Introduction
Traditional market research has always been extremely time-consuming and expensive as the resources required to understand, strategize and execute market research have a high level of human interface. Multiple teams are involved in activities starting from survey programming all the way to report generation and presentation.
Due to the rapid technological development of software-supported market research solutions, it is now possible to generate valuable insights with a high impact within a very short time through regular data collection. New products and services can be tested more cost-effectively and faster, introduced into the market, and further developed based on the “real” needs of customers and markets. The same applies to innovations, concepts, and campaigns.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Quicker, Slimmer, Flexible, Efficient Market Research
- Value-Added Agile Market Research
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Agile market research with technologies for data collection and data analysis
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Solutions for agile market research
- Product test
- Concept test
- Conjoint analysis
- TURF analysis
- Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter
- Net Promoter Score
- Online focus group
- Semantic differential
- Maximum Difference (Max-Diff) scaling
- A/B tests
- Mobile diary
- Heat maps
- Image & video rating
- Intercept surveys
- Offline data collection
- Online panels
- Research communities
- Social listening
- Evaluations and analysis
- Intelligent functions for complex, agile market research studies
- Agile team collaboration
- Agile market research with security
- 24 * 7 Worldwide “agile” support
- Easy integration of third-party systems
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Solutions for agile market research
- Online market research panel
- Build a consumer Community for agile market research
- Conclusion
Quicker, Slimmer, Flexible, Efficient Market Research
Orthodox market research managers would start by creating an objective scope of work for the project, distribute it to various market research companies, and numerous meetings would be needed to finalize the strategy and timelines and cost for the project.
The objective of agile market research is to establish faster, leaner, flexible and digitized processes for market analysis to react quickly to changes in the market and be able to adapt to the wishes and needs of their target audience.
Agile market research managers have now started adapting to the new age market research methods, which are driven by technology.
Let’s review an agile marketing framework that can be used to drive market research projects in any organization at scale.
Explore
Identify costs and timelines
Omnibus surveys are often used to identify customer or market needs. Omnibus surveys are accessible through technology research companies even if you do not have your own sample audience. However, there are certain points to take note of when using this survey type. For example, make sure the omnibus survey has a good number of respondents that match the requirements.
Create an objective scope of work for the project and allocate resources accordingly. Identify the cost involved in executing a small-scale survey, a large-scale survey, or a long-term longitudinal study with technology-based market research companies that will also manage data collection over multiple phases. This will help you identify the cost involved based on your time and resource constraints.
Evaluate different sources to create sub-segments within the target market. Different types of data can be used to create sub-markets for analysis like social media profiles, geospatial information, search patterns, etc. Hence, market research managers should always look at multiple streams of data when identifying target markets for analysis.
Benchmark competition
Benchmarking surveys to understand performance concerning your competition in the market is critical. Without having competitive intelligence, it is not possible to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your research project.
Benchmarking surveys should be run before you finalize the design of your market research project.
Select technology
Selecting the right market research partner that uses digital technology is critical in driving the success of your research project.
The fundamental DNA of Agile market research is to leverage technology for speed and accuracy.
Technology research companies like QuestionPro specialize in using technology, data, and analytics to create target markets and unprecedented customer insights and actionable intelligence for their clients.
Create
Design your questionnaire
Questionnaire design is critical to the success of any market research project. Designing a questionnaire traditionally required subject matter experts and survey programmers to help with the creation process.
With agile marketing tools like QuestionPro, you can select from a plethora of question types that enable market research managers to add different types of research methodologies to their questionnaires. For example, you can create a Conjoint Analysis or a Gabor granger study by adding these question types to your survey and inputting the required variables. Within a few minutes, you have now added research methodology to your questionnaire that traditionally would take days or even weeks to program.
Cross-platform and volume testing
Traditionally, surveys were tested on multiple browsers and devices to test performance and usability.
