Rival Technologies Launches Chat Lab, an Insights and Engagement Platform for the Mobile and Messaging Era

Founder and CEO Andrew Reid to present disruptive new technology at the Insight Innovation Exchange Conference in Austin, Texas

Vancouver-based Rival Technologies is set to launch Chat Lab at the Insight Innovation Exchange Conference. An end-to-end insight platform, Chat Lab is a compelling solution to the email overload and survey fatigue crisis that threatens the future of the $76-billion market research industry.

Rival’s solution aims to close the gap between the way people live their digital lives and how market research is conducted. Researchers heavily rely on emails to engage customers, but consumers are moving away from email and on to messaging apps.

This mass migration is due to two key factors. First, the typical research experience of today does not reflect real human conversations and behaviours. It’s static, boring, and doesn’t use the same language and tone that real people use in real life. Then there’s email overload and survey fatigue: Research shows that nearly 250 billion emails are sent and received every day, with 74% of consumers saying they are overwhelmed by email. At the same time, a 2018 study found that 93% of research participants found the chat experience more fun and easier to complete than traditional online surveys. As a result of their over-reliance on emails, researchers are seeing declining response rates to surveys. This, in turn, makes companies less agile.

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That’s where Chat Lab comes in. By applying extensive market research experience to the development of insight communities — a technology that disrupted research and now dominates the industry — Chat Lab solves several major and interconnected challenges. Built on the foundations of sound market research methodologies and practices, it takes advantage of pervasive chat, voice and video technologies, such as Facebook Messenger, SMS, and Instagram, that today’s mobile-first consumers use seamlessly every day.

“To get an accurate read of consumer attitudes and opinions, companies need to engage with people where they are,” said Andrew Reid, Founder and CEO of Rival Technologies. “Chat Lab is designed to help companies do this by facilitating ongoing conversations in mobile apps and messaging platforms that today’s consumers use. When I founded Vision Critical, we built a solution that helped bring market research to the digital era. Together with the technologists and researchers that make up Rival, I am excited to once again introduce a solution that rivals traditional research methods and helps companies be more agile using conversational technology.”

Marketers and researchers who want to experience chats are invited to try a chat demo: www.insightbot.io/starburger.

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Chat Lab will be featured at the conference as part of a presentation given by sister company Reach3 Insights, entitled A Shot of Insights: How Jagermeister Uses Conversational Insights to Reimagine its Brand.

“By using this platform, we were able to collect feedback across age cohorts – including younger consumers who are notoriously hard to engage with – in an iterative and authentic fashion,” said Lucien van Huyssteen, Director of Consumer Strategy & Commercial Planning at Mast-Jägermeister US. “This meant that we were able to address questions as they came up, and weren’t confined to a single touchpoint to try to address every objective. What’s more, the authenticity of the exercise facilitated respondent trust and allowed us to collect rich video and audio responses instead of only text-based open ends. The ‘human’ element added a layer of believability and context to the results that we don’t typically receive.”

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