How Bellomy Research is Leveraging Discuss’ All-In-One Platform

“The ease of use, in-depth insights, and speed that we’ve been able to produce impactful highlight reels and reports for clients is helping us win additional projects from delighted customers.” 

Angie Moorefield, Sr. Strategist, Social Research at Bellomy

Challenge

Show Rates

One of the first challenges was show rates. Prior to Discuss, due to various technical challenges from both the respondent end as well as from Bellomy, 20%-30% of the sessions were impacted negatively. Without any live tech support resource on and accessible that meant losing both valuable time in completing the project and potentially needing to spend more money on finding new respondents.

Sharing Stimuli

Another challenge related to showing stimuli and getting feedback. At this point, Bellomy was attempting to use a more purpose-built solution, but as part of a large concept and packaging research project for one of their largest clients, they system just could not support showing all of the stim that they had loaded into the tool. Of course, every agency wants to avoid, at all costs, having tools that give off a perception of not being industry leading.

Observer Engagement

As is often the case for qualitative research, stakeholders have an interest in watching live and noting their own key takeaways. With tools like Zoom, these observers were never completely invisible to respondents. Respondents would be able to see there’s someone one who was not announced. In addition, Observers had no easy way to chat amongst themselves and/or with the moderator, and they had no way to easily make a digital mark in the recording when there was an interesting moment or reaction to stimuli or to a question.

Creating video clips to incorporate into reports

Pre-Discuss, creating video clips meant time would be needed for each session on the following:

• Rewatching and noting times of interesting moments in the videos to save as part of highlight reel creation
• Reaching out to observers to see if they recall any particular interesting moments that should be included in the highlight reel
• Downloading session videos and uploading into a video editing tool, and then spending time referring back to notes of different times to clip
• Putting the highlight reels together
• Exporting the videos and uploading to a shared storage app prior to sending out that link to key stakeholders

This could easily translate to 2-3 hours of work per session, so when piecing this together for several sessions, it meant either spending many extra hours, or simply this element not being done (or not being done as often). These first hand video montages are often considered one of the more powerful outputs of qualitative research, but with limited time to complete a project it simply was too onerous for all involved.

Solution

Finding the right purpose-built platform became a top priority for the team at Bellomy. As part of their diligence process, they both assessed and used several different tools that went beyond the capabilities of a more generic web conferencing tool. In the end, the feeling from key users was that the Discuss Platform satisfied all of the different use case needs and challenges that they were seeing and so became the preferred technology for supporting qualitative research projects.

In addition to supporting this broad range of research use cases, Bellomy has also taken advantage of many other industry leading capabilities that Discuss offers. For example, for some client projects it is critical that the respondents have absolutely no idea who the backroom observers are or the company involved. For these research projects Bellomy is using all of the in-app security controls that enable as many observers who want to view the conversation live to easily do that and not see respondent personally identifiable information while ensuring that they can save key moments with a click, and have a private chat room not viewable to participants.

Another more recent addition to the Discuss People Experience Platform that Bellomy is using is the Self Captures capabilities, which are in-app tools that enable unmoderated qual research. So in addition to driving live feedback sessions, they were able to have respondents capture a variety of experiences and respond to questions asynchronously, such as:

• Going to a store and sharing in-moment shopping experiences
• Doing product taste tests
• Capturing in-home experiences like showing their refrigerators and where they would store the product

Results

Better insights, faster. That’s what Bellomy was striving for when adopting a platform for all qual-based research. The quantifiable results seen consistently over their 2 years using Discuss show how they’ve significantly raised the bar towards this goal.

“With Discuss, I’ve cut down by 50% the time it takes to craft client reports that include powerful respondent highlight reels. Discuss makes it so easy to search transcripts and stitch together clips from different respondents, all right within the platform.”

Angie Moorefield, Sr. Strategist, Social Research

Project Managers Save Time

With a central respondent hub for all the pre-session coordination of respondent and observer communications and calendaring, along with the tech check capabilities and services Discuss offers, Project Managers are saving time across every session. But in addition, the show rate issues relating to technical aspects and challenges from the past have now been eliminated.

Moderators and Bellomy Clients Save Time and Money

When it comes to being able to just speak with more respondents across several markets, Discuss has enabled this to occur faster, often with less costs that Bellomy clients would need to incur. With Discuss, Angie has been able to talk with people from New York, Texas, California and other places all within the same week. No travel is required for either Bellomy or their clients, as almost always client stakeholders desire to observe conversations live.

More Powerful Client Reports are Created Faster

After sessions are done, Bellomy no longer has to use a transcription service, which decreased costs while also saving 2-3 days per session, instead relying on Discuss’ auto-transcription which was available 5-10 minutes post interview.

And when the time comes to put a report together for clients, that’s where some of the most significant time savings are seen. With saved moments easily visible in recording timelines, the powerful in-app search, and highlight reel creation capabilities, it’s easy for those creating reports to locate and then stitch together eureka moments. In addition, report creators can look at the observer chat associated with each session to see if there were additional points being shared amongst observers that were seen as key takeaways which further aids in the report creation. The savings add up, often leading to cutting the time to create reports in half.

Growth and Client Satisfaction are Positively Impacted

Most importantly, Discuss is helping Bellomy delight clients which in turn has helped lead to more projects, and more revenue, for Bellomy. This is all made possible by Bellomy implementing a platform that’s easy to use in every aspect, which circles back to their goal from the start. When everyone involved has access to a powerful yet intuitive tool for driving qualitative research, it becomes a game changer for the business.

The ease of use, in-depth insights, and speed that we’ve been able to produce impactful highlight reels and reports for clients is helping us win additional projects from delighted customers.