With agile market research tools like QuestionPro, you can do cross-platform and volume testing of your questionnaire and get feedback from stakeholders in real time. As a market research manager, this will give you insights into how well your survey is designed and what needs to be fixed before the survey goes live.
You can also run bots to answer your survey questionnaire to understand the limitations of your questionnaire. QuestionPro allows you to add bulk test responses to check the data visualization and analysis capabilities.
Control your audience
You can set up advanced quota control on your survey to collect data based on your research goals.
Tools like QuestionPro will provide you with the option to set up quotas for multiple aspects of your study like gender, answer options, and much more.
Go Live
Soft launch your questionnaire to a small group of respondents before you go live with the survey. You can use the QuestionPro online audience panels to get access to respondents across multiple continents and different business segments.
This will help you understand how well your questionnaire and data are performing with your sample audience. You can tweak and make changes if necessary.
Launch and monitor
You can launch your survey project using the QuestionPro online audience panel once you are comfortable with the soft launch data and start monitoring the progress.
QuestionPro’s respondent dashboards will give you insights into how well your market research survey is performing with respondents so you can take action if necessary.
Evaluate
Analyze and understand
QuestionPro’s analytics tools will enable you to take actionable insights into what your target market is thinking.
You can identify trends, segments, and opportunities that will help you make better decisions.
QuestionPro’s analytics tools enable you to create graphs and charts based on your survey data to take away the guesswork around how well your market research project is doing.
Export and develop
Once your data collection activity is complete, you can export the data in PowerPoint or Excel to share the insights you have uncovered with your internal team or clients. You also have the option to download the raw data set in SPSS or CSV from your study so you can take action on it.
QuestionPro’s market research tools help you take prompt action on your insights from the data collected from your target audience.
Initiate improvement measures with stakeholders based on your data insights, carry out targeted campaigns, or launch a new product based on the data trends.
Value-Added Agile Market Research
The added value that agile market research brings with it, namely testing products, concepts, and campaigns intensively in advance is much more cost-efficient, easier, and faster than in the past. Thanks to new technologies, the risk that products, advertising measures, and campaigns will not be accepted by the relevant target market and that this will result in considerable costs or even damage to reputation is considerably reduced.
The concept of testing products and advertising has grown enormously in importance, as failures have often cost millions, not to mention the damage to the image, which can not be valued in monetary metrics.
With agile market research, you can now run different types of market research projects in days rather than months.
Types of Market Research: Market Research Methods and Examples
Whether an organization or business wishes to know the purchase behavior of consumers or the likelihood of consumers paying a certain cost for a product, market research helps in drawing meaningful conclusions.
Depending on the methods and tools required, the following are the types:
Primary Market Research
It is a combination of both Qualitative and Quantitative Research. Primary market research is a process where organizations or businesses get in touch with the end consumers or employ a third party to carry out relevant studies to collect data. The data collected can be qualitative data (non-numerical data) or quantitative data (numerical or statistical data).
While conducting primary market research, one can gather two types of information: Exploratory and Specific. Exploratory research is open-ended, where a problem is explored by asking open-ended questions in a detailed interview format, usually with a small group of people, also known as a sample. Here the sample size is restricted to 6-10 members. Specific research, on the other hand, is more pinpointed and is used to solve the problems that are identified by exploratory research.
As mentioned earlier, primary market research is a combination of qualitative market research and quantitative market research. The qualitative market research study involves semi-structured or unstructured data collected through some of the commonly used qualitative research methods like:
Methods of Market Research
- Focus groups: Focus group is one of the commonly used qualitative research methods. A Focus group is a small group of people (6-10) who typically respond to online surveys sent to them. The best part about a focus group is the information can be collected remotely and can be done without personally interacting with the group members. However, this is a more expensive method as it is used to collect complex information.
- One-to-one interview: As the name suggests, this method involves personal interaction in the form of an interview, where the researcher asks a series of questions to collect information or data from the respondents. The questions are mostly open-ended questions and are asked in a way to facilitate responses. This method is heavily dependent on the ability and experience of the interviewer to ask questions that evoke responses.
