New Opportunities Voice Capture: A Tool for Motivating and Persuading Upper Management Any market researcher who has made presentations to upper management knows the feeling: your research indicates a clear, well-defined course of action, but your message seems to be falling on deaf ears. What to do? J. Patrick Galloway, of Galloway Research in San Antonio has an answer. He uses audio excerpts from his surveys' voice-captured open-end responses to drive home his points. According to Galloway, nothing moves and persuades upper-level management as effectively as hearing a presentation's key points reinforced by respondents' comments. The listeners are affected as much by how respondents express themselves as they are by what respondents say. Voice capture can result in more accurate analysis as well, when the researcher hears - rather than reads - responses. The ability to consider emotion and intonation when interpreting open-end responses can lead to insights that could otherwise be missed in reading transcriptions. According to Scott and Jimy Tallal of Advanced Research Services in Dallas, who have used voice capture extensively for over ten years, "it represents a quantum leap in the ability to understand what drives respondent behavior." Additionally, voice capture gives the most accurate account of what the respondent actually said, with no information lost through interviewers' interpretations. Voice capture also makes interviewers' tasks easier, since they can concentrate on what respondents are saying rather than on recording the responses. Interviews flow more naturally, promoting rapport between the interviewer and the respondent as the interview becomes more conversational. Interviewing quality improves in other ways with voice capture. You can monitor your interviewers' administration of open-ends and use what you learn to improve interviewer training. Questionnaire writers can use results to write better open-end questions and can create effective questionnaires that take advantage of easily recorded open-end responses. Scott and Jimy Tallal point out that voice-capture responses differ from focus group verbatims in two important ways. First, since they are part of a quantitative study their representativeness of the target population is less of an issue. And second, voice capture gives "respondents a chance to speak for themselves, without being influenced by group dynamics." (May 1998, Quirk's Marketing Research Review, "Digital Audio Gives a Real 'Voice' to Respondents" by Scott Tallal.) But like focus group verbatims, voice-captured open-ends can lead to valuable insights and can provide clients with "key words, phrases, and quotes for sales and marketing purposes." Voice capture has some cost considerations. It requires a voice modem (or proactive dialing card) and additional software for each interviewer station. Sound files for a single study can easily take up a half gigabyte of disk space, and you have to budget time for analyzing the information and preparing it for presentation. But given this technology's singular power to motivate and persuade, voice capture can be a cost-effective investment. Back to Sawtooth News…