de meerwaarde van chat

In onze activiteiten rondom digitale communicatieoplossingen houden wij continu onze ogen open voor nieuwe manieren om mensen met elkaar in verbinding te brengen. Met het gefragmenteerde landschap van instant messaging apps, in het achterhoofd gingen een aantal studenten van de Universiteit Twente samen met ons op zoek naar de kansen van een meer gebundelde aanpak van communicatiekanalen. Aan de hand van een klein marktonderzoek werden de eerste hypothese rondom ons chat-gedrag getoetst. Het team werkt in het engels, dus wil je meer weten, dan is het nu tijd om even om te schakelen.

Context

In the dynamic landscape of digital communication solutions, Speakup is continuously attentive for opportunities to connect people through new means. Inspired by the scattered landscape of instant messaging applications, we want to investigate an innovative approach to unifying multiple communication channels into a single, tidy interface. In close collaboration with Speakup, a group of students has begun to conduct market research for a potential omnichannel messenger. In this regard, a survey was designed, to answer some initial hypotheses on user chatting behavior.

Participant description

We spread the survey through multiple communication channels to reach as many occupations as possible. We discovered similar occupations between the participants and summarized them into three personas: Students, Business professionals and IT professionals. Additionally we also received other answers which have no connection to the three personas and labeled them “Other” and also blank answers which we labeled “No answer”. The pie chart below represents our participants ordered by occupation.

Outcome

It is important to be aware of the fact that the sub-sample sizes of both the IT- and the business professional segments are insufficient and outliers can be expected.

Correlating to our results, we found the top five chatting applications used by each identified persona. See the table below.

When investigating the segments’ tendencies to chat on pc, we found that compared to all personas, students chat least frequently on pc, while IT- and business professionals both appear to be significantly more engaged in doing so. In coherence with this, students rarely chat through multiple channels simultaneously, with business professionals appearing moderately interested, and IT professionals significantly engaged in “omni-chatting” through existing solutions. It is important to be aware of the fact that the sub-sample sizes of both the IT- and the business professional segments are insufficient and outliers can be expected.

Findings

When analyzing the wants and needs of IT-oriented respondents, we found a couple of insights that will likely prove useful in the development and feature integration. First of which being that IT professionals are very engaged in the attempt to separate their private and professional chat environments. When focusing on this target group, it might be vital for the success of an Omni-chat solution to offer features that allow for this particular segregation. An idea for this is the labelling and/or clustering of connected contacts, but the IT-segment analysis results have indicated that not a lot of people use a label feature yet. Additionally the Business professionals have slight complications getting used to new chatting application software and find it generally time-consuming to always have to switch between different chatting applications. We also found that a lot of participants prefer to use chatting applications to transfer a variety of files between their own devices. This method has been seen within all personas but mostly significant for the business professionals and the students, IT professionals will likely already have alternatives for this issue. 

Finally, we learned that respondents from the IT segment are very worried about the abuse of their private data by companies, which could explain the absence of WhatsApp and other free mainstream chatting applications among the most used apps in this segment.