- Ethnographic research: This type of in-depth research is conducted in the natural settings of the respondents. This method requires the interviewer to adapt himself/herself to the natural environment of the respondents, which could be a city or a remote village. Geographical constraints can be a hindering factor in conducting this kind of research. Ethnographic research can last from a few days to a few years.
Qualitative research methods are used by organizations to conduct structured market research by using online surveys, questionnaires and polls to gain statistical insights to make informed decisions.
This method was once conducted using pen and paper. This has now evolved to sending structured online surveys to the respondents to gain actionable insights. Researchers tend to use modern and technology-oriented survey platforms to structure and design their survey to evoke a maximum response from respondents.
Through a well-structured mechanism, data is easily collected and reported, and necessary action can be taken with all the information that is made available firsthand.
Secondary Market Research
Secondary research uses information that is organized by an outside source like government agencies, media, chambers of commerce, etc. This information is published in newspapers, magazines, books, company websites, free government and non-government agencies, and so on. The secondary source makes use of the following:
- Public sources: Public sources like libraries are an awesome way of gathering free information. Government libraries usually offer services free of cost, and a researcher can document available information.
- Commercial sources: Commercial sources, although reliable, are expensive. Local newspapers, magazines, journals, and television media are great commercial sources to collect information.
- Educational Institutions: Although not a very popular source of collecting information, most universities and educational institutions are a rich source of information as many research projects are carried out there than in any business sector.
Marketing and product flops can be very expensive!
Think of the many marketing failures that even large and experienced corporations have suffered.
For example, Mitsubishi named one of their models “Pajero”. The off-road vehicle should then be launched on the Spanish market. The term Pajero, however, is a very bad swear word in Spain.
Or the company Henkel, which advertised a detergent in the Arab world with the slogan “DIRTY → PERSIL → CLEAN”. The company just ignored the fact that the reading direction in the Arab countries is different, namely from left to right.
P&G tweaks the sales pitch to fit different markets; that’s what the company is known for. In India, for instance, the convenience of disposable diapers doesn’t resonate with parents. The company’s consumer research found that many Indian mothers think that only lazy moms put their babies in disposable diapers that last a full night. As Pampers brand manager Vidya Ramachandran reported in an internal video shown to employees, “We had to change that mindset and educate [mothers] that using a diaper is not about convenience for you — it’s about your baby’s development.”
Agile market research with technologies for data collection and data analysis
Solutions for agile market research
Let us look at some solutions available for Market research that would traditionally take months to conceptualize and implement. Using agile methodologies, you can implement these solutions within a few days.
Product test
A product concept testing survey enables you to test an idea or concept before introducing a product or service into the market. For a product or service to be successful in your target market, it is essential to understand whether your clientele will accept or not. Using a concept testing questionnaire, an organization can process, analyze, and test the product.
Concept test
A concept testing survey helps teams evaluate product development, an ad campaign, or even a message or claim, by getting feedback from customer segments who make up the target market. … Using visuals, you can compare two concepts side by side and get immediate feedback from potential customers on their preferences.
Conjoint analysis
Conjoint analysis is defined as a survey-based advanced market research analysis method that attempts to understand how people make complex choices. We make choices that require trade-offs every day — so often that we may not even realize it. Even simple decisions like choosing a laundry detergent or deciding to book a flight are mental conjoint studies that contain multiple elements that lead us to our choice.
TURF analysis
TURF Analysis, or Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency Analysis, is a statistical research methodology that enables the assessment of the potential of market research for a combination of products and services. It analyzes the number of customers reached by a particular communication source and how often that happens.
Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter
Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter is defined as a technique for market researchers to gauge consumer perceptions of the value of products or services. It usually means asking four specific questions to help uncover the best price for the product.
Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey consists of a single question that measures the likelihood of your customers’ referring your business to their others. It is an indicator of customer experience, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty. The responses to the NPS survey are used to generate a score ranging from -100 to 100. The NPS score is used to classify customers and help businesses improve their experience.
