Deeper, Richer Customer Insights through Conversation

Priscilla McKinney: Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney, Mama Bird and CEO over here with you as always. And it is my absolute pleasure to find people out in the industry who are amazing experts, but also who are that overtly helpful person who want to spend some time and give everybody their insight, give them their expertise without asking for something in return. And I've got someone great for you today.

Matt Kleinschmit, welcome to the show.

Matt Kleinschmit: Thank you, Priscilla. I'm really happy to be here.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, it's so fun. You know, over the years we've talked at so many shows, but you have over the years built so many businesses, you innovate, you have such an entrepreneurial spirit. And you know, where you and I end up talking all the time is this kind of interesting idea of how do we take interdisciplinary insights and how do we bring that to strategy? How do we bring technology over here? How can we actually take what we know and then support our clients now?

One little word about the clients you have right now is that you support international Fortune 100 leaders. So you've got a tall order from financial services, AI, the tech space, health, pharma, consumer goods, e-commerce, media entertainment, all kinds of experience. But one thing I like about our conversations is that you seem to understand the larger picture that people are trying to do. And that is how do we implement a vision? How do we bring the mission forward? How do we interact with the culture and the structure of brands and how do we build an organizational system that is going to work?

And so you and I get to have really amazing conversations and I'm going to try and take you all over the place today so that people can get the benefit of your expertise and especially your point of view on this industry. But we're always also going to hit on a few kind of hot topics. We're going to talk about, of course, AI. We're going to talk about consumer experience. We're going to talk a little bit about behavioral science.

And of course, I think I'm going to add a little bit of like, please tell us something that we don't know about millennial, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and something that can help us feel like we get our brains wrapped around what's going on and where companies need to go to grow, right? So let's start a little bit about the family of companies you belong to because not everybody is aware of how that's structured. And that'll give us a good context to understand what the venture is and what you're really trying to solve over at Reach3 and Rival Group. So tell us about that.

Matt Kleinschmit: Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, I really appreciate that. And I'm just really excited to be here to be honest with you. So I appreciate you making time and inviting me to join you here today. So for background, I guess I'm the founder and CEO of Reach3 Insights. I'm a lifelong researcher myself. I've been in the business for nearly 30 years.

And I guess the sort of the thread line through my career and my sort of presence in this industry has always been around driving innovation through technology in new and innovative research methods. And in doing so, helping Fortune 100 clients across a variety of industries to hopefully be more successful in the fast moving industries that they're operating within. You know, our venture, I started about seven years ago now in 2018.

And as you mentioned, I'm part of a broader group. So we have a holding company called Rival Group and operating companies, Rival Technologies, which is our software business. And it is the developer of what I refer to as the world's first enterprise-grade conversational insights platform. It's a mobile-first platform that really drives a very immersive mechanism for capturing consumer feedback on an ongoing basis. I'm sure we'll chat more about that as we go along.

Reach3, we're a full service research consultancy. Think of this as being a modern insights consultancy. We launched specifically to try to solve a lot of the key challenges that we kept hearing from clients about their research partners over the years and really address a wide range of different challenges that we think we're facing the research industry more broadly. Things about how to stay relevant, topics and themes about how do you bring greater speed and depth to our research approaches? And of course, the age old question of how do we keep a seat at the table and actually influence decisions and contribute to positive outcomes within the client organization.

So we have Rival our software business, Reach3 is our full service research consultancy. And then more recently, over the last year, we have brought the Angus Reid Group into our fold. For those of you who don't know, Angus Reid is an actual person. And I always think it's a good question from our clients of, is that like a steakhouse or what is that?

So Angus Reid is a prominent Canadian pollster, very similar to George Gallup here in the United States, and has been really a pioneer in our market research industry for nearly 50 years. Angus has had a storied history with a lot of different ventures. Today, he operates a research consultancy called the Angus Reid Group, and more importantly, two very high quality industry panels called Angus Reid Forum, both in Canada and the US.

And the key part of bringing Angus Reid into our organization was to actually bring those wholly owned video validated certified human ground truth data panels into our organization. It's really a key strategic piece of our longer term plan of actually controlling and owning this ecosystem that starts with the highly credible source data, having a modern research platform and then bringing that to life for a lot of our large Fortune 100 clients through our Reach3 consultative research teams.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, that gives such great context and I will say you said one phrase and went right past it, but it's super important and I want to backtrack and hear a little bit more about it. And that is the phrase conversational insights. So tell me about that because I know that is such a strong methodology and philosophy over at your group. Tell us a little bit about that.

