Archive for the ‘Voice of the Customer’ Category

For nearly a month now, one hell of a hot discussion has been taking place within the LinkedIn Group called NewMR - Co-creating the Future of Market Research. The discussion is centred on researchers views of MROC's and whether or not they are truly beyond the old divide of cal and quant.

It's been such a great debate that we thought it only right to share some of the highlights. What follows are the views and opinions of members of the group in response the question 'Are MROC's beyond Qual and Quant?'. These answers describe a new paradigm that is building and managing effective online communities for the purpose of delivering an ongoing stream of valuable, actionable insight. Enjoy...

Research Communities blur methodologies but they can be of benefit to the participant, researcher and client.

Why define the market research space by methodology? Our construct is to look instead whether we are doing "testing" or "discovery". The former is "What do you think of this?", as in this package, this idea, this word, this ad, this display, and so on -- and you can get at that with both quant and qual activities

I tend to think of online communities as a platform that allows the researcher the freedom to do almost any kind of research that they like - quant, qual or the simply the ability to listen to free conversations amongst community members

For me, the real methodological shift with communities is allowing respondents to grab the remote and set the research agenda for a change

The social web is the new frontier in many ways; is our industry able to let go of the comforts of the past way of doing things and become pioneers in defining what research will look in the new world of the social web?

In our view, you would never use a MROC to forecast the size of a market, do a segmentation, scientifically validate a hypotheses or make a decision that involves a very significant investment

Seems to me that using labels like qual and quant is about as outdated as referring to above and below the line

...they can act as a tool to spark conversation and participation within the community: in my experience polls and surveys work well as 'social objects' within a community, lures to get people talking about stuff

The sheer volume of information is the issue. It is more than most of us have ever had to deal with as qualitative researchers from other methods.

An MROC is dynamic, evolutionary and to my mind have elements of both qual and quant.

One of the starting points when we sit down with clients is defining what we want the respondent experience to be and then to marry that with our research and engagement priorities (as far ahead as we can see them). We have successes at the ongoing, MROC end of the continuum and have created environments where active participants come in and express themselves habitually and frequently and associate happily with each other.

At Dub, we've recently been building a number of online research communities to capture discussions around some very private and sensitive issues. These insight and innovation-purposed communities have been commissioned by players in the pharmaceutical and health and well-being industries, who are growing increasingly switched-on to the opportunities online communities present. These include the ability to gather candid feedback and rich insight from end-users, of the sort they've never before experienced. In a sector where insight  from sufferers and patients of such richness has traditionally been hard to come achieve, online research communities present a major shift.

Of course, when discussing Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Over-active Bowel Disorder (OBD) and other serious personal conditions with real people, respecting their privacy and offering them relative online anonymity is tantamount to the success of the study.  With this in mind, our approach allows project owners to assign tasks and questions to individuals  by way of private one-on-one discussions, at the same time as supporting open group discussions. The former puts people at great ease, and when combined with the fact that respondents are participating from the comfort of their own home or place of choice, affords response nirvana.

Group discussions such as forums and blog also have a part to play in that they allow the community to connect,  bond and share experiences with each other. Thus they reward respondents for their openness and honesty by allowing the connect with fellow sufferers, thus providing a level of support and comfort in knowing.

The recruitment of patients and sufferers is no easy task, so making them feel comfortable, respected and valued contributors within the community is essential. Our approach achieves this in a number of ways.

First we work tirelessly to design the tasks and activities that benefit from our own of research into the language and behaviours of the target audience. We see our role as party hosts, not entertainers, so it's important that we communicate with them in a language they recognise - theirs not ours.

Secondly we encourage Community Managers to share with them the insights that are being gleaned, so that they themselves are learning from the project and not just giving.

As our online research community work continues, so to does our amazement at the audience-types that are increasingly comfortable in sharing their lives online, be it in private or social environments. Our communities are an efficient and powerful way to connect, create learnings, gather feedback and support sufferers who wish to help others at the same time.

The market research world has a new kid on the block - digital research. But is ‘being digital’ enough?