Online focus group
A focus group is best defined as a small group of carefully selected participants who contribute to open discussions for research about a new product or a feature update, or any other topic to generalize the results from this focus group to the entire population. A focus group is conducted in the presence of a moderator who will ensure the results are as unbiased and legitimate as possible.
Semantic differential
A semantic differential scale is a survey or questionnaire rating scale that asks people to rate a product, company, brand, or any ‘entity’ within the frames of a multi-point rating option. These survey answering options are grammatically on opposite adjectives at each end. For example, love-hate, satisfied-unsatisfied, and likely to return-unlikely to return with intermediate options in between.
Maximum Difference (Max-Diff) scaling
MaxDiff is a methodology developed by Jordan Louviere et al. that results in interval scale measurements that are based on comparative judgments that can be easily performed, even when the number of attributes is not small. The task presents respondents with a set of items, usually 3 to 6, and simply asks them to select the most preferred and the least preferred in the set (or the most important, least important; best item, worst item, etc. In fact, the method is also referred to as Best/Worst scaling). Respondents can typically handle a number of these evaluations and may be asked to respond to 15, 20, or more sets.
A/B tests
A/B testing is a form of research that assesses the appeal of candidate options. This technique mimics the way things are judged in the real world. It also allows surveys to be kept short, which makes the approach well suited to research conducted via mobile phones.
Mobile diary
Mobile Diaries are a private portal that offers researchers a medium to connect with all the participants to capture data and insights to assess actions, activities, the timing of events, habits, behaviors, and emotions without being nosy.
This can be used specifically with a small group of people that are pre-recruited to be a part of a longitudinal study. This bunch of people are recruited from the existing online survey panel and are instructed on the scope and requirements of a mobile diary. The respondents can upload videos and images, and in the process, give you a sneak peek into their day-to-day activity with a product.
Heat maps
A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the individual values contained in a matrix are represented as colors. Fractal maps and tree maps both often use a similar system of color coding to represent the values taken by a variable in a hierarchy. Heat maps help you get an instant feel for an area by grouping places into categories and displaying their density visually. The darker the color is, the higher the density.
Image & video rating
An image rating question is an easy-to-understand closed-ended question type that allows survey respondents to choose one or multiple images from a list of image choices. The image rating survey question is similar to the regular matrix rating question, except the questions are in the form of images. Uploading images to the question is very simple. It’s an engaging way to get opinions from people and help guide your decisions. This question type is optimized for desktops, mobiles, and tablets so that your questions look visible and straightforward to understand, no matter where your respondents are.
TubePulse™ video rating is an interactive question that allows your survey respondents to provide continuous feedback while watching a video, by dragging a slider along with a rating scale (e.g. bad, good, excellent).
The respondents can react to the video at any point while it is playing by moving a slider. Each interaction with the slider is recorded along with a timestamp for reports. You can also allow respondents to add comments by using cue-point as the data collection method.
Intercept surveys
Intercept surveys were developed to get feedback but most importantly, without directing your website visitor to a pop-up or an external website for feedback. Using intercept, you may copy-paste the survey code on your website and it does not interfere with other elements of the live website.
Offline data collection
The offline survey app enables you to securely conduct market research surveys and collect responses without an internet connection. Use it for efficient market research and field surveys anywhere with any mobile device. The application helps you conduct a device audit, customize your UX, sync with Salesforce, set custom alerts, capture location and much more.
Online panels
Conduct high-frequency research with a quick turnaround time. Slack integration helps you collect instant answers and survey responses. Access more than 10 specialty dropout audiences, including veterinarians, app developers, building contractors, gamers, small-biz owners, and more. Harness the power of smartphones and ask respondents to take photos, videos or participate in mobile diaries.
Research communities
Create a stand-alone branded website for your members. Easily accelerate the customer base with our purpose build community tools. Use push notifications, alerts and mobile technology. We provide you with a one-click solution to post surveys and share member comments on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.
