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Voice and video recordings are often used in Online and CAPI surveys to extract deeper responses. But what respondents say and do in these recordings doesn’t always tell you what they really think. You can, however, use voice analysis software to reveal the true emotions behind spoken words.
Social norms mean people tend to behave politely when answering survey questions. And busy lifestyles mean they may not have fully thought through their responses.
Considering that 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious1, and 38% of vocal communication comes from tone of voice, rather than words themselves2, it becomes clear that relying on words alone for market research can miss a lot of essential details. Consequentially, most researchers aren’t getting the information they need to understand what really matters to people and drives their behavior.
In our continual quest to keep Nfield at the forefront of professional market research, we came across a voice analysis solution called Phebi and decided to put it to the test.
Phebi analyzes speech and breaks it down into what has been said (sentiment) and how it was said (emotion). It does this by checking voice characteristics, such as pitch, rate and tone, every 3 seconds to detect and quantify the underlying emotions. Phebi’s methodology is based on well-accepted social science research and validated via 38,000+ hours of testing.
Phebi’s emotion analysis examines many factors to determine levels of five underlying emotions:
Having put it through its paces, we concluded that Phebi is a useful complement to Nfield Online and CAPI surveys instantly delivering accurate, quantified analysis of people’s nonconscious responses that goes beyond the words they say.
We were also impressed by Phebi’s auto transcription and translation function. In CAPI interviews, we found it could differentiate between interviewers’ and respondents’ voices.
Phebi features include:
Phebi can easily be used to analyze Nfield voice recordings via a simple connection.
Recordings from Nfield Online surveys can be automatically uploaded to Phebi’s server. For Nfield CAPI surveys, you should continue using the built-in Nfield recorder and upload all your audio files to Phebi in batch.
After feeding your audio recordings into Phebi, you’ll immediately be able to see various reports, such as the ones shown below, in the Phebi portal.
If you are interested in using Phebi’s software, please contact them directly at marketing@phebi.ai for a live demonstration and answers to all your questions about their product.
Note: Phebi’s servers are located in the USA, Europe (Germany) and Australia.
It’s natural for researchers, fieldwork managers, sample managers and sample providers to want the highest possible completion rate for every online survey. And while a certain amount of dropouts are to be expected, alarm bells can start ringing when the percentage appears to be too high.
If there’s no obvious explanation, such as the survey being very time-consuming or poorly presented, the reason may be a technical one. Having investigated a number of reported survey dropout cases at NIPO, we have identified five likely technical causes, along with ways to mitigate them:
If you’re concerned about overly high dropouts in any of your surveys, it could be worth looking into these possible causes.
When an ‘anonymous link’ to a survey is shared on a social network, allowing anyone who finds it to enter the survey, you can expect bots to pick up on it and ‘give it a try’. We have observed a number of surveys with literally millions of interview starts that can be attributed to bots, rather than human respondents.
These starts can be recognized in your survey data, as there will be no answers to any of the survey questions. You may still see automatically generated ‘respondent data’, such as device detection, which has been run before the first question is shown. But no data other than that.
How to prevent it
Add a simple landing page between the link and the actual interview start. All it needs to have on it is some text that introduces the survey and asks for confirmation to continue, with a button that brings the respondent into the actual interview.
When tested on previously mentioned cases with the millions of dropouts, which were suspected as being caused by bots starting the interviews, this simple trick lowered the dropout rate from over 99.9% to below 10%. From this, we concluded that (most of the) bots that were causing the high dropout rates do not follow up (by ‘clicking the button’) after the initial request.
It’s understandable that you may feel hesitant about adding ‘yet another screen’ to the survey. But if it already has an introduction page, on which the respondent is only required to click a button, why not simply move this page up the order, as described above?
Why ‘non-legitimate’ interview starts matter
Of course, there are also bots which are smart enough to follow up on some questions and provide pseudo answers. When that is the case, the simple landing page solution will not work.
Even if you don’t share your survey link via a social network, but invite all your respondents personally, providing each with a link containing a unique Respondent Key, bots can still find these and ‘give it a try’. Some smart bots even make up Respondent Keys that they then try.
How to prevent it
As in example #1 (Bots hitting on ‘anonymous link’ studies), a landing page can help. But if the bot is somewhat smart, this alone may not resolve the issue.
