Clients
For us, good research is all about partnerships. If we are going to add real value, we need to be close and trusted advisors. Many of our clients tell us this is what makes us special.
"Research & Incite Consultants are always welcoming of questions, can be counted on to deliver rich insights and are accomodating of our "ASAP" business requests.
Your services are superior to other research agencies I have worked with and, along with our internal resource, form the best research team I have worked with over the past 13 years."
But don’t let us tell you, try us and find out.
Here are some examples of how we work with our clients to provide business solutions.
- Engaging top management
While every study is unique, many organizations face the same kind of challenges when it comes to: read- Deciding on a methodology that will engage consumers, but also convince top management of the validity of the approach
- Presenting results in a compelling fashion, but also effect the changes that the findings indicate are necessary
- Respond to the ever- increasing need to get results faster, but also allow client involvement and produce both qualitative richness and quantitative reliability.
Methodology that works on top management
A major insurance company was looking at other ways of selling insurance outside of the agent, including direct mail.
The Market Research Department was getting frustrated because senior management could only tell them what they didn’t want, and found it impossible to articulate what they did want.
In probing the internal decision-makers we elicited their key issue. Essentially, this was that they considered the very act of researching insurance and direct mail among consumers was doomed to failure. All the decision-makers had sat through many focus groups hearing that “direct mail doesn’t work on me” and failed to see any reason “to waste more hours sitting in dark rooms”.
Our conviction was that qualitative research had a big role to play in better understanding peoples’ attitudes towards alternative channels for insurance. Management needed to be convinced that the qualitative process would work.
Our proposal was essentially to fully involve respondents in the research sessions – not as (skeptical) consumers, but as members of a team charged with developing a company and a portfolio of products designed for real people.
In order to help show top management this could work, we persuaded them to let us take them though the same process we proposed for their potential clients. Now comfortable with the process, management quickly approved and supported the project. - Presentations that force change
The key target audience for the results of a Customer Satisfaction Study was the service engineers and their read
managers within the organization itself.
Management warned us that “anything that sounds like a typical presentation of research results will begin with a very small audience and end very quickly with no audience at all!”
While we all knew the results were extremely relevant to the target audience – the survey had uncovered some real performance issues – our challenge was to engage the engineers and convince them of the relevance of the results.
Rather than setting up a one hour research presentation, we ran a half-day brainstorming session designed to help the staff generate the important issues as they saw them; discuss the major problems they were confronting and so on. Engineers were put into teams and the teams encouraged to be competitive – we had prizes for most animated presentation; most comprehensive list of issues etc.
The research findings were then introduced as additional material against which to calibrate the team issues.
Most importantly, building on the key issues identified in the first part of the session, teams were then charged with finding possible solutions. Lastly, the best solutions were rated in terms of “effectiveness” and “feasibility”.
Unlike the typical Powerpoint presentation, the session generated huge energy and involvement from the target audience. Instead of passively listening to ‘research findings’, the group produced action plans to improve customer satisfaction. - They need it yesterday!
The Market Research Department of a major packaged good company was faced with a dilemma. How could they readresearch on a large number of new concept ideas which would allow marketing to both gauge results to the ideas on a meaningful basis, but also allow marketing to modify elements of the ideas if necessary?On-line research could have answered these objectives. However, the clients were high energy, hands-on types who would feel that on-line interviewing was remote and impersonal. They wanted to see the consumer up close.
We set up a series of sessions with target consumers in three markets over 5 days. In each market we ran two sessions.- Initially, each session comprised 50 target respondents. Each respondent was given a small keypad on which to record their opinion of each concept as well as various elements of each concept.
- Based on their reactions to various key concepts, we then selected two smaller sub-sets of consumers (8 to 10 people) among whom we conducted “focused” groups.
- Company researchers and their internal clients watched the evaluation of the concepts in “real time”. That is, they were able to see how each concept was rated immediately as people gave their rating. They were then able to choose how participants were selected for the qualitative sessions based on the results from the earlier quantitative exercise.
- As the project progressed, Marketing was able to hone in on the concepts most important to them – looking to refine even more the most appealing ideas, and seeing how weaker ideas might be strengthened.
