WhatsApp: The greatest free research tool.
22 participants, 20 days, 20 questions, 1 medium…
When everyone is chatting through WhatsApp these days, why shouldn’t businesses use it as a tool to communicate with their users?
Here’s a low down on how Hektor does research differently.
We talk to our young customers by chatting with them just like how a friend would on WhatsApp, and it has proved to be the most effective way for us to reach out to them.
Why did we think WhatsApp would be a good tool?
First of all everybody uses it, that’s the simple reality. Whether its talking to a friend or even a stranger, it is the preferred medium of communication for youngsters today.
You can express yourself beyond words. As it has been argued a face to face research mechanism can capture emotions quiet easily, now you can get a similar reaction through a WhatsApp conversation. The ability to use visual, video and emoticons within a conversation make it an equally effective tool to capture a persons emotional reactions.
You can probe and extract more rich data, as it has been found that the best research is done when people feel most comfortable. The interactive nature of WhatsApp can make users feel included in the discussion yet it keeps the participants at a safe distance making them feel comfortable.
And lastly its free, so we could put all our resources incentivising our users so they feel more motivated to participate.
The Participants:
Group of 20–30 millennials aged 22 to 35 years old.
Varying profiles and backgrounds, just started earning or early professional.
Owns a smartphone and has a bank account for savings.
Our Objectives were:
To discuss the financial behaviour of young Singaporean professionals and understand their personal aspirations, how they achieved their goals and how they tackled their fears.
To validate their entrepreneurial spirit , which defined their motivation to achieve and what influenced their choices and decisions.
To understand who they trusted or distrusted and their ability to accept new technology or ideas.
To test out what values or brands they endorsed and the reason behind these endorsements, what makes them love a brand?
How they reacted to certain causes and brands that promoted “Doing good” or did it even matter?
The Method:
Throughout the month (20 weekdays)
One key question was to be posted in the group in the morning and additional probe questions were asked to get a deeper understanding on the subject.
One person from the Hektor team was in charge of posting these questions every morning and answering clarifications if any.
One person from the Hektor team would participate as a respondent to encourage sharing and also try to probe the topic or activate the discussion to keep it engaging.
This participant(from Hektor) was responsible to steer the conversation if the discussion takes a controversial direction, the rules were posted at the beginning of the exercise to set discussion standards.
One person from the Hektor team was a quiet observer, taking notes of the interesting insights and points that were being brought up.
The WhatsApp conversation was downloaded and analysed concurrently and also at the end of the month.
The Process:
We posted questions everyday to achieve the above mention objectives.
The questions were designed to be fun, interactive and interesting, but with the hidden goal of addressing and probing our set objective without making the user feel conscious or uncomfortable.
The Findings:
The insights we got through this research process were pretty mind blowing. We got to understand a little bit more on how the local Singaporean young customer thinks, feels about saving, causes, their banks and new fin-tech startups like us.
These insights played a huge part in defining our Persona* and identifying the pain points that our users currently faces.
We could also identify different behavioural insights and how their reactions and thoughts vary between each personality type.
Thus from this exercise we were able to identify a detail list of pain points that our customers were facing and that lead us to identifying the opportunities where we could help them.
What we learnt…
Before the start of a project like this: you need to be completely preparedwith the objectives of the research very clearly defined and drafted.
The questions and probes need to be planned out in detail. Each question and sub-question asked has to be defined individually with its role and objective.
A thorough planning will ensure a good quality research with very rich data.
The person from the internal team interacting with the users needs to be particularly effective in keeping the group active and engaged.
The questions should be thought out or run through with a behaviour research expert to get the right reaction without being too direct.
The questions should also be interactive enough to keep the group interested to answer. A good question on its own can break inhibitions and force the participants to open up and discuss more.
More on how we built on the learnings from this exercise and how it contributed to developing the solution in the coming blog.
*A persona is a representation of a type of customer. Personas answer the question, “Who are we designing for?” and they help to align strategy and goals to specific user groups.
