Often, it is said that market research is vital for business success. And it is true - effective market research helps you get inside your customers' heads. And this feedback can help businesses make crucial decisions regarding new product launches, sales, marketing, and product development.  

But there is something we do not often talk about in market research: the traditional method of collecting customer data is not accurate and reliable. Why? Because these methods like polls, questionnaires, and surveys seek to understand customers' actions and beliefs. But they fail to capture customers' subconscious and emotional triggers - your customers' emotions, which drive most of their decisions.

While using these methods is better than developing strategies without the customer in mind - it is an incomplete approach leading to suboptimal results. How? Well, because you are entirely missing the subconscious, the human element in the decision-making process. Also, these methods are not real-time and often biased. And that's where live conversations can help market researchers.

With instant, technology-led solutions powered by conversation intelligence and emotion AI, brands can converse with their consumers virtually. And gain human insights from these conversations by measuring consumer attention, engagement, and emotional responses.

But what exactly are live conversations, how can you converse with consumers in real-time, their advantages, and how can these conversations help you make better business decisions? Keep up because we will dive deep into this subject.

What are Live Conversation, and Why Do live Interviews Matter?

As the name says, live interviews or conversations are where you are physically or virtually present for the interview with customers. It enables two-way, interactive discussions with customers. You can ask follow-up questions to get context on the customer's initial response.  

These real-time conversations yield a more extensive and much more diverse universe of customer insights. And you can learn much more about your consumers than you could by using traditional feedback methods.

Live conversations allow you to easily design any feedback experience to include responsive questioning and more natural language responses leading to obtaining the correct experience data – customers' beliefs, emotions, and intents.  

Live video interviews are the fastest and the most effective way to identify consumers' emotional motivators. This qualitative data helps you get deeper insights into your customers and help businesses close experience gaps.

In short, you can gain unmatched, nuanced data about your consumers by doing live video interviews

How Can You Converse with Consumers in Real-time?

In this remote-first world, conducting live interviews with customers is quite easy. There are so many video conferencing tools available that you can use to conduct live video interviews via your computer. And that is why many top companies routinely conduct live interviews virtually to save time and money.  

But these video conferencing tools are not built with virtual interviews in mind; they fail to capture the emotional and behavioral traits of the respondent, which would have been possible in real-life interviews. And that's where platforms leveraging Emotion AI - such as Decode - are changing the game.  

With Decode, you can converse with your customers seamlessly and get real-time transcriptions of these conversations in over 100 languages. Also, you can share these virtual meeting recordings with members of your team and bring all these conversations across platforms in a single unified dashboard. You can also highlight the key moments in these conversations and tag those moments with predefined notes to support your conclusions or recommendations.

The key benefit of using Emotion AI for these live conversations is the ability to process people's feelings and sentiments and gain human insights into these conversations by measuring users' attention, engagement, and emotional responses.  

Related Read: How a Single Source of Truth Can Help Researchers Drive Reliable and Accurate Insights.

Benefits of Conducting Live Customer Interviews  

We all know that customer experience is crucial to the survival and growth of any business these days. A great CX helps you retain customers and promotes brand loyalty and advocacy. But do you know that customer experiences are better when deep customer insights back them? Well, you probably do. So, to deliver great CX, you need to understand your customers' needs. In fact, the more you know and understand your customers' needs, the better your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts will be.

To understand their customer needs, many companies use surveys, questionnaires, etc. But often, people do not put much thought into filling them out. And the answers do not reveal your consumers' deepest, innermost feelings. A better way to learn what your customers want or do not want is to have live conversations.

The most significant benefit of conducting live customer interviews is having real conversations with your customers and gaining a deeper insight into them. In live interviews, you can ask about specific experiences and prompt follow-up questions if something is unclear or confusing and can unearth more-detailed insights. Also, you can observe verbal as well as non-verbal cues.

A live interview allows you to get deeper, more emotional insights into customers, which are crucial to drive business outcomes - as the way our customers think and feel - plays a significant role in their actions.

Now that you know the benefits of conducting live interviews virtually let's talk about the tools you need to conduct as well as get more out of these conversations.

