Dynamic profiles, smart distributions, video sentiment, and more: Q4 2022 mega-updates from Rival Technologies

9 November 2022 | 5 min read | Written by Anirudh Sharma

It’s not an easy time to be a market researcher. Inflation. A possible recession. Staff shortages. The confluence of these challenges means companies are leaning on researchers—many of whom are already drowning in work—to deliver fresh insights on how customer behaviors and attitudes are changing and why.

At Rival, we’re in the business of helping researchers make a bigger impact. And today, we’re excited to share enhancements to the Rival platform that allow high-performing research teams to meet these challenges head on.

These innovations are engineered to help Rival customers increase the strategic value and utility of their insight communities through our Community 2.0 platform.

But first: What is Community 2.0?

Insight communities have been an integral part of the Rival DNA for a long time. In fact, many people from our founding team helped invent the concept of research communities back in 2000s.

Community 2.0 is a re-imagining of communities for the world that we’re living in today. It’s a turnkey insight community platform that combines mobile-first, chat-based tech, a game-changing conversational methodology and fully integrated services.

Here's a short video with an overview. 

Over the last 6 months, we’ve rolled out exciting functionalities that beef up Community 2.0.

The goal? Eliminate the hassles of traditional panels and communities, and free you up from repetitive tasks so you can focus on what matters: delivering game-changing insights your company needs to thrive.

Here’s an overview of what’s new.👇 Please get in touch with our insight community experts if you’d like to learn more.


Dynamic profiles: Get to know your members and optimize the community experience

An insight community platform needs to be able to build on what you already know about your members. This is non-negotiable—it’s what makes a community a community.

But what if you could do more?

And what if you could scale your efforts without increasing the burden on your participants?

Today, you can build dynamic profiles that let you do exactly that.

A core functionality on the Rival platform, dynamic profiles let you capture demographic, attitudinal, and behavioral data over time and use that information to engage the right people for your activities, increase their relevance, and optimize the frequency of your engagements with each member.

Flexibility is the name of the game here.

With dynamic profiles, you can:

  • Create and collect profile attributes in different formats: open-ended, single or multi-choice, etc.
  • Personalize follow-up activities based on profile attributes
  • Build the profile of your community members progressively (hint: no need to send a single, long survey to capture all this info)
  • Drive chat logic based on a profile attribute
  • Mask a profile attribute

We have some even more exciting updates to dynamic profiles in Q1 2023. In the meantime, please get in touch with our team if you'd like to see a real-time demo. 


Smart distributions: Put follow-up activities on auto-pilot

We’ve made significant investments in helping researchers optimize the timing and targeting of their community activities on our platform.

Building on core capabilities like timezone-aware engagements, we’ve rolled out event-driven invitations that make Smart Distributions, well, smarter. 😊

The idea is simple: Put repetitive surveys on auto-pilot.

Think workflows that trigger follow-up chats based on responses and behaviors from previous chats. For example, when a new participant joins your insight community, you can set it up so that a pre-programmed chat is sent to them after a pre-determined time. You can also send a follow-up chat after a community member completes a chat.

Combined with our APIs and webhooks, smart distributions also let you trigger a chat based on data coming from your CRM.

In all these use cases, everything happens auto-magically—just one-time configuration and you’re good to go.

Connect with one of our product experts or insight community specialists if you'd like to see smart distributions in action or if you'd like to brainstorm use cases of this functionality—I guarantee it'll blow your mind. 


Video enhancements: Real-time sentiment and “force watch” feature

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of video feedback. Video is ubiquitous in our mobile-first world. It cuts through the clutter, and helps insight teams bring to life the voice of the customer in the boardroom. There’s something magical about seeing customers’ actual faces that make CMOs and CEOs sit up and pay attention.

We’re continuing to launch enhancements that help researchers maximize the value of video feedback.

video-sentiment-mobile-toplineReal-time video sentiment analysis is now available through our mobile toplines. Using AI and machine learning, videos are tagged automatically, letting you track whether a video response has a positive, negative, neutral, or mixed sentiment.

We’ve also introduced a less sexy but often-requested feature: the ability to force participants to watch a video before answering a question in a conversational survey.

For certain research studies (ad testing, for example), it’s important that participants see the entire video. This functionality adds an extra layer of protection that ensures the validity of the data you’re getting from your insight community.

By the way, video is included with your Rival subscription—no additional expenses or clunky integrations required. 


Chat management center: Collab, approve, track, and go!

At Rival, we’ve invested in a multi-disciplinary customer success (CS) team who support our customers on everything from recruitment to authoring, from incentive management to reporting.

Our customers LOVE our CS team (we have a 95% satisfaction rate)—they often consider this team an extension of their internal team and the Rival platform.

Through a chat management center, we've made it even easier for Rival customers to collaborate with our CS team right on the Rival platform.

In one nifty dashboard, you can now: 

  • Review and approve chats that need to go out to your community members
  • View mobile toplines for chats currently in field
  • Access new reports and data files

Of course, our CS team is still be available via email, a phone call, a text message, or a pigeon (if that’s your style 😊). Our full range of flexible and integrated services is still available as well. This chat management center is a value-add we’re providing to give you real-time access to all the projects you have on the go.

chat-dashboard-laptop

By the way, this dashboard is just a small taste of what's on our product roadmap. We've got more exciting announcements coming in Q1 2023 that will make our users' lives easier. If you're a current Rival customer, please reach out to your customer success manager for details. 


Webhooks: Integrate your community to applications you already use

Forward-thinking CMOs want visibility on research findings and insights. But often data from insight communities remain in a silo, available only to the market research team and no one else.

That's why we're on a mission to make it much easier to push research data to apps and systems your company already uses.

Through webhooks, you can send various types of information from Rival to your CRM and systems of record, including:

  • Community subscription and activities: for example, when your customer joins your insight community
  • Chat participation: tracking which chats your customers have completed and when
  • Chat data: sending a participant’s responses (open-ended text, numeric, single choice, multi-choice, etc.) from the Rival platform to your system of record

Webhooks deliver data as soon as a particular event of interest or an action happens, so once these are set up, data is passed through in real-time.

Through our webhooks, Rival will be available later this year on Zapier—a popular piece of tech that enables automations and data integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Google, and almost all major tech stacks imaginable today.

Talk to an insight community expert

We’re excited about these enhancements, and we’re even more thrilled about what we have in store for the next quarter. As always, we’d like to thank Rival customers who continue to give us their candid feedback about our platform as well as our services.

If you want more details about this innovation or if you simply want to connect with our insight community experts, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

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Written by Anirudh Sharma

Vice President, Product Management

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