The Challenges to Market Research: Client Survey

Getting our clients closer to their customers on a continuous basis is at the heart of QuMind, whether this be via our proprietary platform or with the help of our experts. However the biggest challenge we see for those leading on customer insight in organisations is managing multiple suppliers and platforms to achieve this, creating an often cumbersome and costly back end to make this work.

With that in mind we wanted to find out how widespread this was and whether these are real challenges facing the insight communities across industry in the UK. We’ve talked to 50 managers from mid-level to C-suite across multiple industries and asked them these questions.

Within our audience 24% manage their current insight programs using external agencies, 35% use a combination of agencies and in-house tools and 39% manage it all themselves. The increase in self management is a theme that we have seen evolving over recent years. There’s an increasing desire to take more control of data including market research rather than out sourcing it.

In terms of managing Insight in-house, the top challenge cited by respondents was in managing multiple platforms. We believe this really hits into the core of managing a customer closeness program in trying to link all the different data silos together to understand what is going on and take action. Behind this, naturally, sit other issues such as budget, resource and lack of flexibility from Insight providers to fit around the needs of the customer. Central to this lack of flexibility is to custom fit a solution and the hidden costs that often drive up the spend above agreed budgets.

Once a solution is found, sharing the insight around the organisation is then the next biggest challenge, as is making sure it gets into the hands of those that need to make the decisions. From our audience they cited the best way to do this is via;

1. Dashboards
2. Evidence that insight drives the bottom line
3. Concise reports

So in this day and age of data overload, keeping it simple, concise, relevant and actionable in an easily digestible format is crucial for driving decision making around the needs of the customer.

Interestingly though, only 10% of the respondents say they use dashboards with the vast majority preferring to stick with the tried and trusted PowerPoint format. This is perhaps a reflection of the tools out there not being accessible, usable or internal teams not having the skillsets to make this work.

The desire from over 80% of respondents is to have an all in one integrated platform to gather and share insight across the organisation. The core benefits mentioned are a consistent interface across quantitative and qualitative feedback, getting more control over the insight, flexibility around budget spend and not having to manage multiple agencies and platforms.

In conclusion, the in-housing of Customer Insight will continue to grow as more organisations take control and focus on greater customer closeness. The challenge for Insight suppliers is to provide a one stop shop and easy to use platform that covers all a clients insight needs.