Social listening
Survey Twitter integration within the Idea Board of Communities has quickly become one of QuestionPro’s most popular features. This feature allows companies to engage in meaningful ways with their customers/followers on Twitter. Since there is no shortage of insights and ideas being shared on Twitter, there’s a need to compile these ideas and make sense of them all. Furthermore, having meaningful engagement with those ideas is even more of a challenge. This is where the Twitter integration with QuestionPro Communities comes into play.
Evaluations and analysis
The market research platform at QuestionPro offers you a complete package of reporting and analysis tools that give you quick insights into your market research data. Let’s take a look at a few important analysis tools.
Data segmentation
Data filters let you sort your responses based on parameters such as responses to a particular question in the survey, custom variables, or time.
Cross Tabulation
Cross-tabulation is a mainframe statistical model that follows similar lines. It helps you make informed decisions regarding your research by identifying patterns, trends, and the correlation between your study parameters. When conducting a study, the raw data can usually be daunting. They will always point to several chaotic possible outcomes. In such a situation, cross-tab helps you zero in on a single theory beyond doubt by drawing trends, comparisons, and correlations between mutually inclusive factors within your study.
AI-based semantic text analysis
Text analysis (also known as Text Mining or Content Analysis) is a technique that computers use to extract worthwhile information from the human language in a smart and efficient manner. Researchers and developers can use this method to assemble diverse and unorganized data in a structured form. In this process, documents are disintegrated for hassle-free management of data pieces, simply put: the unstructured text gets converted into structured data.
Trend analysis
Trend analysis gives you the ability to take a look at data over time for a long-running survey. It can be useful for comparing quiz or test scores (see an increase in knowledge over the course if you administer the same survey multiple times over the matter of a few weeks or months) or identifying a trend in data sets for a regularly distributed satisfaction survey.
Correlation analysis
Correlation analysis in research is a statistical method used to measure the strength of the linear relationship between two variables and compute their association. Simply put – correlation analysis calculates the level of change in one variable due to the change in the other. A high correlation points to a strong relationship between the two variables, while a low correlation means that the variables are weakly related.
When it comes to market research, researchers use correlation analysis to analyze quantitative data collected through research methods like surveys and live polls. They try to identify the relationship, patterns, significant connections, and trends between two variables or datasets. There is a positive correlation between two variables when an increase in one variable leads to an increase in the other. On the other hand, a negative correlation means that when one variable increases, the other decreases and vice-versa.
Gap Analysis
Gap analysis is a technique that helps you assess a business by measuring the difference between the expected performance and its actual performance. A “gap” denotes the difference between the present state of the business and its desired state.
Use gap analysis to understand what a product lacks and what it needs to excel in the market. Don’t just find out what didn’t work but also understand why it didn’t and identify steps to improve the processes. Make data-backed decisions with the gap analysis tool. Use QuestionPro’s side-by-side matrix in order to run a gap analysis.
With QuestionPro, you can convert your market research reports into easy-to-interpret, graphically appealing, and arranged visual infographics at the push of a button and export them to common presentation formats. For further analysis of data, the results of QuestionPro Can be exported in a variety of formats, including Excel, SPSS, txt, Dropbox, or Google Drive.
Intelligent functions for complex, agile market research studies
The platform for agile market research from QuestionPro offers you a variety of functions to create survey flow and logic based on user selections and attributes. This is considered the brain of the survey as it has the ability to maneuver your respondents through different sections of the survey in real-time. Survey intelligence reduces respondent stress and increases the data quality.
Let us look at some of these features and functions in more detail
Branching logic
Skip logic and branching are used to let respondents skip one or more questions and jump to a different question, page, or survey. The branch logic executes based on their response to the current question. You can use this feature to control the survey flow and display relevant questions. You can define custom rules to create a custom path for each respondent, depending on the answer to a specific question. Branching questions create “intelligent” surveys, i.e., respondents can answer only those questions that apply to them based on their responses to screening questions.
