Walmart Luminate Expands Customer Perception, Adds Qualitative Research

Five years ago, I was invited by Walmart to help them scale customer voice through technology. The vision was to enable agile research powered by data science. In short, we wanted to engage with our valued customers more frequently and match attitudinal and transactional data to facilitate a better understanding of their preferred shopping experiences. What we built has informed more than 1,000 business decisions at Walmart, including W+, autonomous vehicles, and grocery delivery. More recently, I joined the Walmart Data Ventures team to help our partners – both merchants and suppliers – leverage those same technologies and our rich data assets to inform better, more predictive business decisions.  

In service to that objective, I’m incredibly proud to announce the launch of qualitative research in Walmart Luminate, as a part of our Customer Perception product. Now, charter members of Walmart Luminate can see the “why” behind the buy, through self-recorded video clips from our Customer Spark Community. This unlocks candid answers from real customers to strengthen product strategies and sharpen concepts, including sentiment analysis; concept testing; product feedback; rebranding; and store experience, to name a few.  

Qualitative studies in Customer Perception are easy to build and easy to analyze. Here’s how the feature works at a high level:  

1. Define your audience at the most granular level with new UPC audience targeting capability; continue to leverage our ever-expanding list of over 300 category-level transactions and descriptive variables (demographic, lifestyle, etc.) 
2. Move with speed by leveraging one of our built-in templates or fully customize your study from scratch 
3. Take the guesswork out of how real people will respond to what you’re most excited about bringing to Walmart stores. Upload your own videos or images within your study to collect conversational feedback from verified Walmart customers 
4. Get to the meaning quickly and easily with automated sentiment analysis and responses tagged and filtered by theme 
5. Explore responses in detail with in-app video playback and full transcripts 

Importantly, I have to take a moment to thank our charter members, who were a huge source of inspiration for this launch. We could not have done it without you. And equal gratitude goes to our team of associates across Walmart Data Ventures and Walmart Global Tech who helped bring this to life and designed the tool to meet the evolving needs of our clients and our customers. Because of you, we can continue to deliver commerce on the customer’s terms.  

Current Walmart Luminate customers can begin deploying qualitative survey projects TODAY. For those interested in becoming a Walmart Luminate charter member to gain access to this new feature, please reach out via www.walmartluminate.com/contactUs.

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