What I like best about Qualtrics Market Research is how flexible and robust it is for all the audience and internal feedback work I handle at Chicago Broadcast Collective. I’m the Operations Director, so I’m constantly juggling broadcast schedules, digital content rollouts, and coordinating teams across our different studio locations. We make local news segments, community feature stories, and streaming content, and we need solid audience feedback to guide what we put on air. Before Qualtrics, we were piecing together surveys with basic tools, and it was tough to dig into meaningful insights fast.
I really appreciate that I can build different kinds of surveys all in the same platform, no fancy coding required. We don’t just poll viewers. I also run internal feedback surveys for our producers, editors, and on-air crew about workflow bottlenecks and studio resource needs. A couple months back, we were debating whether to shift our weekend digital content lineup to more local human-interest stories instead of short recap clips. I put together a Qualtrics survey targeting our regular streaming and broadcast audience. I added branching logic so viewers who mainly watch our evening news got different follow-up questions than people who only catch our online digital shorts. That let me split the responses cleanly without sending out three separate surveys.
The reporting features are a huge win for me. Once responses start rolling in, Qualtrics automatically crunches the data, flags trending answers, and builds charts I can drop straight into our weekly leadership sync. I don’t have to export raw results and spend hours sorting everything in Excel. There was one time we tested two versions of a new morning show promo, and I ran a quick A/B test inside Qualtrics. It clearly showed which hook resonated better with our suburban audience. We switched the promo before it went live across our broadcast feeds, and we saw way better viewer retention right away.
I also love how easy it is to share survey links with our partner focus groups and pull feedback from our digital signage screens we manage through OneScreen. Sometimes we post a quick QR code on our lobby displays so visitors and staff can weigh in on new content ideas. All those submissions flow right back into the same Qualtrics project.
It’s not bloated with unnecessary features we’ll never touch, but it’s powerful enough for broadcast market research. Whether I’m testing a show concept, measuring viewer satisfaction, or checking in with our production teams about workflow pain points, Qualtrics keeps all the feedback centralized. It saves me so much manual grunt work, so I can spend less time cleaning survey data and more time aligning our broadcast schedule and content strategy around what our audience actually wants. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What I dislike about Qualtrics Market Research is that it has a handful of really frustrating pain points that slow me down constantly, especially as Operations Director here at Chicago Broadcast Collective. We’re always running a mix of viewer surveys, internal crew feedback polls, and last-minute promo concept tests for our broadcast and streaming content, and a lot of the advanced settings are way more convoluted than they need to be. The survey builder works fine for short, simple polls, but it gets messy fast once I start adding branching logic to split up our audience groups — like separating folks who watch us over-the-air on regular TV from our streaming-only digital viewers.
Just last month I was putting together a survey to test two different teaser cuts for our new morning show. My plan was to use skip logic so anyone who never tunes into the morning block would automatically skip those promo questions. I tinkered with the rules twice, but I still messed up the flow. Before I caught it, a bunch of respondents who don’t watch morning news were answering questions about our morning teasers, which threw off our whole dataset. I had to hit pause on the survey, go through every single logic path one by one to fix it, then relaunch everything. That delay pushed back our deadline to lock in the final promo, and our production team had to shift their edit schedule around it. It was a real headache.
I also think the built-in reporting and sharing tools are clunky for how quickly our broadcast team moves. When I need to send survey findings over to our news director, production supervisors, and sales team, the default reports are stuffed full of extra tables and metrics most of them don’t need or understand. I can customize dashboards, sure, but it takes endless clicking to hide all the irrelevant data and simplify the charts so they’re easy to digest. A few weeks back, I pulled the results from our quarterly viewer satisfaction survey. It took me almost a full hour just to clean up the report, strip out all the extra noise, and get it ready for our weekly leadership sync. There’s no quick, one-click executive summary template for these check-ins, and that’s the version I practically need every single time.
It’s not that Qualtrics is bad at what it does, it’s just built for deeper, longer research projects. For our workflow, we often need fast, straightforward insights on tight broadcast timelines, and these little frictions pile up. When I’m juggling studio schedules, crew coordination, and content rollouts, I don’t have extra time fighting with complicated logic builders and bloated reports. It definitely adds unnecessary stress when we’re racing to lock in content before airtime. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
