Your brand name is the first point of contact for your target audience. It conveys the essence of the brand’s value, personality, and promise. It helps distinguish your brand from competitors and builds trust with customers.

In this blog, we will dive into the steps of effective brand name testing and explore how a strong brand name aligns with the brand’s objectives and identity.

What is Brand Name Testing?

Your company’s brand name will play a significant role in shaping your brand image and will also act as an identifier that distinguishes your brand from competitors. As your brand name can play such a big role in shaping your brand image, it is important to pick a name that will resonate with your target audience and will fit the brand image that you want to portray. This is where brand name research comes into the picture.

Brand name testing involves presenting your target audience with a variety of brand name options and asking them to provide feedback on each one. This research helps you make an informed decision while choosing a brand name that is best suited to your company using qualitative and quantitative backing.

Why is Brand Name Testing Important?

Brand name testing helps determine a name that resonates with the target market. The process offers several key benefits. Let’s look into some ways it is important to evaluate potential brand names.

1. It can significantly impact brand perception. A well-chosen name can make your brand more appealing and memorable. Conversely, a poorly chosen name can lead to a lack of trust in the brand.
2. A strategically evaluated brand name that aligns with brand values will help build strong brand-consumer relationships and drive loyalty over time.
3. Choosing a brand name without testing with the target audience will lead to a lack of interest and engagement with the brand. This can also lead to misinterpretations and damage brand credibility.

Also read: What is Concept Testing

Steps to Take to Conduct Brand Name Testing

Now that we have explored the importance of brand name research, let’s look at how to pick a brand name.

1. Pick the brand names you want to test:

The first step in brand name testing is to create a list of brand names that you want to test. These brand names should be ones that you and your coworkers are already confident of. The number of brand names you choose to include will determine the kind of survey design you select.

One effective tool to aid in the early stages of selecting prospective names is using a brand name generator. This tool helps generate name options that align well with your brand’s identity and maximizes creativity, especially before moving into formal testing.

These are some of the most common survey designs:

Monadic Testing:

This research design involves showing participants a single stimulus in isolation. It gives you a measure of how appealing a certain brand name is without skewing the respondent’s perception with the influence of other stimuli/brand names.

Sequential Monadic Design:

This research design involves asking respondents for feedback on multiple stimuli. However, each brand name shown must be evaluated separately rather than evaluation through comparison.

2. Select the parameters by which you will assess the brand names:

The next step is to select the parameters, or metrics, by which you want respondents to assess your brand name. These are a few metrics by which you can measure how good a brand name is:

• Uniqueness: Does the brand name stand out against competitors, or is it easily confused with other brand names?
• Pronounceability: Is the brand name easy to pronounce, or is it common for people to mispronounce it?
• Appeal: Is the brand name appealing to your target audience?
• Purchase Intent: Does the brand name motivate people to purchase the brand’s products/services?

The metric(s) you select should depend on what your goals are for your brand name. If you want a brand name that is memorable and stands out, the most valuable metric for you to measure would be uniqueness.

3. Gather data for brand name testing:

Once you’ve chosen the metrics by which you want your brand name assessed, you can create your brand name testing survey and send it out to your target audience.

Leverage a robust survey software that empowers you to design interactive brand name surveys. Use image questions, ranking, or rating question types to gather a holistic view of potential brand names. Customize the survey with brand colors and fonts to showcase the brand image to the respondents, helping them share insightful feedback.

4. Analyse results to select a brand name:

The final step is to analyze the responses collected in order to evaluate each brand name. This is the most important step, as it involves selecting a brand name that will appeal to your target audience and match the brand perception you want to create.

How brand name surveys can help you find the best options?

Your brand name sticks to the audience’s experience, emotion, and memory. Getting it right can help you nurture a strong brand image and reputation.

1. Brand name testing allows you to understand how your target consumers perceive each potential name. Through surveys, you can gauge factors like brand recall, likability, and uniqueness.
2. Testing multiple names allows you to assess how each name resonates with the market and stands out from competitors. By comparing each name, you can determine the uniqueness of each name.
3. The feedback from your target market can help you understand how to narrow down your options and make it more strong.
4. The process can help mitigate the risk of choosing a name that could have a negative impact on brand reputation. By gathering customer feedback, you can identify and address any potential issues with the options before the official launch.

Why Choose Voxco for your Brand Name Testing Surveys?

These are a few reasons why you should choose Voxco’s Survey Software to conduct your Brand Name Testing Surveys:

• Omnichannel Survey Solution

Our Omnichannel survey software allows you to create your brand name testing survey on a centralized platform before sending it through all channels. This saves time re-programming surveys for multiple channels. Additionally, all collected data is presented on a single integrated platform, allowing you to compare feedback received through all channels.

• Voxco IVR and Voxco Dialer

You can use our survey software in amalgamation with additional tools, such as Voxco Dialer and Voxco IVR, for the most seamless and efficient omnichannel survey experience.

• Powerful Dashboards

Voxco’s powerful and dynamic dashboards provide you with real-time visual presentations of your brand-tracking survey responses. This can help you make a quicker decision while picking your brand name, as our dashboard presents data from across all channels on one unified platform.

• Voxco Audience:

With Voxco’s market research panel, you can gather data from willing respondents representing the total population. With Voxco Audience, you can create your own sample audience to conduct brand name analysis.

