Delivering qualitative market insights with Quirkos

To build a well-designed, well-thought-out, and ultimately useful product, today’s technology companies must gain a deep understanding of the working mentality of people who will use that product. For Melody Truckload, a Los Angeles tech company focused on app-based freight logistics, this means intense market research and a focus on training sales agents as researchers.

Kody Kinzie, director of Melody’s special research and operations team, Cythlin Intelligence, was faced with introducing qualitative social research and analysis to people who had never considered themselves researchers before.

“Quirkos was the first truly accessible qualitative program I found,” Kinzie said.

Quirkos was designed with the philosophy that anyone can become a qualitative researcher. The goal is to allow companies and agencies to adopt unique ways to understand their staff and the wider marketplace. By making qualitative data visual and easy to code, users can see their results emerge and gain quick overviews of complex issues.

Companies like Melody are at the forefront of developing the next generation of qualitative insight, and Quirkos is helping to open the door to innovative new methods of business intelligence.

Kinzie started training his team members to use Quirkos but said he soon discovered that the simple coding allowed even a novice to develop complex data structures with notable uniqueness. Often, he found that these code structures were well suited to analyzing particular elements the researchers were interested in, and he began documenting the experiment to evaluate the resulting structures.

Here’s how Kinzie and his team use Quirkos:
One team member will send a Quirkos database to another team member — a researcher who examines the code structure and walks the requesting team member through an explanation of the thought process that went into creating the code. The data structure’s strengths and weaknesses are then assessed and distilled into a report. The researcher examines Melody’s code construction to discover what kind of information it is most effective at analyzing or categorizing, as well as whether the code tags and organizes information or clusters information into meaningful relationships.

This helps researchers understand what kind of questions these information structures should be applied to, and where a particular researcher’s methods might excel. The ability to use Quirkos to build and analyze unique and flexible databases from these structures has given Melody an edge in developing and sharing insights throughout the team.

While Melody Truckload’s app currently wraps up beta testing with commercial partners, the Quirkos approach has been put to the test most recently on the Melody team’s latest project, Melody Fashion.

“In the complex world of L.A.’s Fashion District, which is the part of town that houses the city’s fashion industry wholesale market, freight consolidation desperately needs to be modernized,” Kinzie said. “The objective of Melody Fashion is to provide a platform for fulfilment and consolidation that takes into account a detailed understanding of a market with many players.”

To that end, sales agents were trained to analyze interactions using grounded theory on Quirkos and to aggregate data garnered in their interactions with customers. It led to valuable insights, including a partnership with local shipping experts to bring Melody Fashion’s technology to the district.

Melody operations manager Marcus Galamay, who introduced new agents to Quirkos software and guided them through their first qualitative exercises, said, “Quirkos provides an intuitive introduction to qualitative analysis for our sales agents, augmenting their role in a way that’s expanded our insights into our client base. It’s a niche that many might not think to pursue, but it’s already delivered results in terms of better understanding of the data we generate and refining our market strategy based on that.”

Thanks to its ease of use and its powerful ability to assist in important social research, Quirkos was instrumental in providing Melody with the insight necessary to build smart and useful technology for a distinct and totally new customer base.