If you observe your survey being ‘polluted’ with Respondent Keys you did not hand out, you may want to set the ‘Allow only known respondents’ setting to True. With this option set, Nfield will only allow respondents with Respondent Keys that have been uploaded into the survey sample table.
If you share personalized links (containing unique Respondent Keys) via email to specific respondents, dropouts can also be caused by the respondents’ email service providers checking that link as part of their automated security process. It is common for email service providers to follow links in emails sent to their customers to check they don’t trigger malicious action. We know, for example, that Google, Hotmail and Yahoo do this to protect their users.
Following these links often means opening them, which causes the interview to be started. The email service provider will conclude that the link is safe, but until the email recipient (i.e. the actual respondent) also clicks that link, the survey will be considered by Nfield as a dropout, because the survey was started but not finished.
How to tell if this is the cause of your dropouts
Take a look at the times these unfinished interviews were started. If you see many dropouts at around the time, or shortly after, you sent out your email invites, this is a good indication.
Before respondents are even shown their first question, many Online surveys begin by automatically running processes to establish the respondent’s device and browser (to determine how the questions should be rendered) and to verify the link that started the interview has not been tampered with.
These processes often involve Nfield interviewing making API calls to services which are external to Nfield. These API calls are not always performed as well as they should be, especially when the load is high. When an API request takes too long to be serviced, Nfield can give up on the request and time out. Without getting the response necessary for the interview to start, the respondent also gives up and closes the browser.
Sometimes these API requests just fail. If no appropriate measures have been taken in the questionnaire script to deal with a failing request, the script can run into an error. When the respondent sees this, they drop out.
A less frequent cause of high dropout rates can be an issue in Nfield itself.
NIPO mitigates issues once these have been reported or recognized. Depending on the severity, hotfixes can be put in place.
Consider each of the first four possible causes described above, and see if you observe anything that indicates any of them as the likely cause. Then take the suggested action.
If, after doing this, you still think what you see is the result of a bug in Nfield, create a support ticket. Share as much detail as possible.
Market researchers examining in-store shopping behavior are increasingly asking us for virtual shelf functionality.
Traditionally, researching this subject has been done by setting up physical displays and inviting shoppers to the relevant locations. However, this is an expensive exercise. And since the coronavirus pandemic, online methods for capturing shopping behavior have become very popular.
In response to this rising demand, we have been working with ConceptSauce to understand their solutions and develop a means of incorporating virtual shelf research in Nfield.
ConceptSauce can provide a virtual shelf or virtual store for market research, which enables shoppers’ actions to be monitored and timed. Virtual shelves can easily be adjusted to carry out A/B testing with altered prices, added promotional banners, changed packaging or different product positioning. You can also find out what happens when you send shoppers on a mission to find a particular product.
When it comes to building your own shelves, ConceptSauce can do this for you, or you can do it yourself using their shelf builder.
Letting respondents loose on your virtual shelves is just the start.
Integrating Virtual Shelf in Nfield opens up a host of survey possibilities. Once the virtual shopping has been done, you can retrieve the lists of both the purchased items and the ones which were looked at but not chosen. Your Nfield questionnaire can ask why these decisions were made. In the case of sending shoppers to find specific products, you can see where they looked and how long it took.
The following high-level steps outline what needs to be done to integrate Virtual Shelf in Nfield. You can, of course, get your technical teams to explain!
Of course, you are very welcome to contact our helpdesk / salespeople for more information. Also, please feel free to share examples with us of how you’ve made this work.
In an online survey world that’s reliant on text responses, do you ever wonder how much you might be missing? Especially for questions which invite free-form answers. When you have respondents who struggle with typing, or articulating thoughts via written words, or for whom the survey is not in their first language.
To solve this, we need to think beyond text. We need to see what other possibilities are out there. We need to be inspired by behavioral changes, such as the increasing popularity of using WhatsApp for voice messaging instead of text messaging.
Voice messaging benefits both sender and recipient by allowing more information to be communicated, in less time, without the effort of pre-organizing thoughts. It also facilitates an extra layer of expression through tone-of-voice. And it’s a convenient solution for young and old alike.
Enabling audio answers in online surveys can therefore open up a whole new world of quality research, from a wider range of respondents. Respondents will share more information, including their emotions, and explain themselves better.