A coding management system can organize and quantify comments from your customers, prospects, or other constituents.  Coding is all about gleaning actionable insight from textual comments.  Coding originated in the survey research industry and its terminology and technique come from that industry.

The survey research industry has elevated the art coding customer comments to a science.  These techniques are valuable to any company that wants to have an accurate understanding of what their customers are telling them – and what company does not?

To understand how you can use these techniques to keep your finger on the pulse of your customers, let us first introduce some concepts and terminology.

What is Coding?

Open and Closed End Questions

Think about the surveys you have seen.  There are two basic types of questions, such as these:

1. On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?
2. Why did you give us that rating?

The first of these is called a closed-end question because the possible answers are known in advance.  The second is called an open-end question.  There are an infinite number of possible responses to the question.

Verbatims

Perhaps surprisingly, we do not call the text that the respondent types for an open-end question an “answer”.  Instead, we call it a verbatim.  Yes, I know that “verbatim” is not a noun, but it has been adopted as one in the survey research industry.  Why do we not call the text an answer?  Well, because we cannot do much with the text alone. 

Coding

Imagine you have 5,000 responses to the short survey above and your boss asks you: What percentage of our customers rated us below 8 because of a product delivery problem?  Perhaps you would read each of the verbatims from the second question and make notes on a piece of paper, then tally up the results.  If you are more methodical you might put the verbatims in Excel and make a column for “Delivery Problem” and put a 1 in the column if the verbatim mentions a delivery problem.  As you do this, you would probably add other columns for other issues mentioned, perhaps “Product Quality” and “Technical Support”.  That way when your boss asks you tomorrow for how many customers gave us a negative rating for technical support, you could have the answer instantly, just by summing the Technical Support column.

In survey research we call what you just did in Excel Coding.  The columns such as Delivery Problem and Technical Support are called Codes, but you can see that in a certain sense we could also call them Answers.  When you put a 1 in the Technical Support column, you mean that this customer mentioned technical support as an issue.  

By coding the verbatims as you have done in Excel you have turned the qualitative data (the verbatims) into quantitative data (the codes).

Sources of Verbatims

In the example above we talked about a simple two question survey.  You may have recognized this as a classic Net Promoter Score (NPS®) survey.  This is a good place to start when learning about coding, because the technique of verbatim coding was developed and refined in the survey research industry.

But traditional surveys are certainly not the only source of verbatims for coding.  Verbatim coding is applicable whenever you want to get actionable insights from comments.  This includes such sources as:

• NPS surveys
• Employee satisfaction surveys
• Help desk inquiries
• Call center transcriptions
• CRM systems

Verbatim coding is appropriate whenever you need to quantify comments from constituents.

Reasons for Coding

If we think of coding as tagging comments with codes that attribute meaning to the comment, we see that there are two primary reasons for coding.

Quantification

Coding turns qualitative data into quantitative data.  Once our NPS survey is coded we can easily ask questions such as:

• What percentage of net detractors mentioned product delivery?
• How does the number of net detractors mentioning product delivery in Q1 compare with Q2?
• How does the number of net detractors mentioning product delivery in the Central Region compare with the Eastern Region?

Note that in the second and third example above we assume that we have some additional information.  In the second example we assume we know the time the comment was given.  This comes along for free; we just need to make a record of the date of receipt of the comment.  The third example assumes we know the region the customer is in.  We could of course get this information by asking a closed end Region question in the NPS survey.  But hopefully we can get this information, and much more, by using our CRM system to augment the data with known information about the customer.

Quantification and analysis of verbatims in this fashion is the bread and butter of the survey research industry.  But these techniques are equally applicable for in-house analysis – and far less costly than engaging a research company.

Classification and Indexing

Even after they are coded, verbatims remain a very rich source of insight into your customers thoughts and attitudes.  With coded verbatims you can get your hands on the verbatims most applicable for a business question you are considering.  For example, a product manager with a delivery problem in the Central Division might, and probably should, read a selection of verbatims from that region that mention delivery.  Once coded, finding these verbatims is trivial.

Classification of verbatims by coding allows product managers and others to keep their fingers on the pulse of the customer using the rich texture of verbatim comments, targeted at specific areas of interest by coding.

Coding Methodologies

We started by looking at coding verbatims using Excel.  That is not a contrived example.  There are small survey research companies that do just that.  But there are far more convenient and productive techniques than using Excel.

Human Coding

In the survey research industry verbatim coding is a profession.  People trained in coding read and code every verbatim in open end survey questions.  The industry uses Ascribe Coder to code over 200 million verbatims each year.

Human coding produces the highest accuracy and allows for nuanced differences in meaning between codes.  The construction of a well-designed code frame, which is the set of codes for a question, is part of the art of human coding.  Human coders have full control over the form of the code frame and can deliver results tailored to a specific survey research objective.

The accuracy and control afforded by human coding comes at an associated cost of labor and turn-around time.

Automated Coding

Advances in natural language processing today allow fully automated coding.  Ascribe CX Inspector can code thousands of verbatims in minutes, with no human involvement.  CX Inspector constructs a set of groups automatically by analysis of the verbatims and classifies the verbatims into those groups.  The groups are directly analogous to codes, although they are created by the machine rather than by hand.

