The Challenge
Liveminds recently worked with a global consumer insight consultancy to conduct a shopper insight study on behalf of a multinational oil and gas giant. The key challenge was to explore and optimise the customer experience in the client owned fuel stations in Malaysia.
The Solution
Platform Branding
The platform was Liveminds branded, rather than custom branded, as the researcher wanted to keep the client concealed. This also helped to avoid any biases and allowed the researcher to learn from people's experiences at competitor fuel stations.
Research Activities
A mixture of web and mobile app questions were used to utilise the benefits of both formats. Mobile app questions allowed participants to capture ‘in the moment’ feedback rather than trying to recall experiences after the event. This worked particularly well when sending people to different fuel stations on shopper missions. Shoppers uploaded photos to bring their experiences to life and filmed short videos of themselves straight afterwards to sum up the highs and lows and how the shopping experience could have been better. To counter any issues with unreliable or slow internet connection the Liveminds app allowed participants to capture these photos and videos offline and sync them to the platform at a later time. Web questions were used when we wanted people to spend more time reflecting on their experiences and providing longer written responses towards the end of the project.
The questions were set to private to ensure participants felt comfortable uploading videos, as well as to avoid any biases from seeing others’ responses.
Blocker questions were used at different points during the project to ensure participants completed tasks in the correct order. These questions stopped participants moving to the next question before they’d answered a blocker question. In this instance it ensured fuel stations were visited in the correct order.
The Liveminds platform also allows specific questions to be assigned to groups or individual participants, for this project they were assigned to different shopping ‘missions’ based on the tasks they usually carried out at fuel stations.
The Results
The consumer insight consultancy had great success with the Liveminds platform, gaining rich, valuable insight into the customer experience at the client's fuel stations. The project was particularly successful at motivating participants to upload photos and videos of themselves in situ, providing ‘in the moment’ feedback on their shopper experience. This was extremely valuable to both the researchers and the end client - bringing shopper experiences to life and helping the client to understand how best to optimise them.
