codeit - the virtuous circle of growth

 All Market Research teams know the pain involved in analyzing survey verbatim comments.

Although open-ended questions are invaluable, the pain of analysis can make people reluctant to use them in their surveys. This reluctance creates a missed opportunity for richer market research insights.

Increasingly, smart teams are looking for ways to make this analysis more efficient, accurate and less painful.

Over the last 7 years, we've welcomed lots of new clients, big and small to the codeit platform. Recently, we took a look at the usage patterns of these clients over time and an interesting pattern emerged. On average, we see companies usage of codeit grow by 25% each year in the first three years of usage. So, a company coding 1m verbatims in year one will typically code 1.25m verbatims in year two and then 1.5m verbatims in year three.

Of course, there are companies that have used codeit for more than three years, and the pattern continues there too – namely, steady growth in usage over time.

We were intrigued by this pattern, and thought it would be useful to speculate on the factors driving it.

The Gateway Project

Quite often, clients come to codeit because of a project that is just too big, too complicated or too unwieldy to handle with their current methods. Perhaps it’s too time consuming and error prone to manage data in Excel. Perhaps it’s a multi-country survey that requires a tool that multiple coders can work in simultaneously. Or maybe the current process of coding is just too inefficient to achieve the turnaround times required.

Whatever the reason, there’s usually a tipping point that justifies “dabbling” with a dedicated coding tool like codeit.

Once the project is set up in codeit, and the coding is underway, the efficiency and time savings quickly become apparent. From there, it doesn’t take much to see that those efficiency gains would apply to all projects big and small. Before long, the decision is made to standardize around codeit on all projects, and make the process faster, easier and more accurate for everyone.

The Fear

As mentioned above, researchers often fear using open ended questions in surveys. The prospect of painful coding and verbatim analysis is very off-putting.

So, another possible explanation for the usage growth we see, is that this fear begins to subside as companies get accustomed to using codeit. As they get used to the increased efficiency and smooth verbatim handling process, they’re inclined to use open-ended questions more readily in their surveys.

This is obviously something we whole-heartedly encourage. Open-ended questions are an important research tool, and it is vital that researchers are empowered to use the best research tools for the job.

Untapped Resources

A large proportion of verbatims collected in the real-world are only given a superficial analysis using basic or sub optimal methods (e.g. skim reading, word clouds). Or worse, the verbatims are collected, and then simply ignored or not used. Usually, this is down to cost and/or time pressures.

However, once codeit is in place within a research team, opinion seems to change. Rather than seeing verbatim comments as an impossible burden, they become a untapped resource. With an efficient tool for cost-effective analysis researchers can start making use of this untapped resource and start getting the full story from their survey data.

New Business

We have also seen cases where the growth in codeit usage has come from new business growth within the client company themselves. Once we remove the pain of handling verbatim comments, the companies are more likely to offer open-ended questions and verbatim analysis as a service to their clients.

So, rather than seeing verbatims as a hassle, attitudes shift and they are eventually seen as a huge opportunity, leading to increased revenues. And so, the virtuous circle is complete!

In the researcher's own words

We’ve seen these scenarios repeatedly with clients when they first buy a codeit license and suspect these experiences have played a pivotal role in driving the usage growth in our users.

Julie Eaton, NEC shares her experience with codeit: “Before we started using codeit, handling customer feedback responses was time-consuming and cumbersome. Now that everything is seamlessly integrated with our data collection system the coding process is effortless.”

Find out why codeit is used by some of the most trusted researchers to unlock deeper insights from market research data. Sign up for codeit for free today with our 30-day free trial.