Blended Approaches

To be fair, a market researcher would not call the fully automated approach verbatim coding because:

• It does not use a code frame constructed by the researcher
• The accuracy is lower than human coding

With the addition of some human labor, the results of fully automated coding can be massaged to resemble human coding more closely.  In CX Inspector you can edit the automatically created groups by merging and renaming them.  This gives you control similar to the code frame in Ascribe Coder while retaining the speed advantage of automated classification of verbatims.  The resulting groups can be saved as a taxonomy and used on multiple projects, just as you might use a code frame in Ascribe Coder for multiple projects.

Working in the other direction, Ascribe Coder provides the Coding Assistant.  Coding Assistant uses natural language processing to suggest verbatims to code based on prior human coding.  Coding Assistant confers much of the speed advantage of fully automated coding, while retaining full human control of the results.

Conclusion

Verbatim coding was developed by the survey research industry, but its usefulness is not confined to that industry.  Verbatim coding is applicable whenever you need to organize and quantify comments from your constituents.  Tools such as Ascribe Coder and CX Inspector allow you to reap the benefits of verbatim coding without engaging a third party supplier.

On the Voxco blog, we have been often focused on increasing response rates through survey design tactics.

That being said, simply “getting through the door” needs to be a key priority for market researchers wanting to drive response rates.

Without building that initial feeling of amicability and trust in phone surveys, the interviewer will have a hard time getting a complete. Here’s why trust matters in encouraging respondent participation and facilitating meaningful CATI survey results:

• It plays a crucial role in convincing respondents that the information they provide is highly valuable.
• It motivates the respondents to share sensitive or potentially embarrassing information which they won’t share otherwise.
• It assures respondents that their information is safe and will not be misused, mocked, or shared in any case.
• It promises respondents that they will not regret the time spent with a company (brand touchpoints) rather they’ll cherish it.

According to GRBN, “only 1 in 10 people have a high level of trust in market research companies.” Therefore, fostering trust is extremely important to garner meaningful results through your survey efforts. Today, we’re covering our top tips for increasing phone survey completes through inspiring trust in potential survey respondents.

Start Creating Surveys Now

Listen and Callback

Interviewers’ first instinct may be to get the person on the line to listen to them. However, it’s crucial that interviewers are listening to their potential respondent. Are they busy? Are they engaged with what you’re saying? Should you offer to call them back? These are questions your interviewer needs to be asking themselves.

At a bare minimum, there are two main types of callbacks: a hard callback where it’s clear the correct person was reached but they were too busy, and a soft callback in which it is uncertain whether the right person was reached or even interested. Of course, successful researchers strive to have the least amount of soft callbacks as possible.

You should ensure that the phone survey software that you’re using allows for callback queues, callback messaging and other call management tools.

Voxco’s survey software provides researchers with plethora of interviewer tools to improve productivity of phone survey projects. Book a demo for free consultation.

Pepper in Sociodemographic Questions

It’s very common for researchers to build surveys that ask respondents all their socio-demographic questions right off the bat to filter the respondent as quickly as possible. You should be careful about what questions you ask the respondent. Take a look at our expert written demographic survey template.

But, this may not be the correct approach to building trust and getting quality answers to the more specific questions in the study. The reality is that sociodemographic questions err on the side of personal and may turn respondents off to your study (eg: What is your age? What is your annual income? What is your religion?).

In the case that not all sociodemographic questions are answered, you can still use the semi-completed survey and weight it as less significant than more complete surveys. After conducting the demographic survey, all you need to do is segment your customers, we’ve got a survey template on segmentation.

Surveys are a Conversation NOT an Interrogation

Guiding interviewers to administer surveys with the proper attitude is certainly a challenge for those managing call centers. The idea, of course, is to have the interviewer and interviewee are genuinely interested in the back-and-forth conversation.

Beyond ensuring that your interviewer team is consistently motivated and your call center culture is inspiring, consistent feedback is key. Using a survey software with built-in reporting features for line items like general call monitoring, productivity, and call analytics will help managers understand the interviewers’ areas for improvement and address them quickly.  

Explore Voxco’s telephony features with a free demo with our team.

Step Up to the Plate, High-Converters!

When the time comes for callbacks, work with your high-converting interviewers to communicate with the potential respondents that did not complete. In these cases, the responsibility to re-engage these people rests on the interviewers’ side.

In many circumstances, people refuse to participate in surveys due to the time commitment of doing the survey. However, as two sides of the same coin, people are also inherently interested in giving their opinion on things that they deem important. In that regard, that’s why the interviewer approach is so important to getting the completes your study needs.

In most of the cases, you need to set up correct survey reward programs. But setting up a reward program can be a task. We have compiled a guide to simplify this process for you.

The Right Tool for the Job

While interviewing methods are a critical part of inspiring interviewee trust and survey completion, it all starts with the right software.

Researchers must ensure that their CATI software has robust callback organizing and scheduling capabilities (by shift, timeslot, etc.). It is also important to have the ability to set and manage complex quotas, in order to assign groups and roles – in the case that you want to employ a high-converting interviewer or an interviewer that speaks a different language.

In addition to these features, Voxco Survey Software has a fully integrated platform, with one unified database for online and phone surveys. Within the CATI software, you can also integrate a cloud-based or on-premise dialer, and an IVR system.

