Recently, we’ve read and written quite a bit on the subject of qualitative research methods’ viability as a substitute for traditional offline methods; however we, as researchers, shouldn’t always think about these methods in an either-or sense. When used in tandem, online qualitative methods can lend additional insights and deeper rapport to your traditional qualitative studies. In more and more of the offline qualitative studies that we at Accelerant Research conduct for client organizations, we find ourselves creating online homework assignments for participants to complete in advance of their scheduled in-person focus groups or follow-up online exercises to be conducted after the in-person groups wrap up. Assigning these homework tasks requires very little additional time for recruiters and comes at minimal additional cost. The following are just some of the many potential benefits of conducting online discussions in advance of your traditional qualitative research study: Building rapport with your respondents. As all qualitative research consultants know, establishing trust and getting your participants to open up is an art. Giving your participants the opportunity to virtually get to know their moderator (as well as other participants) prior to meeting them – and to do so in the comfort of their own homes/offices – helps to increase their comfort level greatly. That’s not to say that you won’t still have to perform your moderator magic to get your participants engaged when the groups begin, but it certainly helps you take preemptive steps toward that end. We often find it helpful to kick off the online sessions with a brief video that introduces the moderator and lays down some initial ground rules for the study. Getting participants thinking about the subject matter. Giving your respondents time, during the days leading up to your offline qualitative sessions, to talk about and reflect on their experiences with whatever subject matter you are studying helps you drive them that much closer to the “sweet spot” frame of mind that will yield the deepest insights for moderator and end-user clients. Documenting behaviors or product usage. Asking participants to keep a journal or log of relevant behaviors (e.g., nutrition diaries, travel journals, product usage logs, countless other examples) leading up to their scheduled in-person sessions can be incredibly informative sources of insights. Instructing participants to use an online qualitative platform for organizing these records can save hours of time a moderator or research assistant might otherwise spend compiling this information from participants’ disparate note-taking sources. Simpler execution of projective exercises. Projective techniques are fantastic ways to get at some of the underlying emotional connections participants have with the subject you’re studying. However, in some cases, pulling these exercises off logistically in an in-person setting can be quite an “arts & crafts” time suck. Giving your participants collage-building, storytelling, or perception mapping exercises before or as a follow-up to your group discussions can be incredibly insightful, and doing so online is much more efficient (from both an execution and analysis standpoint). Early predictions on who to “pay and send.” No matter how strong the recruiter was or how well-crafted the screener, we’ve all had situations where more respondents than needed show up for groups and we end up wishing we had a do-over on who we decided to keep versus excuse. Using online homework assignments, you can get to know which of your participants are the best communicators. Plus, having an idea of which of your participants would be the appropriate candidate(s) for dismissal can help to save you from having to spend the first several minutes of a focus group in the back room flipping frantically through your respondent grids and re-screeners to decide who stays and who goes.
Trimming time from an already crowded discussion guide. Research clients are under an ever-increasing amount of pressure to squeeze as many insights as possible out of a given research project. The above methods are just a few that can help to trim precious minutes off the length of your in-person qualitative sessions, opening up opportunities to explore your subject matter at a deeper level or even to start tackling more of the “time permitting” sections of your discussion guides. For more information about Accelerant's online qualitative and white glove recruiting services, email us at info@accelerantresearch.com or call us at 704.206.8500. Last month, we stated that due to changes in business conditions, it may be a good opportunity to revisit the value of historical data collected in a customer satisfaction tracking study, and consider whether revisions could improve the value of the data collected while reducing costs. As an example of “how things can change” it was offered that the advent of various technologies continues to change consumers’ opinions and expectations of brands, and that these new conditions may change consumers’ purchasing behavior and underlying brand loyalties, causing them to “redefine” their criteria for customer satisfaction. As such, satisfaction measures that are currently tracked, but were identified as key drivers in a study conducted prior societal changes may have decreased in importance, while others may have increased importance and reached the status of key driver, but are not being tracked at all. Overall, the rank order of importance of key drivers may have changed in such a way as to render current tracking programs ineffective in doing what they are designed to do: monitor the effectiveness of various customer programs and initiatives in lifting overall customer satisfaction.