But how do you handle voice responses, to extract all the information they contain? Do you need extra resources, people and coding? Yes and no. There are already solutions which can intelligently transcript audio recordings into text and analyze tones-of-voice to identify emotions. However, humans will probably still be needed to ensure proper understanding of more in-depth messages.
To take your market research on respondents’ emotions to the next level, you can even consider video answers. Have you ever thought about how much information is revealed by a person’s facial expression?
According to research1 published in 2020, there are 16 universal facial expressions2. Imagine what you could learn about how a respondent instinctively feels, if you could capture their facial expression when they see an advertisement, poster, news story or new product.
Or what about their behavior when encountering new packaging design, how they use your hand soap or how they pour your drinks? Having these moments recorded can provide much more information than asking for conscious descriptions.
Worried about the overhead? You needn’t be. Professional emotion recognition software is able to analyze and interpret captured expressions.
To find out how to integrate audio and video recordings in Nfield Online surveys, see our post about to set this up this with Pipe. Also check out Phebi AI for voice emotion analysis.
If you’d like to incorporate audio and video responses within Nfield surveys, you can do this by integrating Pipe’s recording platform. Below is an example of how this feature might be useful.
Incorporating Pipe into Nfield surveys requires specific technical expertise. You’ll need someone who is
Gather your resources
Note: You should set the display size according to the device your respondents will use. It is also possible to make the sizing responsive to a range of device screens. Please refer to Pipe’s own instructions for this. |
Here is an example of ODIN script that will show an audio recorder and a video recorder. You can also download the script here. See beneath for explanations.
Note: The higher the random number, the lower the chance of the duplicate SecondRespondentKey being made. You should therefore check this or decide which recordings to pick in the data processing part. |
Note: Once each recording is uploaded to Pipe, you might want to add *BACK to prevent re-recording or do a check on re-recordings (spotted by same payload). |
accountHash:" YourAccountHash", eid:"YourEID"
YourAccountHash
and YourEID
with the JavaScript values previously generated in Pipe. (See step 5 in Setting up Pipe.)Note: These recordings will be out of scope of Nfield. You should therefore be aware of the location where the data is stored, along with any different security and compliance levels. |
It would be too labor intensive to click every individual record to find the payload information (respondent key and question id) to rename its recording file. But you can automate this task by using a webhook to send the payload and file name to trigger file renaming (optimally in batches). Please refer to the Pipe Webhook documentation for how to use their webhook. Alternatively, you can program something yourself or use other codeless automation tools, such as Microsoft Power Automate, to do the work.
We hope you find these instructions useful. Please feel free to share your feedback with us.
NIPO has released a Markdown theme to be used on top of the NfieldChicago template. With this theme you can use various Markdown language commands in your survey to highlight text, organize the survey page and style your survey. In this series of NIPO Academy sessions we will explain how to use this theme and demo some of the new options it provides.
Attractive, easy-to-digest presentation plays an important role in encouraging survey response. Nfield automatically wraps surveys in a professional design that’s consistent with our industry’s highest standards. Most of the time, this provides everything our users need. However, there can be occasions when you want to customize your presentation more extensively.
Experienced scripters with knowledges of common web development techniques (Javascript and CSS) can add extra presentation elements by incorporating their own theme packages (via a zip file).
Markdown is a lightweight markup language that can be used to add formatting elements to plaintext documents.1 It is very popular, especially among developers, and is widely used by our own teams and in Nfield documentation.
We’ve added a new pre-packaged theme (markdown.zip) to the theme example section in NfieldChicago documentation for you to use. This includes a third-party library as a Markdown parser, which provides you with additional options for formatting your text using basic Markdown syntax.
Here’s how it works.
Adding headers improves respondents’ experience, by clarifying where they are in the survey.
These are created by simply using # for header 1)
and ## for header 2)
…etc.
Links are sometimes useful for enabling respondents to reference relevant information, which helps them understand context and increase their trust.
A clickable link that opens in a new tab is created by using [text](url) "optional hover-over text"
.
There is no need to define bold, italic and bold and italic for every different font.
In Markdown language, this is achieved simply by using _italic text_
, __bold text__
and ___bold italic text___
. This results in much simpler, easier to read scripts.
If you want to add supplemental information to help respondents answer specific questions, enclosing this between two horizonal lines makes for a good, clear presentation.
A line can be created in Markdown by using ---
.
