If you run a business, you must be aware that knowing and understanding the customer is the key to fulfilling their expectations. And that is why nearly every company conducts consumer research to know their customers better. But most companies focus heavily on quantitative research, and they forget to leverage qualitative research. Are you making this mistake?

If you are making this mistake, remember, there has been an enormous shift in consumer behavior and expectations due to the pandemic. And if you are just relying on quantitative research, you will not be able to get a complete picture of your customers.  

Remember, in this fast-changing world, to succeed, every business needs qualitative data as this data holds the power to understand not just the ‘what,’ but the ‘why,’ of the buying behavior. In other words, qualitative data holds power to understand the underlying reasons and motivations behind your consumer decisions.

So do not forget to conduct qualitative research and gather qualitative data, as it is crucial to transform your business into a results-driven, successful brand. With that in mind, in this article, we will dive deep into why qualitative research is vital for every business’s success.

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What Is Qualitative Research?

First things first – I think it is a good idea to quickly point out precisely what qualitative research is to make sure we are on the same page.

Qualitative research is a market research method that focuses on understanding customers through open-ended and conversational communication. The main goal of every qualitative research method, whether a live conversation or a focus group discussion, is to understand the “why” – why people think what they think or why they do what they do.

Qualitative Research Methods

Why Qual Research Is Important?

The benefit of conducting qualitative research is – it enables you to gain a holistic picture of your customers. Given below are a few reasons why qualitative research is crucial for every business:

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Qualitative Research is a Powerful Tool

It is no secret that emotions play a crucial role in people’s decisions, but quant research leaves them out of the equation. With quant, you can understand what your customers are saying but not why they are saying that. For example, an NPS survey can tell you if people are happy with your product or service or not, but it does not answer the why – which can be done with qualitative research.

Qual is exploratory; it can fill the why part. It is about emotions; still, very few businesses leverage qualitative research. Wondering why? Because it seems expensive, time-consuming, and hard to scale. That is why most companies write it off. But consumer expectations are changing quickly, and if you want to fulfill these changing expectations, you cannot do it without qualitative research.

The good news is – it is easy to conduct qualitative research if you are using the right tools. As more research teams have migrated from in-person focus groups and in-depth interviews to video interviews, we have created tools specifically for research professionals. With Decode, you can converse with your consumers in real-time – get real-time transcripts. You can even bring all your consumer conversations across platforms under a single unified dashboard and create a single source of truth for your business.

Remember, it has never been more important to take the friction out of understanding consumers better. Wondering how to do that. Well, you can conduct live conversations using Decode live and get real-time emotion insights into these conversations.

Related Read: Conversational Intelligence: What, Why, How & Top Benefits of CI for Business.

Qualitative Research Provides Deep Consumer Insights

At a time of growing competition, every brand is striving hard to build a deeper connection with its customers – qualitative research can help brands do that. Qualitative research gives you rich, detailed, and emotionally driven insights that can help brands build a more human, emotional connection to their audience.  

Also, qualitative research goes beyond what quantitative research and analysis can do and let brands gain deeper insight into particular questions. For example, let’s say you are an online retailer, and you found out that over 80% of shoppers add products to their online carts but do not finalize the transaction, costing you millions in lost revenue. Rather than merely quantifying the challenge, with qualitative research, you can find out the precise reasons why a shopper did not buy, giving a much richer and more directly actionable insight into consumer behavior.

In short, with qualitative research, you can uncover the whole story, get deeper insights into your customers, and understand your customer needs better, ultimately driving better, more informed decision making.

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Gain Real-time Live Insights

Conducting qualitative research can be time-consuming, or we can say it used to be time-consuming as previously, all qualitative research used to be carried out through face-to-face interviews or focus groups. Also, it is very labor-intensive as qualitative research typically generates a lot of data to mine through and extrapolate insights from.

However, the growth of digital channels has given researchers new and more accessible ways of conducting qualitative research. But it is still tough to analyze this qualitative data to get qualitative insights – with our Emotion AI-powered user research platform Decode, you can accelerate your speed to insights and generate qualitative insights considerably faster.

We let you gain real human insights from your consumer conversations by measuring consumer attention, engagement, and emotional responses.

Remember, your qualitative data holds a lot of information about your consumers, and this information is power, but only if you can analyze and utilize it. As this data becomes more available, it can be a tool to help in your decision-making. But if this research and consumer conversation data are not in a centralized repository, it can inhibit your decision-making process. With Decode, you can create a centralized repository of all your consumer conversations and create a single source of truth for your business. Also, as discussed above, you can analyze this data at scale and generate actionable insights from it.

Related Read: Why Emotion AI Is the Key to Improve Your CX?

Wrapping Up

Consumer research is crucial to your business growth as understanding customers can help you identify strategies that will work for your product, service, or marketing campaigns.

If you are not in touch with your customer base, you will not be able to find out what you are doing right or wrong. And will not be able to pinpoint your product or service flaws. To understand your customers, you need to combine quant and qualitative research methods. Still, most brands just use quant research to understand their customers. But let’s be clear – it is not enough. It is equally important to capture your customers’ exact words and messages by speaking directly with them.

In conclusion, do not underestimate the impact of qualitative research on your business, whether you are at a start-up or enterprise level. The qualitative data you collect can impact how you build your product, market your services, and message your audience, all directly tied to healthy and sustainable business growth. So go forth and make smart business decisions rooted in feedback straight from your customers.

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