Scaling the why: How Kimberly Clark is using conversational AI to blend qual with quant

Room 5 | 10:00 am - 10:30 am | Wednesday, May 8, 2024

When Kimberly Clark had the opportunity to pitch to a prospective trade customer, they wanted to persuade the supermarket to stock one of their products. To do this, they knew it would take more than data – they had to persuade through emotion. To achieve this Kimberly Clark needed to bring the customer voice into the room. Yet they still needed to provide facts and figures to support an emotion-led message. In short, Kimberly Clark needed to scale the why. And they needed to do this at speed and low cost. Join us to hear how Kimberly Clark has partnered with Nexxt Intelligence | inca to scale the why through the latest AI-powered technology.

Using inca Conversational AI, Kimberly Clark has, for the first time, been able to hear the customer voice at scale. By using intelligent AI probing of answers research participants give to open-ended questions, much deeper understanding is gained about consumer needs, motivations, preferences and barriers to purchase. Yet the Conversational AI survey framework also enables the delivery of hard, robust data through all of the quantitative question types provided by surveys. What’s more, this is achieved through an engaging participant experience that means consumers pay more attention and provide more-considered answers.

To date, Kimberly Clark has used inca as a self-serve, DIY platform and also as a managed service. Conversational surveys have been conducted in different languages and across different cultures, such as South Africa, U.K. and Israel. The Conversational AI technology has been used for a variety of strategic objectives, including understanding customer loyalty, assessing new product concepts and for shopper understanding.

We expect you will leave our presentation inspired by the new possibilities AI is bringing us for deep human understanding, at scale and look forward to seeing you!

Key takeaways:

1. Whilst some of the narrative around AI can make it seem dehumanizing, for market research it can be just the opposite. Conversational AI can help us understand humans better, by providing deep insight about them, in their own words at a huge scale. No longer are we constrained by presenting people with predefined choices to pick from; we can let people tell us what they really think.
2. Utilizing Conversational AI as a survey methodology enables the blending of qualitative capabilities with quantitative research. As a result, surveys can scale the why in addition to delivering the what.
3. AI is also used to assess the quality of participant responses, with poor-quality participants screened out live during the Conversational AI experience. Those who remain are engaged participants and provide the good-quality data that decision makers can trust.