For example, a patron at a restaurant can be asked if he/she enjoyed their meal. If the answer is no, the survey questions jump to ask the following question – “Can you rate your experience based on the following parameters.” with a few options about service, quality of food, ambiance, pricing, and the behavior of the restaurant staff. If the answer to the question is yes, a follow-up question about what part of the experience made them respond yes, can be asked.
Scoring logic
Surveys can be used to compute scores/points in real-time. You can administer tests online and calculate scores and present them to the respondents immediately. Scoring Skip Logic can be used to branch to different parts of the survey based on the range of scores.
Custom Variables
Custom variables help capture and relate to the information attached to respondents’ profiles. On capturing the data, your surveys become personalized based on your respondents’ previous inputs. Detailed surveys require a lot of variables or fields other than your generic demographics. Using customer variables, you can pass additional information. You can upload up to 255 custom variables and store them with your respondents’ answers.
Question and answer randomization
Randomization is a research technique that is used to overcome order bias- the bias that can result due to the order of answer choices. Respondents tend to favor choices at the beginning and at the end of a list because they are more memorized. First items may also be chosen by respondents to save time.
Advanced randomization in surveys is a technique by which the answer options are presented to each respondent in a different order. It is used to overcome order bias – a behavior in which respondents tend to select the first option. To tackle this, survey creators present answer options such that they need to spend some time going through all the options and choosing an honest answer.
Block Rotation
A block randomizer displays blocks of questions in an undefined sequence in real-time to the survey respondents. It changes the order of survey blocks presented to the respondents. Further, you can either keep the sequence of questions within a block as constant or randomize that too.
Consider an online quiz with questions on different subjects like history, geography, math, language, art, sports, etc. You can add blocks of questions for each topic. For students majoring in history, the history question block will be kept constant. You can present other blocks randomly.
Question extractions
The extraction logic lets users show the options to the respondents that they have selected in the previous question. The extracted question will be automatically added to the survey. Users can configure the system to move the selected, not selected, displayed, and not displayed options to the extracted question.
Survey chaining
Survey chaining can be used to intelligently branch to different surveys depending on how people respond to specific questions. It can be helpful when you want to keep research studies separate for reporting or tracking the logic.
Quota Management
Quota control is one of the ways to limit the number of responses for each option in a question. This limit differs from the response quota, which places a limit on the total number of responses obtained for the survey. Managing survey quota is one of the ways to add logic and program your survey.
For example, if you would like to have an equal distribution of males and females in your survey, quota control allows you to put a limit on the number of people responding to each option and optionally terminate the responses based on the specified criteria.
The distributed logic quota is a combination of different types of quotas. If the survey uses more than one quota control technique, it is considered distributed quota control. Using this method, you can set up a quota based on answers to multiple questions, custom variables, the number of responses for each option, geo-location, and more.
There are two approaches to quota control – pessimistic and optimistic.
Pessimistic quota control does not count an individual as passing a quota until they have completed a survey. So we can be sure that all quota cells are filled. If a user sends out many survey invitations, there is a strong chance that there will be an over quota situation due to too many completions. QuestionPro implements the pessimistic quota system. You can apply a distributed logic quota on multiple questions.
Optimistic quota control counts anyone who starts the survey but does not finish it. It has a lesser chance of being over quota, but a higher risk of being under quota. To avoid going over quota, the survey creator should manage the timing of survey distribution such that all respondents do not receive the invitation at the same time. It would also help researchers have better control over the responses.
Agile team collaboration
Multi-user environment and simple management of roles and rights for market research teams
The market research platform from QuestionPro offers you a multi-user environment that enables companies to work collaboratively in the context of agile market research. A sophisticated rights and role model manages access at all levels. Design a survey or test procedure with several people and determine who is allowed to see the evaluations or parts of the evaluations. Let’s take a look at some key functions of team collaborations here.
