Given how long market research takes in pharma, it’s not surprising that companies are looking to artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline tasks, such as detecting and analyzing emotions, writing recruitment emails, analyzing spreadsheets and writing the insights into a story, just to name a few.
While some of these approaches are becoming used widely in healthcare research, they are most often piecemeal initiatives that are plugged in here and there. To really supercharge the value of your market research, you need to create a well-planned integrated strategy and ecosystem with AI at its heart.
Imagine a world where AI can be analyzing people’s profiles online, engaging with the right people and conducting market research with them 24/7. Imagine that those transcripts are fed into an AI engine that analyzes them and extracts the rich insights using Natural Language Processing (NLP) automatically.
Imagine that AI is also used to weave the insights into a story and a report. Then all the humans have to do is take the insights and share them with the organization. Actually they don’t even have to do that. We can layer a chatbot interface so they can go to the database and query it in natural language. Any insights on that topic will be pulled up and displayed.
Welcome to the future of market research. Is it a pipe dream? No. We are already doing this with our clients.
In order to develop a truly innovative integrated market research approach that disrupts the industry, you need to bring together three key areas — AI at each phase of the process, digital integration of the ecosystem, and a new model for market research.
It begins with customer data
We are data rich. Just think about all of the data available on social media, IoT-powered devices, and more – much of it unstructured data that wouldn’t have been usable at scale with traditional market research processes and technology. But big data and AI open new opportunities for utilizing data.
AI algorithms can sift through, parse and analyze disparate data that would too much for human minds to tackle. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The wealth of digital touch points and conversations that happen daily are the basis of social listening. But what if you could take that further – much, much further than word clouds and surface sentiment analysis?
Using AI you can actually question and engage people on your topic 24/7. This goes far beyond chatbot uses. The connecting of these data points by individual customer (as AI allows) will allow companies to get a 360- degree understanding of their individual customers’ in-depth viewpoints. The process can be instant and automatic based on customer data and make the customer experience far stronger.
But this is only part of the picture. There are so many ways market research can be supercharged with AI. Here are just a few.
Analysis of topics
The high cost and time commitment of traditional market research projects have limited them to high-stakes decisions on big-ticket items that require advance knowledge of what information is needed to formulate business strategy. AI opens up opportunities for making decisions beyond things like branding, product design or pricing because it can analyze information and identify patterns in a fraction of the time it would take humans. This means even the granular decisions that happen much more frequently can be based on solid data rather than gut feelings or guesswork.
Recruitment (both identification of the right people and actual recruitment)
Recruitment can take weeks (or months in some rarer condition cases) and can be expensive, especially when it drags on. First you have to determine who your target audience is and where you can find them. That’s even more challenging in health care, which tends to have stricter privacy rules than other industries.
And need to design the survey. All that’s before the actual recruitment can begin. That part can be time consuming and labor intensive.
Artificial intelligence can speed this process up by learning what works for specific variables and audiences. This lets you personalize your invites and get more opens, clicks, and conversions to participate. You can even use AI to generate language that strikes the right tone to convert that invitation into a rapid conversion to participate.
Powerful community management
Artificial Intelligence is already being used in online communities to identify which participants provide the most engaged and considered interactions. And it can also help get more valuable market research insights from disengaged community members.
By utilizing AI, community managers can provide the right support to individuals to reignite their interest and get more valuable contributions from them.
Questioning and probing
In the past, chatbots were limited to pre-programmed questions, which constrained your capabilities. However, the new generation of chatbots are in a different league. The natural language capability and the logic to probe and investigate displayed by one of leading ones we examined was quite impressive.
AI chatbots can also help keep customers engaged longer because the experience is more like a conversation than paperwork for the user. And you can identify friction points by tracking where people leave the conversation.
You can uncover deeper understanding of customers than was previously possible. And you can do it more quickly.
Analysis of answers
Unlimited open-ended market research questions can be uploaded and the language analyzed to uncover even greater insights missed by human analysis. In addition to that, AI can reveal correlations between complex responses that would otherwise remain hidden in the sea in data. We have just completed a project doing this in a rare disease area and found some extremely useful new segments for both the physicians and patients that can now be used in the communication strategy for a more effective result.
Creating the insights story
One AI tool I have been examining is focused on automating the analysis and story telling of the actionable insights. This previously was the preserve of the human analyst. Not any more. In fact, several of the big 5 consulting firms are actually using this tool to deliver ‘their’ insights in their management consulting today.
Allowing natural language query of the results
AI can handle massive amounts of data, even when it’s unstructured. And when you layer on a chatbot, you can search for results in plain language. Think Google Home or Alexa, but with your market research data.
Conducting secondary research
Secondary or desk research can be the main source for smaller organizations because it’s more cost-effective. But this can also yield additional valuable insights for larger teams seeking to enter new markets, develop new products, analyze competitor performance, review supply chains and more.
AI automates much of this process, delivering intelligence quickly and freeing up people and resources to handle other tasks.
24/7, always on insights
One of the advantages of utilizing Artificial Intelligence is the ability to analyze data in real time. There are already platforms that allow real time data to be unearthed, read and analyzed in real time.
This will mean that for much market research in the future, we will not require market research ‘studies’ per se, but we can be constantly analyzing data from our customers in real time and unearthing the insights. Companies that use this to make better decisions more quickly will be more nimble and have an important competitive advantage. We have already done this for one pharma company. It is where everyone will be heading soon.
Elements that are key in the new ecosystem
There are several factors that will impact the success of your efforts in this new market research ecosystem. These elements are linked together with AI and increase the value of your insights and strategies to levels never before possible.
Data. Any insights you get will only be as good as the data you draw them from. The good news is that there are a plethora of data sources available to draw from for both primary and secondary market research tasks. These can give you a picture to peoples’ behaviors, thoughts and feelings.
Intelligence Analysis. Turing data into insights is vital to any market research process, and that remains true in this new ecosystem. Given the vast amount of data and the varying sources, this requires the assistance of AI. In addition, AI removes human bias that can so often skew the results.
Real-time decisions and interaction. In a competitive marketplace, speed counts. You can no longer afford to take months collecting and analyzing data to make decisions. The best strategies are based on what is happening now, not in the past. The real-time speed of AI allows you to take advantage of opportunities and connect with customers on a deeper level.
Always on insights. Having a continuous picture of customer insights allows you to spot patterns and trends faster than you could with traditional market research initiatives. This means you can stay on top of the needs of your customers and potential customers.
Conclusion
Traditional market researchers that want to stay ahead must be keenly aware of how the market is changing—and how their competitors are responding.
Successful digital transformations in market research will begin with developing a new value proposition that sets a high-level aspiration and pursuing an end-to-end digitization of the research process. AI is disrupting healthcare research with AI and enhanced customer experience and elevated always on insights.
This is beyond simple social listening tools as we are interacting with the people. Any healthcare research department or agency that puts their customer experience at the forefront with personalization with AI will identify superior customer insights, and will not only generate significant saving and additional revenue, but will win over their customers due to the enhanced experience.
Found this article interesting?
Would you like help in supercharging your market research with Artificial Intelligence either to put it on steroids or to get a unique differentiation for your agency?
If so, Eularis can help.
For more information, contact Dr Andree Bates abates@eularis.com.