Interview: My-Take Director of Insights Discusses New Online Focus Group Tool

The following represents a Q & A with My-Take’s Director of Insights, Rebecca Strott. Rebecca oversees several communities and works directly with clients to create activities to meet their research objectives and ensure quality insights. She also manages a team of community managers and analysts. In this Q & A we will discuss My-Take’s latest advancement, VoC Video Chat: Online Focus Groups and Interviews.

Have you seen an increased demand for online communities and focus groups during the COVID19 crisis?

Strott: Absolutely yes, to both, but especially online focus groups. We’ve had twice the number of inquiries as the same time last year. I think that people are looking for a way to continue to connect with their consumers, and our tools being online focused, really help them do that in a few different ways depending on their overall goal.

Online focus groups have been on the rise because people are having to adjust their in-person research needs. Our tool works really well to capture something many surely would have had to do in a in-person focus group or individual interview setting.

Communities have traditionally been My-Take’s focus. How did you get into online focus groups?

Strott: My-Take is known for innovating in the community space and expanding our platform features, so we have added this capability which we call VoC Video Chat to our platform. We’ve worked hard to make this feature very powerful and it is available as part of the platform and/or independently.

We found that a lot of our clients were doing these external focus groups for research and they really wanted a way to be able to connect to their consumers on the community platform. As someone who's done focus groups in the past, I can say that our tool lends itself really well. It makes the process simpler. You have all of these reporting tools at the tips of your fingers, so you're able to really look at each individual response to each individual question and really drill down to what people were saying.

So, we’ve seen the rise of video conferencing tools, how does this fit in, or how is it different?

Strott: This is a professional tool developed specifically for market research. It is made for focus groups and individual interviews. It's not a conference tool that's trying to work as a research method. So there are features such as the ability to have observers watch the interviews or focus groups and not be seen. There are moderator tools that really allow for total control over the group. And then, that reporting capability that I discussed that really does lend itself well to these research methods. This tool is also much more secure than other video conferencing tools, all data is stored in a secure location which is only accessible with permissions.

Can you tell us a little more about the moderator tools?

Strott: There is the moderator chat, which enables moderators to chat with any observers in a private text chat-box that is invisible to participants.

There is also the ability to queue up questions for participants in advance and also add more during the session on the fly.

Screen-sharing is another one of the tools available. This gives moderators the chance to showcase content such as an image or silent video to chat session participants.

Other than the moderator tools, we in-addition have advanced reporting capabilities. There is the video clip editor which allows data to be examined in greater detail resulting in higher-level insights. Having chat sessions recorded allows researchers to enhance reports. High level features such as this allow researchers to edit the footage from their focus group session to include the notable participant responses.

Transcriptions are available for better understanding of the responses to questions. A transcription is a written account of the audio in the video, they are available for individual responses or for the recap video. In the recap video the words are shown in the order spoken. All video clips from chat sessions are formatted into one session recap video using various layouts depending on the number of participants. There is the option to have AI or Human generated transcriptions.

To learn more about My-Take's VoC Video Chats for online focus groups and interviews contact us today!