Rival Technologies, has unveiled Community 2.0. A turnkey platform designed for busy teams, Community 2.0 is a combination of chat-based, mobile-first tech, conversational methodology, and integrated services that lets researchers scale their efforts, deepen customer understanding, and elevate the role of insights.
“Community 2.0 is an exciting manifestation of our mission at Rival to help brands activate their best customers,” says Andrew Reid, CEO and Founder of Rival Technologies and Founder of Vision Critical (now Alida). “We’ve taken everything we’ve learned about insight communities in the past 20+ years and re-imagined the experience—both for participants and researchers—for the mobile-first world that we now live in.”
Community 2.0 differentiates itself from old-school community and panel providers in four key areas:
- A member-first approach: Research engagements that feel like a conversation rather than a test—chat surveys people respond to and that uncover deeper, more meaningful feedback.
- Agility, flexibility and scale: Seamless quant, qual, and video feedback on one platform, and the ability to create dynamic profiles that enable agility and iteration.
- Integrated and flexible services: A modern, more lightweight approach to community management fully supported by a customer success team knowledgeable in recruitment, questionnaire design, advertising, data analysis, and more.
- Reporting and storytelling: Mobile toplines and video reels that help researchers increase the visibility of their impact.
Community 2.0's mobile-first approach means brands can recontact research participants via SMS instead of email. This tech also supports next-gen recruitment, including through social media platforms.
“Researchers today are under enormous pressure to do more with less, and having innovative tech alone is no longer enough,” says Jennifer Reid, President and Chief Methodologist at Rival. “We’ve invested in a multi-disciplinary customer success team to deliver the range of services insight teams need today to increase their strategic capacity.”
This combination of tech and services has inspired research leaders from Land O’Lakes, Dell, Diageo, REVOLT Media, and Paramount to adopt Community 2.0.
“The Rival team is very responsive and supportive of our ongoing questions and needs,” says Monica Rezac, Principal Engineer, Customer Experience Research at Dell Technologies. “I appreciate the positive culture of the company and the willingness to help guide us through our process of growing our community.”
What’s new on the Rival platform?
In addition to a robust survey engine that supports all question types, display logic, piping and masking, and video, the Rival platform recently rolled out key enhancements to beef up its Community 2.0 offering.
These include:
- The ability to create dynamic profiles that build members’ demographic, attitudinal, and behavioral data over time and let researchers optimize who they engage with and when
- Smart distributions that automate follow-up chats based on responses and behaviors from previous chats
- Video enhancements that include real-time sentiment analysis as well as the ability to force participants to watch a video in full before answering a question
- A chat management center where research leaders can check on the status of their projects, access real-time reports, and download data
- Webhooks that enable integrations with tools like Zapier to help researchers push data to applications they currently use
These enhancements come after a slew of substantial updates to the Rival platform earlier this year that include Recruitment APIs, time-zone-enabled distributions, and multi-factor authentication.