Matt Kleinschmit: Yeah, that's a great point. I'm glad you picked up on that, Priscilla. I mean, the idea of conversational insights is sort of a bit abstract, but it's actually very tangible. And it's something that underpins really all the research that we do today. And I think maybe to put it in context would be to think about sort of what I refer to as kind of the old way or the traditional way of doing research. So here we are in the year 2026.

And it's something that I've been saying this since we launched the business back in 2018, which is the majority of quantitative research that's conducted today globally is almost entirely reliant upon email-based online surveys. And when you think about that, you have to kind of pause and say, wow, that's kind of crazy. When you think of the fact that we're still deploying research exercises through email, a channel that inherently is very much rear view mirror, something that is very cluttered and something that generally is not immediately acted upon by the participant.

And then you think of the research experience, this survey experience, for example, as just one key example. When someone goes in to take an online survey, they immediately are met with kind of a boring process, right? Long, usually arduous. A lot of multi-choice grids, radio buttons, endless questions, a very clinical and overly formalized sort of method of asking and answering. Really, it feels to the respondent like they're taking a test.

And when you think about that, that's sort of the exact opposite as researchers that we want. We don't want people to feel like they're taking a test. We want people to open up and share more. And so the idea of conversational insights and conversational research design principles is about evolving the research process to feel less like taking a test and more like having a conversation. And we do that through enabling underlying technology through the Rival platform. Obviously we're leveraging things like AI throughout that process.

And the idea here is to have the survey and research experience feel like you're texting a friend. So the mobile chat platform that we leverage with Rival has been designed and built from the ground up. Instead of deploying through email, we deploy through a text message trigger, the respondent taps on a text message and goes directly into one of our conversational exercises. The conversational exercise feels like they're texting a friend. It's not an app. It's just a piece of web-based technology that increases representation, makes it a frictionless experience for the respondent.

And ultimately what it does is it makes the respondent, the participant, let their guard down and they just share. They share more information, they share video, they share photos, they open up and they share this stream of consciousness type of feedback which as researchers we're always going for. That sort of source ground truth, the really open, honest, unvarnished, authentic type of consumer feedback that we can capture that then leads to not only big predictive type of outputs, but also the nuance and the depth that really help our clients in today's sort of volatile world really understand where there are those nuggets of opportunity for them and their respective industries.

Priscilla McKinney: As a cultural anthropologist, everything in me is saying yes, yes, this works because your background is a researcher and we all know that the more comfortable you make that person the better the response you get, right? They just feel like they're not becoming someone else when they're being performative and being pulled out of their regular world or their regular thought process. They're not giving you that in the moment insight.

So I think that is just really astute and I think that's one of the things that you seem to capture well is this idea of the tension that exists in that we need to adhere to certain methodologies and we need to have certain rigor, but we have to understand the modern world and how people want to interact and when they are really at their best moment of either frustration or elation or boredom or whatever it is that they can really give you that nuance. And so I can see that's completely powerful, right?

Matt Kleinschmit: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. As researchers, we all pride ourselves many times in this sort of the lab coat mentality of having scientific principles and rigorous methodologies and tried and true types of techniques and those sorts of things. And those are all critically important. But at the same time, we have to balance that with actually engaging people in a way that mimics the look and feel of sort of how they actually interact with people in this modern world that we're living in.

And so when we think back to sort of why we launched the business, it's almost like, how do you take all of these really powerful research methodologies, analytic techniques, outputs, quant and qual and implicit projective exercises, all of the types of things that we as researchers leverage on a day to day basis, how do we evolve and migrate them into a world of constraints. And the world of constraints is constraints of time, constraints in attention, and in a real tactical, tangible standpoint from a research methodology perspective is constraint of screen size. Most research exercises in the online world are designed for a desktop or laptop.

And when those all of a sudden are answered on a mobile phone, which is the predominant method of responding to research exercises, whether it's quant, qual or some other type of technique, all of a sudden you're sort of forcing the respondent to work. They have to resize things. They have to go through things in ways that wouldn't ordinarily be the case. And so for us, it's about a mobile first mentality. It's about taking all of the rigor that you would expect of traditional types of approaches, but migrating and evolving it into something that is a much more modern interface, which makes the participant engage, come back, et cetera.