Tools to Conduct and Derive Value from Live Conversations

Web Conferencing Platform

To conduct live customer interviews, you need a web conferencing tool like Zoom, Team, or Webex. One that lets you perform an audio and video conversation seamlessly. But it is not necessary to use only these tools if you are using any other tool for web conferencing that will also work.

Related Read: 5 Video Conferencing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2022.

Notetaker

While conducting these live interviews, you need a notetaker where you can take notes, so you never miss a word from these conversations. And access and share these notes with any team member for better collaboration. A tool that allows you to store all these notes in a central place where you can instantly search for them, helping you get more from these conversations.

Conversation Analytics Platform  

To get value from customer conversations, you need a platform that lets you analyze these conversations. One that enables you to translate these interviews into tangible data of what people say so you can gain valuable insights into these conversations.  

To conduct live customer interviews and leverage these conversations, you can use all the aforementioned tools. But if you are trying to limit the number of tools in your stack or if you want to gain real-time human insights into your customer conversations, you can use Decode.  

It allows you to conduct, collate, collaborate, and comprehend these conversations. Wondering how? Well, you can conduct better qual interviews with our proprietary meeting room built with customer interviews in mind.  

With the help of Emotion AI, voice tonality, and text-based sentiment analysis, it lets you measure consumer attention, engagement, and emotional responses and turn that data into scaled, structured data. It enables you to share these insights within and outside the organization in a simple and attractive layout.  

Also, it lets you bring all your consumer conversations across platforms under one roof so you can get detailed transcripts and analytics on them.

Make Better Business Decisions with Live Conversations

Here are three ways in which live customer interviews can help your business:

Make Faster Decisions

To succeed in business these days, we need to understand consumers' changing expectations faster. Why? Because on the one hand, customer loyalties are on the decline, on the other hand, customer expectations are at an all-time high.  

In fact, there have been volatile shifts in consumer expectations in the past two years. Though customer needs and expectations have been rising for quite some years now, the bar has gone way up during the pandemic. So how can you meet consumer expectations?

Well, to meet consumer expectations, businesses require a deeper understanding of the customers, which is only possible through qualitative research methods like live virtual conversations. With live video interviews, you can learn more about your consumers in less time and make better-informed decisions.

Live Conversations Leads to More Honest Responses

To make better business decisions, you need to understand what makes your customers tick. You need to understand your customers not just on the conscious level but on the subconscious level too. And live conversations can help you do that.

How? Live interviews allow the interviewer to probe and clarify the consumers' comments in real-time and post justifications. This allows the interviewer to dig deeper and get to the why part—why people do the things they do. Also, live conversations target a different part of the mind than traditional methods like surveys or questionnaires.

In live interviews, people speak instead of writing thoughts down, and speaking aloud engages both analytical and subconscious parts of humans' brains. Thus, helping researchers unlock unfiltered, subconscious responses.

In short, by conducting live interviews on the Decode platform, you can get to those hidden "Why's" of why your consumers do what they do.

Live Virtual Conversations Leads to Emotion and Sentiment Analysis  

By interacting with your customers through a video conferencing platform, you can record what consumers say and how they say it. So, in addition to gaining consumer insights through what they are saying, businesses can tap into the subconscious of their users and get behavior and emotion insights by conducting live conversations virtually.  

Also, with the help of the latest technologies, these video conversations can be translated into tangible data to understand the conversational intent of the participants, helping businesses gain a complete understanding of consumers and make better decisions.

Easily Share Insights with Your Team  

One of the main benefits of conducting live virtual interviews are they can be easily recorded. This makes it easy to access these conversations, and you can easily share these insights with your team by sharing these recordings.  

If you are using a conversation intelligence platform like Decode, you can also create collections and group these conversations logically to derive aggregate insights. Also, you can highlight key moments in these user research interviews and tag those moments with pre-defined notes so that your team members do not have to spend hours checking them.

Wrapping Up

I hope this has given you deeper insight into how live customer interviews can help your business and why they are crucial for running a business successfully in this fast-changing digital world.  

Now we all know knowledge is essential, but only when you put it into practice. So, start conducting live interviews now to gain deep customer insights.

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