Every interaction people have with your brand carries an emotional charge. People feel excited, reassured, let down, delighted, and those big feelings are what’s driving their decisions as consumers.
The gap between how people actually feel and what traditional surveys can capture is vast. A rating scale can tell you someone scored an experience an 8 out of 10. But, it can't tell you exactly why their face lit up when they tried your new product.
At Rival, we've spent years designing research tools that meet consumers where they are — on their phones, in real moments, with methods that feel natural rather than clinical. The result is a platform built to surface the emotional truth behind your data, not just at the individual level, but at scale.
Here's how we do it.
In-depth interviews (IDIs) have long been a cornerstone of qualitative research, and for good reason. Hearing someone speak candidly, in their own words, reveals things no checkbox ever could. With video, even an unprompted tangent could turn out to be the real insight you've been looking for.
But IDIs are also time-intensive and expensive to run. A skilled moderator, recruited participants, hours of scheduling and transcription — it adds up fast, and the result is typically a smaller sample that's hard to scale.
Rival's video responses give you that same quality of emotional
signal without the overhead. Participants record and submit selfie videos on their mobile devices and you get responses from dozens or hundreds of real people. It's the depth of an IDI, at a scale an IDI program could never match.
Whether you're collecting 50 video responses or 5,000, Rival supports it all and has the AI features to help you process it into something valuable. The numbers speak for themselves: video responses generate 8x more words and are 182% more thoughtful than standard open-end text responses.
Now, if the idea of combing through hundreds or even thousands of video responses is making you shake in your boots, with Rival it doesn't have to be manual. Rival's AI Insight Reels tool automatically combines open-ended video and text responses into video highlights that bring findings to life. Thematic analysis groups text and video responses that support your insights. Then, you can edit and rearrange clips, add headers, captions, and demographic context, and even blur participant videos when privacy matters.
These days open-ended questions are the workhorses of qualitative survey research. But they come with a limitation: the follow-up. A skilled interviewer knows when to say "tell me more about that" or "what do you mean by frustrating?" A static survey does not.
Rival's AI Smart Probe is changing this with intelligent follow-ups that trigger when they're actually needed, not after every single response. It works using Rival’s Thoughtfulness Score™, a proprietary technology that evaluates each open-ended response across 10 research-grade dimensions.
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With the Thoughtfulness Score, when a surface-level response is detected, the AI probes deeper. Rival's AI makes sure the follow up is a question that is contextually relevant to what the respondent actually said, rather than a generic "tell me more." And because original responses and follow-ups are combined for analysis, you get the full picture without extra processing work on your end.
In a case when the initial response is already rich in detail, the probe won’t trigger any follow-ups. The result is a survey that behaves more like a conversation with someone who is actually listening. This avoids over-probing and generic follow-ups that feel unnecessary and erode the participant experience fast.
The proof is in the data: in a study with Oura, AI Smart Probe drove a 5x increase in words per response and a 294% increase in thoughtfulness.
Sometimes the simplest response is the most powerful one.
Rival's brand-new emoji choices give participants a fast, frictionless way to express how they feel as an intuitive reaction without extra cognitive overhead. Available as single or multi-select, emoji choices offer a quick and fully customizable way to collect emotional feedback at scale.
But the real power comes from what happens next. Emoji choices pair naturally with Rival's branching and skip logic. Because once you know, directionally, how someone feels, you can route them to follow-up questions that make sense. For example, someone who picks "disgusted" after trying a new product gets a very different set of questions than someone who picks "delighted." Both paths are relevant and Neither wastes the participant's time.
Sometimes emojis aren't quite the right fit. Depending on the subject matter or the audience, they can feel too casual. And some research contexts call for something more considered.
Rival's single or multiple choice image grid gives researchers a
flexible alternative for emotional elicitation. Upload a curated set of images, ask participants to pick the one that best represents how they feel in the moment, and follow up with an open-ended question asking them to explain their choice. It's the same signal-first, dig-deeper logic as the emoji choice, but with the freedom to use any visual language that fits the brand or research context.
This flexibility is essential for some. For example, a set of bespoke lifestyle images might capture emotional nuance for a luxury brand that a standard emoji set can't. Or, for a media company, custom imagery can ground emotional responses in the brand's own visual world.
Emotional insights aren't a nice-to-have — they're some of the most actionable data you can collect. When you understand how consumers feel about your brand, you unlock a next level of decision-making.
It impacts the entire lifecycle. If you can identify the moments in the customer journey that create genuine connection you can build product experiences that generate advocacy versus those that quietly erode trust. From there you can create messaging that resonates because you understand the emotional job your brand has to do.
That's what Rival's suite of emotional insight tools is built to deliver. Together, they form a research toolkit that doesn't ask your consumers to translate their feelings into a number — it allows them full expression in a way that makes them feel valued.
Want to see how Rival can help your team capture emotional insights at scale? Book a demo and we'll show you what's possible.
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