Market and customer research can be a hefty investment. It takes purchasing or subscribing to  the right survey tool, developing a survey with strategic questions, taking time to conduct the survey and recruit respondents, and then analyzing all the data. When you go through all that work and come out with only lackluster quantitative insights, “disappointment” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

To truly make the most of your investment, qualitative data should be a core part of your research along with a survey platform that makes it easy to analyze. Let’s take a closer look at the impact of qualitative data and the top qualitative data analysis tools to enhance your research.

What Is Qualitative Data Analysis and Why Does It Matter?

Qualitative data analysis is the process of organizing and interpreting non-numerical data, which is typically presented in the form of words. The goal of this process is to identify meaningful themes or patterns that help answer a research question. In survey research, qualitative analysis refers to text-based responses – answers to questions like “how would you describe your experiences with our brand?” as opposed to “on a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with our brand?”

Qualitative data analysis used to be a time-consuming and manual process because computers didn’t have the technology to understand and analyze human language. Even today, most survey tools can only analyze and summarize quantitative data, and will still leave you with large batches of qualitative responses to read and categorize manually. There are select tools, however, that harness the advances in artificial intelligence to analyze qualitative data for you.

Qualitative data analysis software is critical in getting the greatest benefit from your surveys and market research. This software:

• Saves you the incredible amount of time it takes to manually read through and analyze text-based respondents
• Cuts out the inherent bias of having an individual analyze and categorize responses
• Creates a consistent, predictable method for categorization and analysis, which is difficult for individuals to maintain especially as they weed through a large pool of responses

Top Software Tools for Qualitative Data Analysis and How They Compare

While most survey tools are sorely lacking in the qualitative data analysis department, there are a select few that do it well. Consider these top qualitative data analysis tools and how they compare to find the best options for your research.

1. GroupSolver

GroupSolver is a new generation of survey platform. It operates as a conversational survey, with a text-like user interface that engages respondents. Meanwhile, in the background, the AI platform analyzes and cleans up qualitative answers in real-time.

The intelligent survey platform uses a crowdsourcing approach, allowing respondents to share their ideas and evaluate popular answers provided by others. The dynamic survey builds and evolves on itself over time, learning from new answers and gauging the audience’s consensus.

What’s more, the technology will condense the qualitative data into a concise set of unique ideas (backed by quantitative support) for you. This allows researchers to focus on the answers that really matter and get to the why faster.

2. Qualtrics

Qualtrics, like GroupSolver, gathers qualitative data through individual surveys. It operates in a very different way, though. Qualtrics operates more like a traditional survey, where the data analysis takes place predominantly after the survey rather than during.

One unique feature Qualtrics offers is predictive analysis for individual consumers. It tracks how specific consumers respond to surveys, analyzing their risk for churn and predicting their responses to certain changes in your customer experience. This can be helpful for certain types of research.

There are downsides to Qualtrics, though. This tool is built for enterprises so it’s a highly professional, featureful tool. The challenge with this is that it has a steep learning curve, and the price tag can be too big for small and medium-sized businesses to swallow.

3. Remesh

The qualitative data analysis tool Remesh works in a different way compared to GroupSolver and Qualtrics. It operates more as a live online focus group than a survey. With up to hundreds of people gathered digitally on the platform, a moderator asks questions and generates discussions to collect qualitative data. The platform, then, gathers participants’ responses and analyzes them behind the scenes to distill them down to key trends and takeaways.

A benefit of Remesh is that it analyzes the focus group’s responses and takes the manual analysis out of your hands, saving you time. However, there are innate issues with focus groups that Remesh cannot remove.

There is natural bias within focus groups. The moderator, even unintentionally, will bring some bias to the conversation. The members of the focus group often influence each other too, so you can’t be confident whether the answers you receive are genuine or are influenced by peer pressure.

Which Qualitative Data Analysis Tool is the Best Fit for You?

At the end of the day, the right qualitative data analysis software for you depends on your needs, the type of market research you’re conducting, the takeaways you need, and the bandwidth of your team.

For most, GroupSolver provides the ideal middle ground: a user-friendly experience, efficient and accurate qualitative analysis, and an advanced methodology that gets to the “why” answers that allow you to translate your research into action. To find out for yourself, request a GroupSolver demo today.