Editor’s note : The blog was originally published in June, 2020 and is now updated for accuracy, comprehensiveness & freshness.

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What is an Exit Poll?

When it’s about the election, an exit poll is all everyone talks about. In simple terms, election exit polls are the poll of voters taken after people exit from voting stations on the day of the election.

During the time of the election, people are eager for information. Pollsters conduct exit polls using voter’s responses about their choices and project how the election turned out even before the ballot reveals the real result. Pollsters are generally private organizations or companies working in association with newspapers and/or media.

Exit polls, unlike opinion polls, gather information on who people voted in favor of instead of who they intend to favor. The pollsters or surveyors approach this direction of poll information because real outcomes may take hours or days to tally. Once the votes are added, the media and newspapers explain the outcome on the grounds of exit polls.

How reliable are Exit Polls?

Exit poll, while primarily used to understand the outcome of election results or predict them, is also used to figure out the reason behind their vote. Exit polls are rendered reliable to collect demographic data of the voters.

Election voting has always been conducted namelessly, but exit polls can confirm who has cast their vote. Exit polls also provide statistical data to understand the voter’s decision on why they cast their vote on the ballot. Also, exit polls have been used for a long time as a rough indicator against any decision misrepresentation and election fraud.

However, exit polls also face issues like the most popular of all, “1992 UK General Election”. The error caused by exit polls in this election was that the poll was predicted to have a hung parliament. Still, after the final result, John Major’s Conservative Party Government held the position.

Exit polls rely on the people who went to the voting station to vote. The surveyors can’t reach those who cast their vote by postal ballot and absentee voting. This often causes a vast difference between exit polls results and final results. Hence, pollsters must consider such factors to gather a more accurate exit poll result.

Functioning of Exit Polls

• The first step in conducting exit polls is to categorize sample size, which races to operate in, and what questions to ask. 
• The organization must also be equipped with a social research survey tool for gathering data and analyzing it.
• The organization will then research the polling station’s location, the voting duration, and what the rules are in those states or districts. 
• Next, the organization allots one or more (depends on the organization) interviewers in each zone from the time polls open until a little before they close. The interviewer conducts the exit polls on the voters. The frequency of how many voters are interviewed depends on the organization. 
• The data gathered by the interviewers are sent to the organization, where they are tallied and sent to broadcasting channels and newspapers.
• The questionnaires in exit polls primarily include questions on demographics, their opinion on candidates, and when they decided to vote. The voters themselves fill out the questionnaire. The questionnaire and exit polls are confidential.

For example, the National Election Pool informs their interviewer to talk to every third or fifth voter. They aim to conduct 100 to 150 interviews. NEP will stop the interviewer three times a day and take the exit polls results to tally them. Edison Media Research conducts exit polls for NEP. 

When NEP conducts their questionnaires, the interviewers are instructed to record visually the age, gender, and race of those who declined to participate. This helps in the tally of the result. The NEP reports the exit polls data after the tallies, refusals, and questionnaires are processed.

Do you want to know how satisfied your employees are with their employment but don't know what to ask them? Don't worry, we're here to assist you.

How satisfied your employees are, depends on several factors such as the workplace, condition of everyday life at their office, their pay, the atmosphere at work, etc.

Ultimately, your employees are the ones who interact with customers on a daily basis and contribute to the success of your organization.

In this blog, we will discuss why you need to conduct an employee satisfaction survey. On top of that, we have provided you with a list of questions you should ask your employees.

Before getting started, let us understand what employee satisfaction actually is.

What is an employee satisfaction survey?

Employee satisfaction surveys are used to assess the degree of satisfaction of its employees with the organization and their jobs. Such surveys are carried out not only to determine how satisfied employees are with their positions but also to determine how dedicated and aligned they are with the company's goals, vision, and aspirations.

It explores how employees perceive business culture, employee growth, colleague relationships, superior recognition, and other significant concerns.

Why do you need an employee satisfaction survey?

Unsatisfied employees may become noxious over time, affecting employee morale, fouling the workplace, and increasing turnover. Employees who feel encouraged and happy are more willing to go far beyond.

Low satisfaction can have a negative influence on an organization's bottom line in a variety of ways. Now, let's look at why you should conduct an employee satisfaction survey:

1. Acknowledging employee skill gaps

Employee surveys are an efficient way for organizations to identify specific employee shortfalls.

Employee surveys, when carried out on a regular basis, assist management in developing training sessions for employees to overcome shortcomings and promote success.

2. Obtain honest and ethical feedback

Source

While procuring feedback, organizations prioritize a greater response rate in order to have more precise data. However, in employee satisfaction surveys, the quality of the information collected is more important than the responses.

With access to high-quality data, management may utilize additional insight to support business decisions and implement modifications to provide the best working atmosphere.

3. Improve employee retention

Source

Another critical objective of carrying out employee satisfaction surveys is to keep employees onboard for a prolonged period of time.

Organizations invest a lot of effort and resources in their employees from the time they are hired until they leave. This explains why losing employees in the initial stages could be overwhelming.

Now that you have learned the need to conduct employee satisfaction surveys. Let us now explore the questions you should ask your employees.

Top 10 Employee Satisfaction Survey Questions

You might have discovered the fact that asking the right questions is vitally important for creating a highly satisfied workforce.

