Research Panel – benefits

20th May, 2010 - Posted by Tom Raybould - No Comments

As business decisions become more and more significant, a company can live or die by misjudging its market. Does anyone remember when there was a Woolworths on every high street? The pervasive nature of the internet and tightening of budgets means there has never been a better time to set up an online Research Panel and tap into customer insight via the internet.

Engage your customers
By setting up a panel you can create engagement with your customers, giving them a voice in the development of your company and increasing their loyalty to your brand. Many customers are happy and willing to give feedback and like to know that their views are making a difference. Engaging with them in the online space allows you to make use of all the exciting multimedia tools available to improve participation and increase your response rates.

Engage your business
Your research panel can make research more readily available to departments and encourages them to further learn from customers before making decisions. Also if the right hand is aware of what the left hand is doing they can work together to achieve common goals and this can encourage synergy between departments. With the cost efficient element of online research already taken into account a reduction in duplicated tasks will also save your company money.

Ensure productivity
Online research allows for more rapid turnaround of projects and having your own research panel only expedites this. The panel becomes an enabler and reduces timescales meaning the business is able to accelerate the research schedule and make more timely decisions.

Research benefits
Other than time savings there are also significant cost benefits in having your own panel (and these can easily amount to 30 to 50% over a year) which means your budget can be stretched further and you can in fact conduct more research. With a carefully managed research panel you can ensure that your base remains representative of your customer base, the UK population or some other pre-defined profile, giving you the confidence that any results or insight you derive will be robust. Being able to fuse panelist profile information, Recency/Frequency/Monetary data (RFM) data or a bespoke or commercially available segmentation system makes owning your own panel a very compelling proposition. Research is also not limited to just quantitative data, your panel can be used as a pool for qualitative discussion or for use in other methodologies, like telephone or mobile surveys.

Learn more about Benefits of a custom research panel