Millennials are more likely to engage in surveys that are presented in a more visual and gamified way. Emojis3 are also a good tool in this regard.
You can now copy and paste emojis to your script. See a list of emojis in Unicode 1.1.
It is usual to provide a means of contact either at the beginning or the end of a questionnaire.
You can now easily incorporate a clickable link by enclosing your email address as shown here <sales@nipo.com>
. This will launch the users email program / app.
Instructions for doing this begin at step 7 of 10 Steps to create a theme. If this will be your first time incorporating a theme in Nfield, we recommend watching Academy #6 NfieldChicago theming.
The world of Markdown is quite extensive, with possibilities ranging from standard headers to more advanced options. Please look at theming in NfieldChicago documentation to download and try this out. We also have another example theme available for setting font colors called markup.zip (See bottom right for download link). Please feel free to share any feedback or questions you have about themes with us.
NIPO is proud to announce the opening of our new Mumbai office. In recent years we have seen a strong growth of our business in the Asia Pacific region, something that also was the result of our Nfield China deployment we launched 2 years ago. This major step is now followed by the opening of our new office in Mumbai, that has been in business as of 1 November 2021.
The NIPO Mumbai office will be dedicated to supporting our customers in the Asia Pacific region, with backup from the NIPO Helpdesk in Amsterdam.
NIPO offers remote support to all Nfield users by email (no telephone at the moment, due to all staff working at home for reasons related to Covid), hosts Nfield introduction sessions and on-site training sessions on topics ranging from survey creation to fieldwork management.
Office contact details:
3rd Floor,The ORB
IA Project Road, Andheri
Mumbai 400099, India
We are delighted to announce the opening of this new office and look forward to supporting you from Mumbai!
In this new series of NIPO Academy sessions we will do a short recap of the standard fieldwork report, but most time will be spent on how to create a private data repository and how you can use this to create your own reports.
As anyone who shares a broadband network with high-capacity users knows, when others are eating away at bandwidth by playing high-definition games, streaming TV shows or live broadcasting over social media, internet performance deteriorates.
The same is true for any shared IT resource. Including Nfield’s survey hosting environment in the Azure cloud. Our acceptable use policy is designed to prevent excessive resource use by some causing performance problems for all. But with the roll-out of our Isolated Interview feature, we aim to completely eliminate the risk of suffering from “noisy neighbors”!
In a shared hosting environment, an individual survey occupying a disproportionally large amount of processing power will lessen everyone else’s performance. This can happen if a lot of respondents suddenly rush to a survey at the same time, or if a badly scripted questionnaire results in an infinite loop or excessive quota checks.
To prevent this in situations where it can be foreseen, such as the planned launch of a large-scale research project, we ask customers to warn us in advance so we can scale-up capacity as necessary. But errors, such as bad scripts, can overload the system without warning.
Nfield does automatically expand its capability as necessary, but this isn’t instantaneous. In the period before scaling up takes place, online interviewing performance and Nfield manager responsiveness slow down. Respondents can get frustrated and the market research team’s job becomes more difficult, as everyone suffers the consequences of having “noisy neighbors”.
Thanks to new technology, we have succeeded in developing an architecture whereby each individual survey is run in isolation (survey-level isolation), utilizing its own resources and with the ability to expand these without affecting other surveys.
When an isolated survey reaches its pre-set Nfield threshold, its resources will automatically scale up, without other surveys in the same or different domains being impacted during the moments of heavy loading or scaling. In Nfield design, if a request faces timeout, there is a double fall-back mechanism to keep servicing the request. Initially falling back to the isolated resource, then to the shared resource.
Expanding in this way at survey level is also more economic than doing so at deployment level (as in the noisy neighbor scenario).
By keeping every survey accountable within its own realm, Isolated Interviewing
Isolated Interviewing doesn’t just provide protection from noisy neighbors. It also enables heavy users to scale up faster and cheaper than when in a shared environment. A shining example is a recent project in which 2.36 million requests were handled in a four-day period, peaking at 5,000 requests per minute. This also saw us smash right through the 100,000 successfully completed Nfield interviews in 24 hours barrier for the first time!
Despite this extremely heavy load, processing time remained reasonably fast, with 99% of requests processed within 549ms, and no other customers impacted. In addition to performance speed, the Isolated Interviewing feature provides a more stable, risk-free environment for everyone.