We have created a list of the top 10 employee satisfaction questions. Let’s have a look.

1. Do you think your position permits you to learn new skills?

Employees seek out their own learning opportunities when they believe their employer is not assisting them in avoiding obsolescence. And such learning opportunities are usually found outside of their core firms. This question determines how satisfied your employees are with the training possibilities available at your company.

2. Is your management open to assisting you in completing your work?

Managers should recognize an employee's distinctive skills and give them projects that focus on them. If your survey findings suggest that employees do not feel motivated, you have the evidence you need to call for extra training for them.

3. Do you get along with your coworkers?

Employees spend a substantial amount of time with their coworkers, and therefore they have a major impact on their job satisfaction and inspiration. Being surrounded by passionate and productive people makes work more motivating and enjoyable. This question might reveal communication problems between the employees.

4. Do you agree that you are being fairly rewarded for the position you hold?

While engagement and gratitude are important factors in retaining employees, so does remuneration. Every employee wants to be compensated and enjoy benefits in addition to their income. It's a good idea to include questions about your company's salary and benefits package in your survey.

5. How likely are you to recommend our organization as a wonderful place to work?

Your company's success is dependent on its ability to recruit qualified individuals in a competitive marketplace. Understanding whether or not your workers would endorse your organization is critical, not solely for retention efforts.

However, it also implies that you may reduce the expense of recruiting by encouraging references. It also implies that they are definitely satisfied with employee engagement.

6. Does your management appreciate your opinions?

Employers who do not promote open discussions with their employees or who tend to prioritize the opinions of some employees above others can be a big cause of discontent.

Secondly, it might hinder employees from making a stand about serious concerns and contributing useful ideas. For successful management performance, it's crucial to modify a management style accordingly.

7. Do you consider yourself to have a great work-life balance?

Employee surveys are an effective method for determining the overall level of employee stress. Inquiring about employees' feelings about their current work-life balance might provide useful information. It is a critical aspect of ensuring long-term employee happiness.

8. Where do you see yourself in this organization in the near future?

If your organization has a poor level of engagement, it is unlikely that your employees will be dissatisfied in the long run. As a consequence, engaged workers are convinced that they will be prepared to thrive and grow with the company, ensuring a bright future for both.

Asking this question provides better insights into retention issues and potential turnover.

9. Do you feel your accomplishments are acknowledged?

If your employees do not feel valued and acknowledged, they will often leave your organization. If a survey reveals that employees lack a sense of achievement, you have a chance to prove the real-world worth of your company's work and develop measures that acknowledge the necessary contributions.

10. Is there a clear understanding of the organization's strategic objectives?

Employees that have specific objectives can take the necessary actions to achieve success. If goals and objectives are unclear and yearly performance assessments are unsatisfactory, employees who feel let down by a company's evaluation system may develop bitterness and disappointment.

Key Takeaway

We think that these questions will be extremely beneficial to your organization in terms of employee satisfaction. You need to include a variety of question types to obtain a thorough picture of the retention of employees at your firm.

Segmentation, you may know means grouping of people. Psychographic segmentation likewise means a grouping of people based on the psychological traits that influence their consumption habits. Market research tools can allow analysts to conduct this form of segmentation easily. The segments of customers or consumers are based on their: social class, lifestyle, personality, interests, and so on.Psychographic data can help you give your business a customer-centric image that is relevant for a brand in the market.Psychographic data can be considered the last piece to complete the set of a holistic view of customer’s purchase or consumption behavior. It is conducted by understanding “How” people think about your service and “What” they should buy to reach the “Why” the customer should appreciate your products/service. The psychographic survey takes into consideration the psychological journey of the customer.To measure and predict these patterns the researchers fulfill some basic criteria such as:

• What is the motivation behind customer’s thoughts?
• What are the principles they follow?
• What in fluencies them to make a decision?

Understanding customer’s demands and expectations play a major role in the marketing strategy. As a result, the data can be used as guidance to provide the market with products that are customer-oriented.Therefore, the belief of psychometric segmentation is that understanding the customers would help them to understand your brand.For example, if a Chinese restaurant wants to open a branch they will have to take into consideration several factors. They need to conduct market research to consider the area with a better social circle, the food habit of the neighborhood people, and many more factors. They will put out a survey with questions beneficial for their strategy and then decide their business plan.

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Collection of Psychometric Segmentation Data

Psychometric data is challenging to collect because people are not always willing to tell you everything you want for research purposes. Moreover, you need to dig beyond the obvious data and read between the lines. You need deep insight to understand the psychological functioning of your customers.There are several ways you can collect these data, some are listed below.Survey:

• This is the most common method used by all companies or organizations to understand their consumers. 
• Open-ended questions help in surveys the most as they let customers answer freely. You can use these responses to group your customers and then take action on the suggestions. You can also use a Likert scale to gain data on your customer’s experience. Or, a Semantic differential scale to understand how your customers feel about certain services or concepts.

Third-PartyThis method is quite tricky and may turn out expensive. Third-party implies that you take help from market research companies that can provide you customer data for your market. You can then use the information you require. There are two ways this method functions: focus group and customer interviews.