So that's what is leading to some of the phenomenal response rates and quality that we see. And so the other aspect of this that I would say is that as researchers, we also need to make sure that what we do passes the rigor test. And so over the years we've been doing very rigorous research on research. So side by side, AB methodologies across a wide range of different types of common research approaches and techniques. And the whole goal there is to make sure that it tests out the way we would like it.

You know, are the responses consistent? How does it work across demographic groups? Do the key findings mirror each other between different types of methodologies? And then what are the benefits and the additional sort of add-ons that are really the things, the surprise and delights that our clients really love? And so one of the things that we found over the years is that the results are very consistent in terms of the big beats that you would expect, but you get more depth and nuance through things like unstructured data inputs that are so common today and how people communicate.

So you think about how people communicate today. It's much more stream of consciousness. They're texting friends. They're maybe uploading a photo or a video. They're maybe using a GIF or an emoji or something like that. And then they go away and then they come back and pick up right where they left off and keep the conversation going. So how can we as researchers mimic that thread? And for me, that's where I get really excited because you think about the thread of kind of call and response that ties very nicely to sort of ongoing iterative learning where you maybe start with some quant and then you follow with some qual, you maybe do some video based immersions.

And each time you're doing that, you're able to learn along the way and build upon it every time you have that researcher touch point. And it's all facilitated for us through a text message notification that engages people in the moment where they are, where they're actually out and about in the world as opposed to sitting at home in a basement on a desktop or a laptop completing a survey. So it's really about an immersive type of experience that we know through the research on research that we've done drives really strong response rates, nearly 90% completion rates on the exercises that we deploy and 60% or higher recontact rates. So the ability to engage the same person over and over again to build upon that depth of knowledge is something that our clients across all industries have really found a strong value in.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, I would think that recontact piece would be key. Like a brand hears something and is like, what? Wait, what? What's going on with that? And being able to say, well, that was a nuance we hadn't heard before, but that still doesn't explain it to us. We need to come back and ask more. And that's like the basis of good research period, right?

Matt Kleinschmit: Yeah, well, they always say like the good piece of research always brings more questions. And in this day and age, you have to be able to answer those questions and build upon it. And frankly, what we found is there were a lot of restrictions with more traditional types of techniques, and frankly, sample sources that were not really enabling us to have that sort of ongoing relationship with the end consumer or business professional, depending on who our client may be.

Priscilla McKinney: Right, but I can just say as a human being when someone wants my opinion and then they send it to me in a text and then that text sends me to now a link that takes me somewhere else that I don't trust and that now is like a desktop app of 18 questions where they said, wait a minute, we're just going to ask you one and it's all this bait and switch and it's just, you know, the technology's not in sync and it's just asking you the same question over again. I mean, there's so much stuff like this still out in the market. It almost blows my mind, right?

Matt Kleinschmit: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes for, you know, not only is it bad from a research quality perspective, but when you think about, if you're a client that really cares about your brand and you're doing branded research, that is another touch point, a brand touch point. And so many of our clients have come to us because frankly, they feel like their brand is being sort of denigrated by some of the more archaic research technologies that are out there. And I don't blame them because in some cases it's such a painful experience for someone to provide feedback that there's no reason it doesn't surprise me that people don't.

Priscilla McKinney: Right, right. Well, this is my show so I can say this, but I'm telling you, I am tired of the survey experiences I get when I get off a flight. And you and I both know how much we fly. I don't know which flight you're talking about. Like you're going to have to tell me more. If you want me to give you some feedback, you're going to have to, first of all, understand my experience, where I am in my process. Like since last Tuesday, I've been on six flights. So I don't know what you want to tell me.

So okay, look, now that's my show and that's my rant, but let's move on because I have kind of a little hidden motivation here. You know that I look out on this industry and I do a lot of competitive landscape work and a little birdie told me that there is a big commitment on your side of building your own panel and that it's a significant commitment. And I really would like to hear directly from you about this because this is a little bit unusual right now. So many people are aggregating. You've already mentioned this idea of sample quality and what's really going on there. It's better to hear directly from people.

And you've also alluded to this idea of, well, brands need to be careful when they reach out to people, are they hurting their brands with the way they're reaching out? And you look at that and you say, well, the people, the respondents, are this rich resource and we have to treat them correctly. Tell me, is this true? First of all, I like to verify rumors. And what does owning the data layer really mean for your company?

