Editor’s note: Miguel Ramos is product marketing manager at research software  firm Confirmit, London.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words does video capture? As research and feedback professionals push the boundaries of data collection to deliver deeper, richer insights, video has come to the forefront of engaging with respondents. Whether you are focused on marketing research, customer experience or employee engagement programs, there is much potential in including video to get to the heart of your audience’s attitudes and opinions.

With a new generation of consumers comfortable with sharing their views via multimedia channels, there’s an opportunity to increase response rates and gain an unprecedented level of qualitative – and surprisingly quantitative – insights to help drive effective decision-making.

A rich data source

Video is a rich data source able to gather powerful, qualitative insights. For example, studies have shown that video contains four times as much information as compared to open-ended text response. Intuitively, this makes sense as researchers have much more information with a video – in addition to what respondents answer and the words they say, researchers can tell how respondents say things, read the emotion in their face, consider the environment they are in and more. 

Having access to this level of information helps us derive deeper insights into the people companies are analyzing. In addition to these obvious benefits, it has also become easier to capture this type of data, making it more appealing. Most devices people are using today have an integrated Webcam – because of this advancement in technology, researchers can leverage the devices respondents are already using.

Respondent perspective

Video is an unparalleled way to illustrate what people think about a particular subject matter. It has become a valuable resource from both a respondent perspective and the researcher or end client. From a respondent perspective, Millennials are notoriously hard to engage with for research and feedback purposes. They are a critical market for many businesses so companies need to interact with then using channels they favor. More than nine in 10 Millennials watch digital video monthly, so leveraging video for feedback is a smart resource to collect as much feedback as possible.

From an end-client perspective, video is also becoming more mainstream. Seventy-five percent of senior executives watch work-related videos on business-related Web sites at least weekly. Thus, video is a great way to pull together and present key statistics in a meaningful and impactful way. The move toward storytelling as a reporting approach plays well into the strengths of video.

Implementing a video strategy

When thinking about how to actually deploy video, it’s helpful to consider specific use cases and methodologies around how companies can adopt and implement a video strategy. For example, being able to capture video responses as a part of ad testing (i.e., presenting a video and then getting feedback on that piece of content through video again) gives brands greater insight compared to simply written feedback. This approach results in a combination of quantitative metrics with qualitative video data, which allows companies to do qualitative research on a bigger scale – a growing trend we are seeing in the industry.

Here is a very simple framework to help identify the right use cases and value-adds:

  • Background: What are the business and research objectives?
  • Opportunity: What is the opportunity for improved capability?
  • Approach: What approach(es) are we going to use and with whom?
  • Benefit: What are the benefits and the business value?

Once these questions are answered, the next step is execution, which can easily be broken down into four sections: capturing content, codifying the content, analyzing the content and storytelling.

  • Capturing content: It’s critical to consider how to employ video capturing across different methodologies. There are three key ways to capture content: smartphone apps, HTML Webcams and direct uploads. To ensure companies are capturing content effectively and encouraging capture, keep the questions open and make sure you ask the respondents how they feel about a product or service. Make sure the design is a “What?” question followed by a “Why?” question. Incentivize people to give as much detail as possible. Sentiment-neutral questions such as, “please describe your last trip to…” result in responses that are well-suited to text analytics so provide richer insights. It is also important to offer tips to educate and ensure respondents are providing quality responses, for example: not standing directly in front of the light source, speaking clearly but not quickly, not covering the microphone, paying attention to background noise, etc.
  • Codifying content: Think about what a video contains (demographic, emotion, object, spoken word, activity, attitude); then work to automate all these different assets. Video can help analyzers start to home in on the different assets of a single video.
  • Analyzing content: Search for key words/phrases to find meaningful moments of video content aligned to your brief and hypothesis, then identify additional key themes that emerge from the video content. Next, classify, filter and tag content to uncover patterns and trends, then integrate text into existing analytics tools. Automatic audio-to-text transcription can aid this process.
  • Storytelling: One of the most powerful elements of video capability is not only analyzing the content but the ability to create customer stories. Keep stories short and concise, splitting out key deliverables and making it succinct. Video recall rate is successful but rate is even higher if you have very focused content. Some key statistics include:
    • Eighty percent of viewers recall a video they have seen in the past 30 days.
    • Viewers retain 95 percent of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10 percent when they read it in text.
    • Videos under one minute enjoy 80 percent viewer retention.
    • Fifty-nine percent of senior executives prefer video over text, with 75 percent now watching video at least once a week.

This approach is making it as efficient and effective as possible across each of these four key boxes to ensure companies can drive video insights at scale across each of these different use cases.

Capturing feedback

Emotion detection and AI have already begun making great strides in the CX and MR industries, but video is becoming the new trendy feedback collection method. A great example of a company already take advantage of the benefits that video feedback offers is Devlta – which has integrated a video chat serviced into the Delta Sky Assist, so passengers can connect with customer service representatives with the push of a button.

Facial and tonal recognition is improving rapidly, helping video to become a much more manageable approach. Both help to build a complete picture of responses by getting closer to emotional reactions and going beyond how people say they are feeling.

With technology constantly evolving and expanding (and customers attention spans shrinking), it is vital that organizations are finding new and innovative ways to effectively capture this feedback, with as little effort from the customer as possible. What seemed like witchcraft a few years ago is rapidly becoming a reality, as the tools required gather momentum and start to drive true value.