Our team at Actionable Research is very excited about this upcoming 2019 year. While every new year brings its own opportunities for renewal and progress, this year is special; for Actionable Research we are bringing solutions to a few of our clients’ most persistent market research challenges.
This upcoming blog series is dedicated to providing more insight into why we are so excited about Insight Streamer LifeCycle. Our experience has taught us what our clients are thinking about most often when they are gathering research data and insights from their customers, prospects and industry experts; we believe relieving the stress of these difficulties will allow them to be more productive and satisfied in their roles as product managers, marketers, and researchers. While they aren’t the only problems they are confronted with, these specific problems are certainly relevant and under our control.
With the new year, we take aim at these common customer challenges:
1. Utilizing experienced, knowledgeable outside market research expertise, labor and tools on an as-need, cost-effective basis.
Most of our clients have in-house marketing research operations, and as a result, their needs vary from one project to another. Whether they execute a project completely internally or with the assistance of Actionable Research, the workload is seldom consistent. Companies who have internal centers of excellence focused on market intelligence and insights must remain flexible to support ad hoc research needs. As these needs change, scaling experienced staff workloads becomes very challenging, offering opportunities to compromise quality of internal project support.
Insight Streamer LifeCycle allows our clients to receive Actionable Research staff time and tools when they need them through Insight Streamer. Everything from survey writing, fielding, respondent selection and sourcing can come with the basic subscription. With our vertical market focus in healthcare, oral health and information technology, Actionable Research can truly become an experienced and productive extension of your team.
2. Allowing market research reports to flex to the needs of their audiences; creating reports that provide the opportunity to look at the data in a variety of ways without having to go back to Excel to make additional charts and graphs.
We deliver many reports each month, and for years that meant providing a high quality PowerPoint slide deck that included the most important results, along with information on each question asked for backup support. These become a reference for teams internally going forward, so they could apply the knowledge to product and marketing decisions.
It was has served as an effective process, except for a limited ability to anticipate which additional questions people may ask that weren’t included in the slide deck. Questions that may relate to a specific segment of the audience, or comparisons between segments. The answers could be gleaned from the data through more analysis, but the person asking the question doesn’t have time to re-learn how to use data analysis tools. Asking internal research staff to create these additional looks is time-intensive and impractical; trying to keep a static PowerPoint presentation up to date is just not possible for many of our clients.
Through Insight Streamer LifeCycle, our clients get access to EverStream Reporter, our base technology for research reporting. EverStream delivers PowerPoint slide formatted output in a live data form online. Filtering results of a research effort by one segment of the audience, or comparing audiences is an easy task in EverStream, and allows for output to PowerPoint, available immediately. Every project we perform at Actionable Research comes with this powerful tool, and an initial PowerPoint report as well which can be easily updated and output through its use.
3. Analyzing research results between two different survey research projects; taking data that would be relevant for cross-analysis (similar questions across similar or same respondents) and placing it next to data that has been analyzed in a separate project, including data collected through two different vendors or means.
This one is the dream for many, and the goal of many big data/data science projects. From a practical perspective, this is a very manual process no matter how it is addressed. The process involves data wrangling, which requires careful review of questions, answers, respondents and scales, and placing the data into a structure that is able to be analyzed together.
Insight Streamer LifeCycle is designed to be a solution to this very issue. All of the data gathered in each study to be included in LifeCycle is copied into a single data structure which is then managed to offer additional ad hoc analysis, which can be conducted by our clients’ staff or Actionable team members. This can be an important source of new insights, one that is very difficult to facilitate outside of a big data effort that has accounted for survey data analysis (which often is not the focus of a big data/data science project).
4. Extending the lifetime of the investments our clients make in custom survey research, including complex conjoint-based studies that span across several geographies.
Conducting primary custom research can be expensive; especially when it is applied for more complex purposes and makes use of methods that require analytical expertise and experimental design skills that are hard to source or scale. Add to that a need to survey highly paid professional respondents such as surgeons or senior executives and the challenge to maintain efficiency only increases. One of our clients required a survey to understand their hospital audience across a 10 country geography, through a conjoint based survey that provided insight into what features each audience needed based on their affinity for presented product configurations. Extending the lifetime value of this research is a high priority always.
Insight Streamer LifeCycle’s ability to stretch the lifetime value of research like this through enabling ad hoc analysis, as well as the ability to refresh it in a greatly simplified manner, makes it truly a lever against obsolescence. This means that study intervals can be set longer, or refreshing data can be made less costly and time consuming.
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It can challenge to explain the benefits of custom market research, let alone the difficulty of explaining a new innovation like this tools-enabled services offering, Insight Streamer LifeCycle. For this reason, our new series will be based on actual real-world examples that highlight what our clients receive through their use of this tool, all depersonalized in order to preserve anonymity.
Yes, 2019 is one of our most important years ever; please come with us over the next few weeks as we share how Insight Streamer LifeCycle can be an important addition for you this year as well.
