With the increasing need to move live focus groups and interviews to an online space, Recollective is once again revolutionizing the way researchers can schedule, engage, and analyze participant video interviews! Over the coming weeks, we'll be diving into an in-depth, multi-part series of blogs that take a look at our exciting 1 - 1 and group video interview tools!
In today's blog, we'll be looking at how Recollective eliminates one of the biggest annoyances when it comes to organizing live online sessions: scheduling individual interviews!
- Automatic Scheduling
- Manual Scheduling
- Notifications
- Rescheduling Upcoming or Missed Meetings
Scheduling Interviews
Recollective provides researchers with a quick and simple way to connect with participants directly - whether it's using our unique automatic meeting scheduler to have participants book their own session time, or integrating previous scheduled meetings into the platform manually. Now lets explore both options in more detail so you can determine which one is right for your project...
Automatic Scheduling
So you've decided to run video interviews for your upcoming research project! Like any research project, there are a ton of moving parts that need to go smoothly to ensure you're getting the data and responses you need to successfully conduct your project. When looking at a typical workflow around synchronous online focus groups, a researcher often has to coordinate many aspects that include some, or all of the following:
- Determine functionality needed to conduct the sessions and pick a video interview platform based on that criteria
- Establish a timeline for the project and coordinate researcher/ client availability to conduct the interviews
- Identify a recruiting partner, calendar scheduling platform, or other method to recruit participants for sessions that fit into the predetermined availability
- Manually coordinate booking times and availabilities for each participant, and then assign them to an available researcher (and let's hope there aren't any existing meeting conflicts!)
- Issue meeting confirmations and hope that everyone remembers their assigned times
- Reach out to participants or send reminders to join the upcoming video sessions
- Attend the actual meeting
In many cases, this workflow involves the use of multiple tools which can become a convoluted nightmare logistically. The automatic meeting scheduler in Recollective eliminates all of the manual complexity and legwork involved with manual bookings so you can focus on more important aspects of your research project! Instead of juggling multiple calendars and meeting invitations, a typical Recollective Video IDI booking workflow can be as simple as:
- Choosing which moderators will be handling the meetings, what days and times the meetings occur, duration of each meeting, and buffer times in-between each meeting (just in case you need to step out for a quick break before getting to the next meeting!)
- Crafting a custom invitation email that automatically sends to every available participant
As soon as those two elements are defined, the platform immediately informs every participant about the upcoming interviews, and repeatedly reminds them to confirm their preferred time slot. There's no added work on your part as a researcher, and you'll always be provided with a list of available meetings each day, along with which moderator is assigned to them.
It's so simple, that it even accounts for booking conflicts, rescheduling, and reminder notifications automatically!
Manual Scheduling
Already have meetings pre-booked on your end? No problem! Just choose which moderators are available on your end, set the desired duration for each meeting, and then start picking from a list of available dates and times and assign them to each individual participant! Notifications will be sent to them as soon as you've confirmed their set meeting time.
Regardless of which method of meeting bookings you choose, Recollective includes all the typical enhancements to help control who you're meeting with! Whether that be with the entire study population, a specific segment group, or even a randomly selected number of participants on a first come first served basis, we've got you covered!
Notifications
Now that you have participants registered for your interviews, how do you make sure they’re going to attend? Recollective activity notifications will take care of that for you!
Whenever you build a 1 - 1 video interview, the system provides a plethora of options to keep participants and admins fully aware of all upcoming meeting commitments. These include notifications for items such as:
- Reminders to schedule a meeting
- Confirmation on a booked meeting
- Reminder to of any upcoming meetings
- Reminder to rebook any missed or cancelled meetings
Each and every one of these notifications is delivered both in-app, and via email on a real-time basis! You'll never have to worry about you or your participants forgetting to either book, reschedule, or attend actual meetings in the future!
Rescheduling Upcoming or Missed Meetings
What happens if you or a participant needs to reschedule or misses a meeting entirely? No problem! If you're using our automatic scheduler or the manual booking method, Recollective allows you and your participants to quickly hand off or reschedule meetings in a handful of button clicks! As a researcher, you'll be able to:
- Ask a participant to pick an alternate time
- Pass the meeting over to an alternative moderator who is available
- Cancel the meeting outright
In the case of missed meetings, the platform immediately sends an email notification to the participant and provides up-to-date availability dates and times for a rebooking.
Regardless of what decisions you choose to make on rescheduled meetings as a researcher, all parties are informed of the changes automatically and immediately. No more muss and fuss around the idea of comparing availabilities after everything has been booked, or if people end up missing meetings!
As you can see, there optimizations around multiple aspects of your research projects involving live video interviews! From a massive simplification of the administrative planning involved with booking meetings, to multiple notification mechanics to ensure that participants and researchers are aware of and attending all meetings, Recollective's interview meeting scheduler provides the peace of mind that every researcher deserves!
Hopefully you enjoyed the first look at our meeting scheduler! Stay tuned for the next part of our Recollective Live Video Interviews blogs: Prepared Items!
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