• • Focus Group: This includes a wide range of responses because the target of this survey consists of people from different backgrounds. The idea behind the focus group is that once a customer responds well to the object/service, they bring in more people with a similar choice.
  • Customer Interviews: These are discussions conducted with customers to collect relevant data based on their opinions. This helps create a balance because it gives you a picture of what right or wrong you are doing in your business.

Cookies

•  Many websites use cookies to track a customer’s journey online. When a customer agrees to the cookie on a website it means they are giving permission to the website to access your personal information. A company can collect psychographic data by tracking the user’s journey and activity on social media, websites, online purchases, and other online platforms. 
• The digital data obtained by this method gives a complete picture of the customer; who they are, what they do online, how much time they spent, their reviews, why they spent time online. This information helps a company build its online presence attractive enough to keep its customers visiting daily.

Variables of Psychometric Segmentation

Exploratory Research Guide

Conducting exploratory research seems tricky but an effective guide can help.Download NowCustomers have a special need and expectation from brands and these demands are based on a certain factor which affects their life. Companies use these factors to promote and capture the attention of their customers in the market. The following are the variables used for marketing strategies.Personality:

• Customer personality is believed to be strongly related to their purchase habit. Products and services can be catered to various personalities. Also, different concepts and surveys can be used to analyze different personalities. 
• For instance, Mirror in 2018 began selling itself as an interactive home trainer. The workshop for the product advertised towards people with the personality of workout-lovers. The customers who can’t find time to go to the gym responded to this business strategy.

Lifestyle:

• Understanding the kind of lifestyle your customers have from their social media activity or keeping track of the trends can help you create a strategy to attract your customers. Such development of products is more successful because they are created based on customer’s lifestyles.
• For example, the “Yuppie Handbook” of the 80s was targeted towards young, urban, and working-class professionals who earned enough to spend on fashion over utility. 

Social Status:

• Social status which is based on the income of one person often is the determining factor of their purchase behavior. Each social class has its choice of brands that they can afford. 
• For example, a brand can aim for rich, upper-class people because their brand has a clear idea of who can afford them. High quality and high price become their brand image, with their audience being upper-class.

Interests:

• The market observes the activities and interests enjoyed by the customers to create customer-centric products or services. Their opinions about a concept are factors that the companies or organization build their marketing strategies around.
• For instance, digital communities are one such example of an interest group. You can find many sites dedicated to particular interests or activities focusing on customers who enjoy such options. You can find websites with movies, music videos, channels with video games, etc. all such websites target audiences who share the same interests.

Values:

• Value is one such segment that catches the attention of the customers. You can track the values of your customers based on the data you have collected about their lifestyles, interest, social class, etc. 
• More and more companies are targeting values related to the environment. Sustainable fashion, furniture, architecture are some examples that are now being advertised as a marketing strategy.

Examples of Psychographic Segmentation

Starbucks Starbucks uses psychographic segmentation while conducting market research as you can see the range of products they sell.For examples,

• Frappuccinos and Sandwiches are catered for those who can’t drink coffee but can spend their time socializing in their stores. 
• Top-quality beans to brew coffee for those customers who like their coffee of premium quality and have a high income. 

Starbucks advertises and appeals to their customers with a high success rate because they use psychographic segmentation.Foot Locker

• Foot Locker uses the psychographic segment of Authority to track and appeal to its customers. The product badges of Foot Lockers are a stamp of approval that drives customer’s purchase behavior. 
• They can use this behavior pattern of their customer who responds to Authority and implement it on their business strategy.

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Advantages of Psychographic Segmentation

• This market research tool can help you understand the psychological working of the customer’s behavior.
• Segmentation depending on psychographic factors can help customize your business service and products.
• The detailed insights from psychographic segmentation along with geographic and demographical segmentation give you a vividly clear picture of the customer’s attitude.

A customer experience survey enables a brand to gather a customer’s perceptions based on the experiences across various touch points. To determine the crucial touch points of the customers, it's imperative for businesses to map their journey. Leveraging an entire customer experience management is essential for this.For instance, you need to track the experience of your customers from the time when they considered your brand (for the first time) to when they become repeat customers. In this scenario, you must keep a check on what customers are saying about your brand at every level. By using a best-in-class customer experience survey, you can effectively measure customer experience as well as satisfaction across different touch points of their journey.

Why are Customer Experience Surveys important for your business?

Being a crucial component for understanding what customers think about a brand, a customer experience survey empowers businesses to gain actionable insights into the overall customer journey as well as customer support. Here are some reasons why you should use customer experience surveys:

• Boosts customer retentionA customer will return to your brand only if he/she is happy and satisfied. By allowing you to effectively track the customer journey, a CX survey lets you anticipate if your product or service is performing well or not. It also helps you forecast future sales on the basis of customer loyalty. A CX survey highlights the required changes that need to be immediately incorporated for retaining customers.
• Discover your promotersA customer experience survey is an ideal method to determine the promoters or advocates for your brand. Leveraging a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey can help you categorize your customers as promoters, detractors, or passives. Moreover, this information can be used for sending targeted and personalized messages, thereby transforming detractors into promoters.
• Solicit feedback for making informed decisions Data is certainly the most important factor for making decisions in the best interest of a business. With a customer experience survey, businesses can gather insightful data that helps them to function smoothly and uncover the likes and dislikes of their customers.

What are the types of Customer Experience Surveys?