Multi-user survey collaboration
QuestionPro lets you add multiple users and grant them specific access levels under one organization. It can be used by businesses that require multiple users to work on their surveys. All the research tools, features, and reports are available in the main account and the sub-accounts.
Roles and permissions
A user role represents a collection of users that an administrator assigns permissions to perform similar actions or functions. There are two standard roles named User and Super Admin added by default to every QuestionPro organization, which are not editable/deletable. Super admin can add new custom roles and assign them to other users. The super admin can also provide permission to add new users to other users by selecting the user management permissions while creating a role.
The user permissions are the access to the features given to the user within their QuestionPro account.
Following are the permissions, distributed in six categories, which you can see while creating a new role:
| User Management | Edit | Distribute | Analytics | Integrations | Other |
| Add Users | Custom JavaScript | SMS Distribution | Conjoint Analysis | Salesforce | Setup SMTP |
| Edit Users | Customize Survey Themes | Schedule Email Invite | Schedule Reports- FTP | Zapier | Setup SSO |
| Delete Users | Rewards | Email Reminders | Crosstab Reports | Marketo | |
| Add Roles | Collaborate on Surveys | Export Email Batch | GAP Analysis | MS Dynamics | |
| Delete Roles | QR Codes | Correlation Analysis | HubSpot | ||
| Add Teams | Social sharing | Sentiment Analysis | Caspio | ||
| Delete Teams | Maxdiff Analysis | Tableau | |||
| Inter Team Folder Sharing | TURF analysis | Access API | |||
| Edit Responses, Heat Map Analysis, Hotspot Analysis, Tupe Pulse (for videos) | Access Webhooks, Real-Time Post, FTP, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Omniture, Interactive voice response (IVR), Qualtrics Data Import |
Use cookie-based single sign-on functions that make the tedious administration of multiple passwords superfluous. Authenticate your QuestionPro-User account with SSO towards third-party systems to guarantee the highest level of security
Agile market research with security
The top priority in market research is the security of market research data. We understand the importance of protecting intellectual property data which is why QuestionPro has made significant investments toward security and compliance.
Let us take a look at a few of the security and compliance certifications of QuestionPro.
Survey security
Password protection
Adding a password to your surveys adds a layer of authentication to your surveys. To view and answer the survey, it will require respondents to log in with their unique passwords.
Surveys with a password ensure they are available to only those respondents whom you have emailed or invited. For more security, you can enable email address/password validation on the survey. Respondents will have to enter their email address along with the individual password to access the survey.
QuestionPro allows you to share or publish dashboard reports with your stakeholders such as clients, colleagues, and other stakeholders, as soon as the responses are captured in your survey.
Respondent Anti-Ballot Box
Anti Ballot Box Stuffing (ABBS) prevents participants from taking a survey more than once. It helps collect authentic responses and prevents diluting the data.
At times, researchers offer incentives like gift cards or discounts to answer the survey. They may want to prevent respondents from taking a survey multiple times. QuestionPro uses cookies to detect if the respondent has already answered the survey. You can also use custom variables to identify responses to QuestionPro surveys
Compliance
GDPR Compliance
QuestionPro is fully compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and our survey software users can create and send GDPR compliant data collection surveys. To aid this process, we have put in place a sophisticated process to ensure all data being collected using our platform is fully GDPR compliant, including data portability, data protection, consent and other compliance features.
ISO 27001:2013 Certified Company
QuestionPro is an ISO 27001:2013 certified company. ISO 27001 is a globally recognized international standard for managing risks to the security information you hold. We have all the sets of standardized requirements for an Information Security Management System (ISMS). Under these standards, we adopt a process-based approach for establishing, implementing, operating, monitoring, maintaining, and improving your ISMS.
CCPA Compliance
QuestionPro has assessed compliance readiness against CCPA requirements through a comprehensive/interactive assessment. We have a solid action plan in place to address the gaps, and we are working on building a consensus to implement a program that includes gap & risk analysis, industry benchmarking, and resource plans.
