From isolation to interaction
Editor's note: Sofia Rojo del Busto is associate director at Inspired Health.
Listening to virtual qual can be…a challenge. It’s a familiar story:
The session starts. You are in your home office, in your casual attire, a fresh cup of coffee in hand. The ping of an e-mail notification suddenly forces the respondent’s voice to the background. Another e-mail comes through – you check it out. Interesting. Oh, there’s another one. Less interesting. Facebook sends a notification. You can’t resist, so you look. You notice a LinkedIn alert. The article is only a three-minute read; it won’t take too long. Click. Your Ring doorbell picks up a UPS truck delivering a package. I wonder what that could be?
It’s no secret – it can be hard to stay focused on virtual qual for the full 60-90 minutes!
People talk about how in-person qual used to be so much better. It was easier to stay focused in a research facility built specifically for the purpose of viewing research. But was it really?
You remember the feeling – sitting in a dark, too-hot or too-cold room, not knowing the time of day, eyeballing the bag of M&Ms you would inevitably reach for, listening to colleagues and clients laugh about a shocking comment on the other side of the glass, hoping that the respondents wouldn’t overhear. Despite being together, the crowded in-person back rooms could be lonely places where the sound of tapping keyboards filled the void between interviews instead of constructive dialogue.
The truth is there are and always were issues with qual back rooms, virtual or at a facility, pre- or post-pandemic. They can be lifeless places that, if not managed, do not nurture the collaboration required for outstanding research to flourish. Sometimes there’s no energy, no magic.
Conversely, purposely creating an engaging and inclusive research environment can fuel collaboration. It can build synergy so all parties feel involved in the research process and its success. An engaged back room creates value and ensures that the client’s needs and objectives are realized and then some.
At our firm, keeping the magic alive in the back room has always been important to us. We have long believed that what goes on behind the glass is just as important as the interview itself. Our in-person back rooms are known for being lively both during and after sessions. We pride ourselves on using structured techniques to engage our client teams to ensure everyone feels connected.
Even before the pandemic, we worked on replicating our in-person backroom approach to a virtual setting. It was crucial for us to find a suitable solution that emulated the in-person magic for our virtual interviews to maximize the client experience and expand opportunities to engage a wider range of stakeholders. While we were close to losing the physical presence of a back room when the pandemic hit, we used techniques to re-create the experience of our structured collaborative format virtually and gained a wider client reach as a result. We strongly feel it is our duty to bring our clients closer to the research and to their customers. That is the motivation behind our backroom approach: structured participation and research collaboration (SPARC).
A process for collaboration
SPARC is a process for collaboration and anyone can do it. So how does it work? Throughout fieldwork, before, during and after the interviews, we engineer client interactions into the process to keep things alive. Before the research begins, we connect with the team to hear hypotheses, develop concepts to test and ultimately stress-test the line of questioning together. During and after interviews, we moderate discussions with our clients and their stakeholders to collectively discuss what we heard in an interview. Our team catalogues key thoughts throughout the research process to ensure we capture the evolution of themes that emerge. After interviews, we collaborate with the team to iterate the research and gain deeper insight. Our approach in-person has always been coaching clients on how to breathe life into these small moments. SPARC began as an in-person approach but has evolved beyond that. Our virtual iteration of SPARC is similar.
Picture this:
You’re sitting at your home office desk, enjoying a nice cup of coffee in your casual attire, excited as you click into the virtual interview. Immediately, you see the research team and your colleagues chatting in the secret space about the respondent’s profile. The interview begins and you feel the energy and enthusiasm from the research team as they share recurring themes, make connections to past work done with you and call out strategic opportunities throughout the interview. You feel inspired to tag quotes, share your perspective on connections to current strategic initiatives and react with emojis to shocking commentary from respondents. Suddenly, an hour has gone by, the interview is over and the moderator comes on the line. You collectively discuss how best to adjust the line of questioning to dig deeper into areas of interest that have emerged as the interviews have gone on. The meeting ends and you get up to refill your coffee, eager for the next interview to begin.
That is the goal of the SPARC experience.
We use videoconference technology to create virtual environments with research-viewing capabilities and a private chat to mimic the physical backroom experience for clients. The SPARC approach can be used to: discuss fieldwork findings in real time; post interesting quotes, comments and any surprises in the moment; allow clients to keep in contact with the research team and their internal stakeholders throughout each session; request questions for the moderator to ask; note themes and trends as they appear; react to responses to encourage continued conversation; review the catalogue of insights to compare/contrast interviews or review a missed session; and serve as a space to hold a post-interview debrief without having to exit the meeting.
The power of SPARC is that it is methodology agnostic. The same principles apply whether you are in-person or virtual. The tools we use stream in-person interviews to clients who may not be able to travel, allowing them to participate in the backroom discussion with in-person clients as if they were physically present. We catalogue moderated discussions with the team in a structured online database that clients can access throughout the research to catch up on an interview or to compare what they heard from earlier sessions. This enables client engagement and connection to the research journey from wherever they are.
The integration of technology into this approach has expanded our ability to collaborate. The virtual back room not only saves the conversations for posterity but allows viewers to post during and after interviews, in-person or virtual. The backroom chat remains open 24/7 between interviews, allowing people to post comments and insights as they begin to digest the interviews. For client-side insight teams, those capabilities are critical. The back room is a crucial place to engage stakeholders. Our clients leverage this to get stakeholder buy-in, showcase a new side of the business and ultimately increase research visibility. We create opportunities for structured collaboration to ensure this happens so they feel invested in the research success.
Client feedback for SPARC has been positive, with many remarking on the impact the collaborative research experience has had at their businesses. Now that SPARC has a wider reach among client teams, stakeholders beyond the research team quote respondents from interviews, insights from debrief calls and action items discussed in moderated sessions between interviews. This approach to the backroom experience is not only approachable, it’s impactful and empowers our clients and their stakeholders to act.
Extract more value
The growth of virtual qualitative has changed the way we conduct and engage with research but there’s an opportunity to extract even more value from these moments. The magic of the back room is not lost, it simply requires reactivation, using approaches like SPARC, to keep researchers agile, relevant and future-focused. We have a responsibility to connect our clients (and their stakeholders) to the research we conduct. When we bring insights to life in this way and make them loud – shine a light on them, talk about them, socialize them – they reverberate across a business. Loud insights inspire stakeholders to act, to innovate, to change. At the end of the day that’s why we do what we do as researchers, right? To make a difference and bring businesses closer to the needs of real people. Backroom magic results in loud insights. Loud insights make a difference – they inspire change and take businesses to the next level.