There are multiple surveys or metrics that you can use for tracking your CX. Based on the touch point in question and your specific requirements, you can pick up the right customer experience survey to measure your CX. Here are some CX surveys that you should consider:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) SurveyNet Promoter Score Survey (NPS Survey) is used by brands to measure customer loyalty as well as brand advocacy. With an aim to predict the growth trajectory of a brand, this survey asks the respondent a simple question:

“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service/brand to a friend or colleague?”After the respondents choose a score, they're asked another question: “Why did you give us that score?” This is an open-ended question that propels the customers to give their feedback in detail. This follow-up question can help you gain insights into the customer pain points. Based on the score given by respondents, they're classified as: Promoters (rating of 9 or 10), Detractors (rating between 0 to 6), and Passives (rating between 7 or 8).

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) SurveyCustomer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys are used by brands to determine the level of customer satisfaction with their products or services. Being an excellent indicator of critical aspects related to CX, a CSAT survey helps to track how customers feel about the quality as well as the effectiveness of a brand & its products or services. In this survey, customers are asked the following question: 

“On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate your overall satisfaction with our product?”

• Customer Effort Score (CES) SurveyCustomer Effort Score (CES) surveys are used by businesses to understand how much effort does a customer had to put in specific touch points or interactions with them. This helps to determine if the customers are really happy or sad with a brand. These surveys are mostly dispatched after a customer has interacted with a brand's customer service. It involves asking customers one question:

"Please rate how easy or difficult was it for you to find a relevant solution to your problem on our website?"

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Making the most of your Customer Experience Surveys

• Set your goals right Start by defining your goals, i.e. what do you want from this CX survey, how will it add value to your brand? This benchmark will prevent you from losing sight of your survey’s purpose while helping you visualize the results too. Without analyzing your objectives, you might get data from the survey but not the required insights you need!
• Choose an efficient CX survey softwareTo effectively evaluate your customer journey, it's important to choose the right software for your customer experience survey. A robust CX survey software not only helps you to elevate your customer experience but also empowers your brand to stay ahead of the competitors. Voxco offers best-in-class customer experience surveys for fostering closer ties with your customers.
• Pick the right survey templateFinding it difficult to design your CX survey from scratch? Look no further than a survey template! While a survey template is a great source to create a customer experience survey for your brand, it also comes with the added benefit of customization. So you can easily customize it according to your brand logo and color code!
• Use the right question typeAs respondents are going to interact with your brand through a CX survey, it’s essential to include questions that provide the best information. While you can use any question type (dichotomous (yes/no), rank order, slider, matrix table, multiple-choice), it's recommended to use open-ended questions as they help to gather more actionable and insightful information. Also, you should avoid using questions that are biased or misleading as these undermine the validity of the results.
• Test your CX survey Before you begin with distribution, you should always test your CX survey to discover the loose ends. Getting feedback from a group of testers can help you realize the areas of improvement and make required revisions. Moreover, it helps you acknowledge the chances where customers might misinterpret the questions.

What to look for in a customer experience survey software?

While choosing a customer experience survey software, it's important to consider one that can transform your organization's growth by seamlessly tracking & optimizing customer journeys. Here are a few things to consider while selecting the software for your CX survey:

• Omni channel CapabilitiesThere's no doubt that it's a technology-driven world where most individuals are online, not everyone has access to the internet 24x7. This is why it's essential for your customer experience survey software to help you reach respondents across all channels (Online, face-to-face, telephonically). This ensures to gather more accurate data by allowing brands to break down geographical barriers while surveying their respondents. Voxco’s omnichannel CX surveys help you gather the feedback you need anywhere, anytime.
• Powerful dashboards and analytics Gathering data is a crucial aspect of CX, but for insights, your customer experience survey software needs to be equipped with robust analytics tools. Voxco enables brands to intuitively view their data through customizable dashboards and identify the key trends in customer behavior. Not everyone in your company needs access to all the data collected through your CX survey. With Voxco, you can effortlessly control information access while ensuring that the right data is available to the key stakeholders. 
• Seamless App Integration For businesses having a large volume of app users, this feature is a must. By integrating customer experience surveys like NPS, CSAT, or CES into your application, you can understand customer pain points by soliciting feedback immediately after important interactions. Voxco’s best-in-class CX survey software allows for easy integration into your app, helping you to get customer feedback within no time. This, in turn, boosts the overall customer experience.
• Flexible Hosting Options Customer data is certainly the key contributor to business success. This extends to the feedback data collected via customer experience surveys as well. With exceptional survey tools like Voxco, it gets easy to store your customer feedback data securely on the cloud or your own premises, as it's compatible with the security protocols of your business!

What is Qualitative Data?

Qualitative data is used for describing information. As this data can be easily grouped into categories, it is popularly known as categorical data. Play a key role in the investigation, this data is open-ended that enables respondents to express their views and opinions completely.  

Since this data type cannot be measured or expressed using numbers, it is usually categorized on the basis of identifiers like attributes, properties, labels, etc. This type of data is mainly gathered through one-to-one interviews, open-ended survey questions, focus groups, or case studies.

Example of Qualitative Data  ​

Being used for characterizing objects or observations, the aspects related to qualitative data majorly include subjective and abstract qualities. For example, there's a meeting scheduled for a manager and an employee at the time of appraisal. If the supervisor gives feedback based on the previous projects' performance, problem areas, and behavioral analysis without giving a rating to the subordinate, this can be considered as an example of qualitative data.