Assuming it’s time to re-assess and refresh key drivers, a number of excellent opportunities emerge to manage your research budget. First, by conducting a new key driver identification study, you can leverage its findings and include only those items found to be key drivers in your tracking survey, i.e., pare down the amount of data collected to only what is needed. This is where key driver studies pay for themselves. That is, you can avoid spending research budget on measurements of things that do not have a strong relationship with overall customer satisfaction (or other business-based dependent measure). Eliminate the “nice-to-know” survey items and keep your tracking questionnaire as brief as possible. A good rule of thumb to follow for designing surveys for customers is to keep it at 10 minutes or less. This amount of time is quite adequate to fit several topics of survey items that map back to key drivers identified in the previous study, as well as accommodate important open-ended questions in which customers get to provide their opinions and feelings in their own words. Another opportunity is to review the methodology that has been used in the past tracking efforts and consider whether a less expensive process of data collection can be deployed without a loss of research quality, e.g., switching from CATI to web or interactive voice response (IVR), provided that sample representativeness can be maintained. Methodology changes can sometimes cut the research expenditure in half while delivering the same value. And yet another opportunity exists during these tracker episodes in the form of re-bidding the study with a new set of research suppliers. Indeed, a research manager’s fiduciary responsibility to his or her employer is to drive bang for the buck on behalf of the organization’s research spend levels. Indeed, there is nothing like an RFP for a tracking study that forces research firms to sharpen their pencils in pricing its offer of tracking services, both for the incumbent supplier as well as for prospective ones, too. The third and final installment of “Have you thought about your tracker lately?” will be published next month. In it, the reader will see a step-by-step process laid out in which migrating from one method to another and/or one supplier to another can be done, while minimizing the loss of historical data. This migration, when done with some care, can enable an organization to maintain at least some, if not most, of its historical data provided in previous waves of tracking research. Even though tracking studies are considered by many organizations to be one of the most important research programs to conduct, they may be wasting a lot of your research budget that could otherwise be spent on more fruitful endeavors.
Tracking studies typically represent the largest portion of an organization’s research budget, but sometimes they fall victim to a condition of “status quo” in order to preserve historical trends which represent significant investment by the organization. On the one hand, the history that existing tracking studies may have represents a view of “from where we’ve come” and offers the best empirical basis for the potential of seeing into the future. Yet, on the other hand, revising, upgrading, or downsizing tracking studies may, in fact, represent the best opportunity to maintain the viability of an organization’s set of customer satisfaction programs and initiatives that are designed to improve customers’ perceptions and strengthen the ties that bind them to its products and services. It is safe to assume that, over time, the importance of various aspects of the relationship between an organization and its customers changes. As such, the exact same set of the organization’s performance measures, i.e., key drivers of overall customer satisfaction, that have been tracked in previous waves of research may no longer be valid. Indeed, the shelf life of previously identified key drivers of satisfaction may have expired. For example, take the case in which customer satisfaction with a bank has been tracked for several years. Perhaps that tracker began with a key driver study that was designed to identify, among all aspects of the banking relationship, only those aspects that showed a significant (statistical) correlation with overall satisfaction. Subsequently, it was only those key drivers that were included in the tracking study – and that is the proper way to initiate a tracking study. It may be that the initial key driver identification study did not find that offering an app to be used to make peer-to-peer payments (e.g., Zelle, Venmo) had a strong relationship with overall satisfaction and customer loyalty. But now, this particular aspect may have a strong effect on overall customer satisfaction due to the recent advent and proliferation of such technologies. Proceeding along with an existing tracker, without tracking on this particular aspect of a bank’s offerings, may be a major mistake. The inherent benefit of tracking on key drivers of satisfaction is to initiate programs, messages, and other organizational efforts to lift satisfaction over time. Instead, the “same old tracker” may have the organization spending a lot of money, but otherwise flying blindly. In essence, it may be time to stop tracking on things that have been heard in the past, and start fresh by listening to the new paths pinpointed by key driver research to capture the hearts and minds of customers. If you can hypothesize that the same old performance items that have been tracked have changed in importance, it’s appropriate to test that hypothesis empirically, with a new key driver identification study. If a new set of key drivers emerge, it’s time to take a long, hard look at your existing tracker and weigh the merits of this historical, trended data that are otherwise valued so dearly. In today’s product, service, and tech development environments, agile processes continue to build momentum and adoption. While developing, building, and refining designs, user/customer experience feedback is incredibly important. To aid this process, Accelerant Research has developed recruiting processes for providing excellent research participants in a timely manner to help UX/CX researchers operate within aggressive agile timelines, but do so without having to settle for sloppily recruited research participants.
At Accelerant Research, our participant recruiting process is designed to provide the right target audience in a timely manner. We will work as an extension of your development team to get you the insights you need and keep the Agile process moving forward. We invite you to request a cost estimate from us as a first step. Simply give us a call (704-206-8500) or send us an email (info@accelerantresearch.com). If we are granted the opportunity to work with you, we are confident that the quality of recruiting service you receive will be a marked improvement over your existing process. |
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