All domains within our America deployment environment already have Isolated Interviewing enabled. However, Isolated Interviewing only comes into effect in newly-created surveys. Existing surveys remain on shared resources.
Over time, we’ll be carefully rolling Isolated Interviewing out to more domains in other deployment environments. And, of course, we’ll continue to invest in this feature to further increase its capabilities to accommodate our customers’ hunger for high-volume projects.
Recently NIPO introduced Survey performance for Nfield Online, as part of fieldwork monitoring. Survey performance metrics are very important to make sure that your survey is technically running fine. But perhaps even more crucial is that these metrics give insights in how your respondents are experiencing your surveys.
Nfield’s Voice Over feature is a very useful tool for both Online and CAPI surveys, which can be used to overcome visual impairments (Online), interviewer bias (CAPI) and local dialect differences (CAPI and Online).
By voicing survey questions and the various response options, Voice Over broadens the scope of people who can contribute to answering surveys.
In particular, it provides the following benefits:
Nfield has recently enhanced its Voice Over functionality by making it possible to play audio for questions and answers separately. So users can repeat-play specific answers for clarification, without having to listen to the entire question with all its answers over again.
Go to the page produced by our NfieldChicago team for a simple demonstration of Voice Over in action and instructions for implementation. You’ll also find this in the NIPO Academy video #19.
Setting up Voice Over isn’t difficult. It simply needs some patience for the time taken to link each separate audio file with each part of the question.
If there’s anything else you’d like to know about using Nfield’s Voice Over feature, don’t hesitate to contact us!
Having achieved gold status for the Application Integration competency for the Microsoft Partner Network at the end of last year, we are proud to share the news of NIPO’s success in achieving an additional Silver status for the much desired Security competency.
The competencies Microsoft awards are a strong confirmation that these partners have demonstrated the highest, most consistent capability and commitment to the adoption and implementation of the latest Microsoft technology. Securing a competency is highly dependent on successful certification of technical staff, which implies a deep and continuous investment from both the organization and the individual software developers.
Our Nfield users can benefit directly from NIPOs status within the Microsoft Partner Network. Next to our annual ISO 27001-2013 (Information Security) certification, this is another proof of leading external recognition for the NIPO team and our Nfield platform. This information can be used in client pitches for those projects where Nfield, as Kantar’s destination platform, is used and where the customer would like to understand how, for example, security is addressed.
Securing the Silver status for the Security competency was one of our goals for 2021. Now the NIPO team will continue her efforts to upgrade the Security competency to Gold status.
More and more customers have been asking for real-time insights while a survey is still in progress. And now, Nfield is able to deliver these via our new Data Repository feature, which provides a continuous data delivery pipeline straight into your dashboard.
Today’s fast-paced world calls for ever-faster reporting. Nfield Online’s powerful interviewing capability enables a tremendous amount of data to be collected in a short time-frame, without hardware or network limitations. For many customers, the ability to quickly capitalize on this data is also very important.
A good example could be in media production, where survey data can be used to inform outlets of current audience interests. Let’s say, skateboarding suddenly becomes a hot topic at the Olympic Games. The content producer can choose to use this information to switch focus and retain audience attention.
With the Nfield Data Repository feature, insights can be attained immediately, without expensive setup and dependency on IT teams.
Transferring Nfield interview data into insights in customers’ own dashboards is a complex task. Traditionally, the ETL (extract, transform and load) process requires involvement from data processing and IT teams, either during initial setup or each time the process is run, which is a time-consuming overhead.
Now, with the Nfield Data Repository, data from completed interviews is extracted every 10 minutes and directly fed into an engine which converts it into a database format, from where your dashboard / reporting tool can instantly retrieve it.
To make the fast, high-performance engine that keeps the data pipeline flowing affordable to all customers, we offer a scalable pricing system based on usage.
You’ll find the new “REPOSITORIES” section toggled within the Nfield Manager interface. To enable it, please contact your Nfield account manager.
When onboarding new Nfield Online customers we always organize an online introduction course to ensure a smooth start using Nfield. One of the NIPO trainers will go through the whole research process and will teach how to use the many features Nfield Online has, also taking into consideration the specific needs of the customer. We decided it would be a good idea that in this series of NIPO Academy sessions we will do such a session for a wider audience.
Request a demo to see how NIPO can help you meet your requirements with our smart survey solutions.