc.
The best insights result from crossing the two types of data, hard and soft, which are really complementary. One example: early qualitative data will drive a product prototype that will be fine-tuned using hard data from usage. Another example: when customers are not paying their invoices, soft data may provide valuable insight, explaining why.
Founders move on, managers change, but, most of the time, the company keeps operating, therefore, it is key to maintain key knowledge in the organization.
So, how to store this data, track trends and evolution for future use or to explain past decisions? I believe that there are some ideas that can be considered.
Firstly, it is essential to have a continuous process to generate insights track and record data, with defined moments during the year and clear innovation techniques to use, not only, for disruptive, but also, for incremental innovation.
Secondly, approaches like design thinking are very useful at this stage, insights can be generated with customer discovery and with immersion in users experience. One method is to use a combination of design sprints to evaluate personas, motivation and usability creating prototypes to test insights. Larger companies are building Digital Labs to increase focus and stimulate innovation.
Almost every exploratory interaction can be recorded and analysed. Therefore, it is good practise to generate qualitative data using videos, photos and audio. Interactive video, where clicks and interactions can be added and in-video behaviour collected, is another very useful tool to gather large amounts of data from customers.
Thirdly, create an area to store the information, a data lake can be an option, which is a repository that allows to store structured and unstructured data.
Fourthly, there are some technologies to speed future analysis, for instance, with speech recognition technologies is already easier to transcript and analyse video and audio recordings from research, the internet or on-site.
Lastly, some information will remain qualitative, therefore, define a standard format and an area to store information so everyone in the company can use it.
