Forsta has released a smartphone app, which companies can harness to build customer communities and gain qualitative insights at scale.
Available on iOS and Android devices, the app functions almost like a mini social media platform, providing a space for polls, on-the-go focus groups, and various other crowdsourcing initiatives.
The capacity for uploading videos and photos adds to this, giving color to customer feedback.
Yet, perhaps most innovatively, it allows customer participants of digital research to keep a log of how they interact with the brand on a daily basis. Hence, its name: “Digital Diaries”.
As a result, companies can uncover behaviors and needs from a distance, gaining the human insights that add value to data.
Building on this point, Brian Bhuta, Chief Product Officer at Forsta, said:
Digital Diaries enables the type of deep consumer understanding that can only come with one-on-one interactions with customers, sharing their feedback in a way that feels natural to the way they live their lives—on their phones and using text messages, social media, and other forms of digital communication.
Such a solution seems to support human-centered CX initiatives, which harness human insights – such as stories, emotions, and conversations – that are traditionally difficult to quantify.
Many companies can then connect these insights with big data to find new, exciting answers to common CX quandaries.
Tricia Wang, Co-Founder at Sudden Compass, promotes this approach in a popular TED Talk, in which she stated:
Relying on big data alone increases the chance we’ll miss something while giving us the illusion that we know everything.
Wang continues by suggesting that quantifying is addictive, and that companies too often throw out data because it cannot be expressed as a numerical value.
Yet, innovations like Digital Diaries may help businesses get to grips with the human narrative, underlining common themes that are sometimes missing from traditional data models.
As such, companies may begin to view the complete picture of CX.
Enabling this further, the app is available on desktop and tablet devices – as well as smartphones – and functions without need of a WiFi connection. This ensures the company never misses a beat.
Further features include the ability for community managers and researchers to react and respond to customer feedback in real-time. They may also exploit helpful visualizations such as word clouds and heatmaps.
Companies can access the solution through the Forsta HX (Human Experience) platform, alongside other applications from the leading VoC provder, as per the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Such recognition and its robust reputation paved the way for Press Ganey, the healthcare experience analytics stalwart, to recently announce plans to acquire Forsta.