Why Qualitative Data matter?

By seamlessly determining the qualities or characteristics of a particular subject, Qualitative data empowers researchers to gain insights into the behavior, emotions, or personality of the respondents. With an aim to build parameters for observing large data sets, Qualitative data offers a dynamic approach to research that quantitative data cannot match.  

In the case of conducting market research, qualitative data plays a crucial role as it helps researchers to understand their customers, their choices, and the issues they're dealing with. By uncovering the motivations and perspectives of customers, qualitative data empowers brands to focus on the problem areas so the problems get resolved in a minimum timeframe. Voxco offers best-in-class omnichannel solutions for collecting qualitative data.

How to collect Qualitative Data?

Intending to perform comprehensive research and analysis, Qualitative data helps to figure out why respondents feel, react, or behave the way they do. Since this data type cannot be measured in numbers, here are the data collection methods that researchers use to gather qualitative data:

Individual Interviews

Individual interviews follow a personal approach to gather qualitative data which makes them a highly preferred data collection tool for conducting research. As the interviewer collects data from their respondents one-to-one, the interviews are usually conversational and interactive. These types of interviews are informal, so there's no defined structure and the questions (open-ended) are asked impulsively based on the flow of the ongoing interview.

While conducting an interview, it's important to include questions that are likely to generate as much information as possible (about the subject). By including open-ended questions that are neutral, sensitive, and easy to understand, Voxco helps you create surveys that resonate with the respondents while addressing the objectives of the research.

Focus Groups

Being a popular qualitative research strategy, a focus group is a group discussion on a specific topic among a batch of 5-10 people. The discussion is monitored and managed by a moderator (or researcher). Although focus groups have similar features like less structured interviews, they do more than merely collecting similar information from multiple respondents at once.

Based on the sorted data, the members of a focus group share similar kind of interests. For instance, on conducting a study on cricketers, a researcher will choose sportspersons who are cricketers or were cricketers and have in-depth knowledge about the topic.

Case Studies

Qualitative data is also collected with the help of case studies. By leveraging an in-depth analysis of case studies, it becomes easy to dive deeper into the intricacies of the subject. Moreover, it is a versatile method of analyzing simple as well as complex subjects.

Observation

A systematic method for qualitative research, observation enables the researchers to look at the respondents' activity in their specific environment. By keeping an eye on the respondents and creating notes, the process of observation provides direct information about research. It can help researchers to gather the information that respondents might not share otherwise during one-to-one interviews or focus groups.

How to make the most of Qualitative Data?

Arrange the data wisely

The data you've gathered would be raw and unstructured. To make it meaningful and readable, it's the duty of the researcher to transcribe it. That's where the need for data arrangement arises. Transforming the data into text format and exporting it to spreadsheets can be an effective option.

Organizing is essential

Once you've arranged the data, organize it in an orderly manner on the basis of the questions asked. On creating a dedicated table for your research objectives, it becomes simple to organize the required data. However, it's recommended not to work with unorganized data in any case.

Coding is key

A crucial step to analyze qualitative data, coding helps to classify data by categorizing them into meaningful divisions. This streamlines the process of analysis. By carefully reviewing the developed categories and using them for creating codes, the process of data coding becomes effortless.

Don’t forget to validate and summarize

For successful qualitative data analysis, it's essential to keep a tab on data accuracy by ensuring there are no flaws. Data validation is a continuous process that is obligatory at every stage of the research. Once you're done with validation, it's recommended to create a report (by concluding all data) that can be used for future research.

What are the advantages of Qualitative Data?

It helps to understand changing attitudes

As customer preferences keep on changing, qualitative data enables researchers to seamlessly understand the customer mindset. By gaining insights into the attitude shift and the reason behind it, businesses can effortlessly adapt to the perspective shift which strengthens customer relationships. The use of qualitative data plays a pivotal role in understanding customer perceptions which streamlines the process of market research.

It provides detailed analysis

Leveraging qualitative data, it becomes easy for the researchers to collect in-depth and intrinsic information. Unlike quantitative data (which is bound by various limitations), qualitative data can help to add context to subjects where numbers are unable to reveal insights. Using the right set of questions can help researchers to gather necessary information for better conclusions.

It offers accurate data

While collecting qualitative data, there are open-ended questions used primarily. This allows the respondents to express their views/opinions freely and share everything that's on their minds. As the respondents participate with full vigor, they're likely to provide more information that is accurate.

What are the disadvantages of Qualitative Data?

It consumes a lot of time

Gathering qualitative data takes a lot of time and once the researchers are done with it, they need extra time to sort that data. As every data point shared by respondents is analyzed subjectively, the worth of qualitative data gets in doubt always.

It generates misleading outcomes

As different respondents have different opinions, the results of qualitative data can often come out at two extreme levels. While some users will resonate with the findings whereas others do not. Thus, it's impossible to generate a generalized outcome from qualitative data.

It is not reliable

As qualitative data relies on the perspectives of the respondents and those perspectives keep on changing, there's no reliability when it comes to drawing conclusions. As the gathered data is true only at the time of collection, it cannot be trusted for taking decisions in the long-term.