Matt Kleinschmit: Yeah, great question. So I think for us, it's really quite simple. It's about enabling us to control and own the human source data from which so many of our methodologies, our analysis, our recommendations, our implications that we're producing for our clients is based upon. And so we all know the horror stories in the industry about bots and fraud and all this type of stuff with a wide variety of sample sources. For us, it really comes down to how can we actually build a real validated, video validated, credible, certified human source panel that can be directly connected to one of the most modern research platforms available today, the Rival platform, and then activated through our Reach3 industry-focused research teams. And so that's kind of the premise behind it.

And when you take a step back, it's kind of interesting more broadly about the industry is that over the last five to 10 years, you have a lot of research agencies who have sort of given up the survey software piece. So they've sort of subcontracted that out and now they buy it from another supplier. You also have a lot of research organizations who have sort of divested the panels that they used to have, and instead they go through large panel sample companies who claim to have very robust panels. But what many of them have is river sources where it's people coming online and clicking on a link and going to a survey and then they disappear and you don't really know who they are, the context of that interaction, any demographic information. You're never going to be able to recontact that person again to be able to have that iterative learning that I was just mentioning. And probably most concerning is that now you have a lot of those interactions being done through AI and bots.

And so for us, it's really about being able to bring the human source data into our organization so that we can sort of control and own that. And there's a lot of power there, not only for the research methodologies that we do, but when you think about AI and synthetic models and synthetic data panels and digital twins and all of these different elements that are coming into play within our industry, the quality of that human source data is more important than ever. And so we know from the research on research we've done that conversational research approaches already produce higher quality outputs, even if you're using sort of traditional sample sources.

And so for us, it was about how can we actually connect conversational research design with high quality video validated certified sample sourcing that we own and operate and then use that to not only drive all of our research that we're doing, but when you think about clients who come to us and say, we want to create a synthetic panel of some certain type of respondent, whether it's business professionals or physicians or a hard to reach consumer group, we have the ability now to sort of generate that synthetic panel. We can train and calibrate it alongside our own wholly owned national panel. And something that is really exciting for us, something that our clients are really excited about, is that as they are all being pushed to investigate and adopt a lot of the new AI methods and models that are out there, they're looking for research partners who can guide them along that way.

And when I say that, I mean they're looking for someone who is going to be transparent about where the data is coming from, the models and how they're built, a lot of transparency around validation and calibration and training. And then ultimately, a research partner who can help them to be successful and have confidence when they produce and share those results within their own organization. And we just have found a lot of our clients today, they're overwhelmed with all of the AI enhancements. And so for them today, they're looking for a real trusted advisory organization that can help them with that. And frankly, from a Reach3 perspective, that's our role with these Fortune 100 clients within Rival Group.

Priscilla McKinney: It just makes sense and understanding that backstory and really your perspective where you sit in the ecosystem of insights. It makes sense, right? It's like, yes, not everybody is doing that. Nobody wants to make that commitment right now. And yet it basically underscores your philosophy.

And I think you've hit the nail on the head that brands are just drowning in options. They don't know what to do. It's tech, you know, no, this methodology, no, we're going to tweak this methodology this way. No, this is conversational. No, this is synthetic. And I love that idea that you're there to consult and say, look, we're going to have to look directly at the outcomes, look at the business problem that you have, and we're going to have to help you cut through that noise and trying to help you figure out when to apply what.

And I think that's so beautifully put because as you said, you come back from research and so it's going to be the research rigor that is going to be first, but it's the reality of where we're at. How can we be a company that leans into the future, but actually really understands where we came from and why we exist. And I think that's something that's really fresh and it's very important right now in the industry. Okay, so.

Matt Kleinschmit: Just to reiterate that Priscilla, I think that we oftentimes talk to our clients about this idea of leaning into the future, but not losing touch with the past. And it's this notion that a lot of the client researchers that we work with, they want to be innovative. They want to bring new things into the organization, but they also have to have trust and credibility that what they're bringing into the organization is legitimate. It's viable. It's going to actually be valid. It's going to produce the types of outcomes that their internal stakeholders are requiring.

And so for that, they oftentimes are looking to us to sort of help to lead them into that pathway with something that they know they can trust, but also still has the rigor that everyone would expect with any kind of research methodology, particularly when you're making really high value types of business decisions.

