Yazi's WhatsApp platform automated KLA's 84-person wine diary study - delivering clean data, multimedia playback, and real-time tracking with zero manual exports.
How Yazi's automated WhatsApp platform transformed KLA's pre-group diary study — delivering clean data in real time, rich multimedia insights, and effortless participant tracking for 84 wine consumers over 7 days.
KLA is a South African qualitative and quantitative market research agency. When they needed to run a pre-group diary task involving 84 wine consumers over a 7–10 day period, the traditional approach meant manually WhatsApping each participant, waiting for responses, and then exporting data one chat at a time for cleaning and consolidation. The workload was heavy, the process was slow, and tracking staggered recruitment timelines made everything harder.
Partnering with Yazi, KLA deployed a customised diary task on WhatsApp that automated participant onboarding, daily engagement, reminders, and data collection. Responses flowed into a clean, tabular dataset in real time — with voice notes and videos playable directly in the browser — eliminating the manual export-clean-consolidate cycle entirely.
Diary studies demand sustained engagement over multiple days. When you're managing 84 participants manually on WhatsApp, the logistics compound fast — staggered start dates, inconsistent response rates, and a mountain of data trapped inside individual chat threads.
Each of the 84 respondents had to be messaged individually, questions sent one at a time, with the team waiting for and chasing responses across days of fieldwork.
Data lived inside individual WhatsApp chats. Exporting meant doing it one conversation at a time, then manually cleaning and consolidating everything into a usable format for analysis.
Participants joined the study at different times, creating overlapping timelines that made it difficult to track who had completed which diary entries and who needed reminders.
The operational burden of managing participant engagement, data collection, and progress tracking consumed the team's time — leaving less capacity for the analysis work that actually matters.
Yazi built a customised diary task on its platform, designed to feel natural to participants on WhatsApp while automating the operational work that had previously fallen on KLA's team.
The project followed a structured rollout — from platform configuration through to real-time data access — with Yazi managing the operational layer so KLA could focus on insights.
Yazi customised a flexible, easy-to-navigate diary task on its platform, allowing participants to upload multiple entries over the 7-day period. The interface was designed to enhance participant experience, making it simple for respondents to engage with the tasks via WhatsApp — the same channel they already use daily.
Thorough testing was conducted in collaboration with KLA to ensure seamless interaction and a smooth user experience, focusing on minimising any potential issues during the diary task before it went live to all 84 participants.
Yazi managed the onboarding of respondents, utilising a dedicated WhatsApp number for all communications. Real-time monitoring allowed for the tracking of participant engagement and task completion, with reminders sent as needed to encourage consistency across the full diary period.
Wine consumers received an invitation to join the diary study via WhatsApp, through KLA's YourView panel. The experience felt like a natural conversation — participants could respond with text, photos, voice notes, or videos about their wine consumption over the week.
The most transformative outcome was the elimination of manual data handling. Where KLA's team had previously exported WhatsApp chats one at a time, cleaned the raw text, and consolidated it into a usable format, Yazi's platform presented responses in a clean, tabular dataset from the moment they were submitted. No exporting, no cleaning, no consolidation — data was analysis-ready in real time.
The combination of text, voice notes, and video gave KLA something their manual process couldn't deliver at scale: a vivid sense of each participant's experience and context. Rather than dry survey responses, the team received stories — the braai that called for a sauv blanc, the special occasion that warranted a red, the supermarket promotion that swayed a purchase decision.
KLA accessed the study data through Yazi's platform — a clean tabular view of all responses, a media library for playing back voice notes and videos in-browser, and real-time progress tracking across all 84 participants.
| Manual WhatsApp Diary | Yazi on WhatsApp | |
|---|---|---|
| Participant messaging | One-at-a-time manual messages | Automated onboarding & daily prompts |
| Data collection | Export each chat individually | Clean tabular data in real time |
| Data cleaning | Manual cleaning & consolidation | None required — analysis-ready |
| Progress tracking | Spreadsheets & manual checks | Real-time dashboard across all participants |
| Multimedia handling | Files scattered across chats | In-browser playback of voice & video |
| Reminders | Manually sent to stragglers | Automated based on completion status |
| Team workload | Heavy — operations consume analysis time | Minimal — team focuses on insights |
Yazi transformed KLA's diary study workflow from an operationally heavy, manual process into a streamlined, automated pipeline. The team reclaimed the hours they'd normally spend on data wrangling and participant management — freeing them to focus on the qualitative analysis and insight generation that actually drives value for their clients.
The richness of responses improved dramatically. Participants engaged through a familiar WhatsApp interface, sending voice notes and videos that provided vivid, contextual detail about their wine consumption habits — the kind of texture that dry survey responses and manually managed chat threads rarely surface at this scale.
Initially, we managed participant engagement and data collection manually, which was time-consuming and inefficient. Yazi's platform transformed our approach, delivering clean data immediately and allowing us to easily track participant progress. The ability to access voice notes and videos directly within the platform provided us with a richer understanding of our respondents' experiences. Yazi truly revolutionised our diary study process.
Diary studies are one of the most valuable tools in qualitative research — they capture behaviour in context, over time, in people's own words. But the operational overhead of running them manually on WhatsApp has always been the bottleneck: the messaging, the chasing, the exporting, the cleaning. The research insight gets buried under logistics.
This project demonstrates what happens when you automate the operations without losing the human touch. Participants engage through the same WhatsApp interface they use every day. They send text, voice notes, and videos naturally. And the research team gets clean, structured, multimedia-rich data from day one — no export cycle, no data wrangling, no tracking spreadsheets. The diary study method stays; the operational pain goes.
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