Digital research is nothing new. Quantitative digital research tools have been around as long as computers have. And very useful they are too.

But now there is a new breed of tools, which offer a more dynamic, richer approach to aggregating the thoughts, ideas and insights of consumers. These qualitative tools are an emerging field, which are being progressively adopted by the industry and their clients.

Qualitative digital research tools can be built as a result of the convergence of two key developments:

• Improved infrastructure - primarily broadband internet connections, capable home computers and media capture devises eg. video-capable mobile phones
• Sophisticated digital user-behaviours

The latter has been made possible as a result of the myriad methods of digital communication, taught to people by popular social networking services like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. These services and the interactive features they offer have equipped participants with the tools and capabilities needed to share complex viewpoints from the comfort of their own home.

Digital research tools offer numerous immediate and obvious technical benefits over more traditional research practices. For example, all data generated is already digital, enabling researchers to cut and slice data dynamically, without the need to transcribe. This is only the start - but that’s a different post!

These benefits alone under-estimate the real potential of qualitative digital research tools. The real benefits are less about the technical advantages and more about the ability to persistently commune with groups of participants for extended periods of time.

With these tools, it is possible to hold extended research ‘workshops’ for anywhere between a few days and a few months. When compared to traditional practices, the quality and quantity of the work generated by each participant can be higher than traditional approaches by an order of magnitude. And typically for little or no additional cost per-participant.

These new dynamics require a new approach to research. The typical method of questions and answers needs to give way to a more open discourse between researcher and participant. This requires researchers to think differently about the way they conduct their primary research. Pre-planning is still vital, but the possibilities of being flexible, reactive and proactive during the research period is much greater.

The levels of open discourse offered by these tools also present new and interesting ways of fulfilling research objectives. In our experience, spending the extra time creating empowering research tasks, which put the participants at the centre of the question, rather than posing questions that ‘tick the box’ produce rich, high quality results that would otherwise be missed. Equally, the opportunity to respond and build on the responses of participants (both immediately, and importantly over time) becomes central to the methodology.

Researchers also need to have an ever increasing understanding of their participant base. This includes having an appreciation of their wants and needs. Looking after participants for extended periods of time is no easy task. Participants need to know what they are expected to do, when they are expected to do it and, how they are expected to do it. In essence, they need to be offered a narrative - explaining where they have come from, where they are now and where they are going. And this needs to happen more than once during their journey!

A well managed community of participants who are ‘looked after’ by someone aware of these factors will produce better results for longer periods of time than a community who are given a few tasks and then left to their own devises.

We offer our clients a sophisticated array of social media tools (blogs, forums, video-interviews, etc.). With these tools they are able to talk to people for extended periods of time, about the topics that are important to their studies. But with this comes the responsibility to help them make the most of the tools and the people using these tools. By offering a supporting service where research tasks are co-designed and managing participants is discussed, we are able to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Congratulations to Experian, Progressive and Vanguard for winning Forrester's inaugural Voice of the Customer Awards in NY yesterday. It's great to see that organisations that gather feedback and turn it into actionable insight to generate ROI are being recognised. It's a major task to gather feedback from the customer masses, and then collating and reporting on it at such a scale.

This new form of marketing is largely supported by some traditional skills combined with great new technologies including:

• Cloud Computing and the rise of the Software-as-a-Service business model
• Increased access to faster broadband
• Maturing social networking behaviours and social media tools
• API's that allow you to integrate mutliple systems such as CRM

All three companies awarded a prize emonstrated hat the voice of the customer was too valuable to ignore, and that by listening to and valuing individuals, the resultant insight and opportunities could propel the business through increased sales, greater advocacy and generally being regarded highly as a business that listens and acts upon what their customers are telling them.

At Dub we provide the tools to allow brands and organisations to do just this, whether it is your customers, your staff or even your suppliers that you want to engage and listen to.

I was saddended not to see any European businesses in this list, surely you are out there. If you are, and you think you should be represented in a more European-centric award scheme, let me know and we'll see what we can do about it.