Priscilla McKinney: I love that. Okay, now this is the part, Matt, where I admit that I do a lot of recon and I talk to a lot of your team at different conferences. So just know this. And I love to hear how sales teams are structured. How do they approach this industry? How are they thinking about their clients and how are they thinking about their clients' problems?

And one of the things I think is interesting about the way you've set up your companies is that you organize your teams by vertical experience rather than by methodology. So tell me why. Why have you done this and how is it working?

Matt Kleinschmit: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I've worked throughout my career. I've been involved in a lot of different organizations that have done different types of setups with specializations and different matrices in terms of how things are organized. At our stage of development today, and ever since we launched the business back in 2018, we really have leaned in big time into the idea of vertical specialization. And I've always been a big believer in that.

You don't want to just show up at a client call and not really understand the intricacies of your client's business, their competitive environment, the industry macro trends, all of the things that they might be dealing with. And so we're very invested in the idea of having industry-focused research teams that know how to deliver on the promise of iterative conversational technology accelerated research design. So this combination of mobile chat, conversational, but how do you bring that to life for this industry versus that industry? And so we've been organized like that since inception.

And when we started to launch this business into the market, it was kind of a new thing, mobile chat, conversational. A lot of clients were very intrigued with what we were doing. And oftentimes they were looking for specific use cases on where to apply it. And in some industries it was a little bit more of a fast mover than others. And what we did is we really focused our teams on getting to know the business issues that our clients are operating within, and then positioning our solutions to really answer their core business questions. And you can't really answer the questions if you don't know the industries. And so we really have grown up in that fashion.

And as we built out different industry vertical teams, more recently, we have really leaned into areas like financial services, for example, who historically is a bit more of a conservative industry in terms of adopting new approaches. Even more recently, health and pharma. And we've had a lot of interest from those industries now in this really immersive mobile-first conversational approach. Why? Because they're trying to bring innovation into their work. They love the fact that what we do helps them to get below the surface and see what people actually think and do. They love the idea of being able to capture behaviors, emotions, and context in one research touch point. And they're finally at a point in their organization where a lot of their stakeholders are asking them, what new things are you bringing into the organization?

And so right now we have sort of five core industry verticals that we are really leaning into. We're building teams around those. And so when we get on a call with a client, not only do we kind of know what the question is, we already understand some of the competitive aspects of why that question exists, the dynamics at play with some of the industry macro trends. And we probably even know a little bit about possible methodologies and approaches that are going to help us to address that. And so we come to the call already educated in a way that we can kind of jump right in and hit the ground running.

And our clients really do appreciate that. And it also, of course, makes the quality of analysis, implications, outcomes, the quality of our deliverables even more impactful. So that's an area that frankly we've been really leaning in on and I don't see us ever going away from it. It's just been something that I think our clients appreciate. It's almost a table stakes thing in the industry right now that clients expect you to know their business before you start.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, I would agree but I think the insights industry as a whole has been kind of slow to that uptake and I think it's about that business prowess that is really needed. And I think at the end of the day it's about a strong empathy for the people we serve to say, you know, what are their feet being held to the fire for? What does that sound like? What kind of a meeting are they walking into with our data that they're going to feel like they've got to answer for?

And if we can put it in their language and if we can understand their challenge more deeply in their words, then we're really partnering. And I really appreciate that, Matt. This has been super fun. Of course, just because you've been on the podcast doesn't mean I'm not going to corner you at another show and then we can talk shop some more.

Matt Kleinschmit: I always love doing it Priscilla. This has been a pleasure for me and I appreciate your time. And as you can tell, I'm quite passionate about this industry and our topics today. Usually my colleagues are telling me, hey, that's enough. That's enough. But I could just keep talking about it. Anyway, really, really excited to be here today.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. You need to reach out to him. It's Matt Kleinschmit and I'm going to spell that for you. It's just Matt, M-A-T-T, but find him on LinkedIn, K-L-E-I-N-S-C-H-M-I-T. So find him on LinkedIn because you can see that the passion is there. And I think what I've known over the years is that he's completely willing to have any conversation about where this industry is going and how we might be able to do better as a group so that we can serve the businesses and really help them grow. So Matt, thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it.

Matt Kleinschmit: My pleasure, Priscilla. It's been a total pleasure for me. So thank you so much for your time.

Priscilla McKinney: From all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.