PCI -DSS compliant
QuestionPro is compliant with the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standards (PCI – DSS). Launched in 2006, the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council has put forth a series of regulations for merchants to follow in safely accepting, storing, processing, and transmitting customer credit card data. We at QuestionPro adhere to all set standards to ensure the complete protection of our clients against possible data breaches.
Section 508 Compliance
Surveys created through QuestionPro are Section 508 (US Federal Accessibility Guidelines) compliant. Online surveys, questionnaires or polls that are created on our platform are compliant for differently-abled personnel to access, consume information or act on. Through this compliance, QuestionPro demonstrates its commitment to being all-inclusive.
SOC 2 Data Centers
QuestionPro owned and managed servers are co-located at off-site data centers. These facilities undergo periodic SOC 2 audits and are monitored for unauthorized access and service availability twenty-four hours a day. These ongoing audits, conducted by an independent accounting firm, signifies that the data center security and operational procedures have been reviewed and tested to validate that controls and processes have been suitably designed and are operating effectively, in addition to protecting and safeguarding customer equipment and data.
HIPAA Compliance
QuestionPro is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant and all individual data that is collected in the form of online surveys is protected. We have physical, network, and process security measures to collect patient health information (PHI). Administering HIPAA compliant surveys help organizations that use the QuestionPro online survey tool to manage their research while being mindful of the PHI collected.
24 * 7 Worldwide “agile” support
Here at QuestionPro, we take our customer service very seriously. We offer you worldwide live customer support around the clock, 365 days a year. You can reach us at any time via online chat, email, or phone.
In addition, we offer you permanent contacts who know your entire customer history and can therefore react quickly to challenges in agile market research in live operation.
Dedicated resources assigned to customers:
- Account manager:
An account manager will be working with the organization during the initial contracting and solution stage. The account manager will be checking on the onboarding process and the customer’s team periodically over the tenure of the contract.
Responsible for:
- Contracting
- Handover
- Expansion
- Renewal
- Customer success manager:
A dedicated customer success manager will onboard the customer’s entire team onto the QuestionPro platform. The CSM will be working in the customer’s timezone and will be responsible for setting up goals based on the organization’s requirements.
Responsible for:
- Onboarding and training
- Customer journey
- Quarterly business review
- Feature requests
- Account health
- Enterprise support:
A dedicated enterprise support engineer with over 3-4 years of research experience is assigned to every customer account. The ES is responsible for any and all technical questions that the organization has. The ES will work closely with the customer success manager and the customer teams.
Responsible for:
- Training
- Technical queries
- Solution implementation
- Additional services
- Account usage metrics
Easy integration of third-party systems
To be able to guarantee agile market research, QuestionPro seamless integration and synchronization of market research data with your existing IT infrastructure, such as CRM tools, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Tableau, Caspio, Google Sheets, Hubspot and many others. With a variety of powerful software integrations supported by webhooks and APIs, you have a perfectly consistent and coherent back-end integration for your data.
API and webhook integration
API integration or ‘application programming interface’ integration with surveys allows you to create a custom library to communicate with your existing suite of web applications. You can build a robust research process by authenticating your QuestionPro API by using the API key in the request and automating the data collection process.
The QuestionPro API is organized around REST. We use built-in HTTP features, like HTTP authentication and HTTP verbs, to allow you to interact securely with our API from a client-side web application. JSON will be returned in all responses from the API, including errors.
Now let’s talk about webhooks. A webhook lets you augment or alter the behavior of a web application via custom callbacks. These custom callbacks may be subject to maintenance, modification, and management by developers and third-party users and may not necessarily be affiliated with the originating app.
QuestionPro supports incoming as well as outgoing webhooks. You can invoke webhooks before the beginning of a survey, during, or after a survey is completed. Incoming webhooks fetch data from external sources into your survey, and outgoing ones send survey data to external sources.
Salesforce CRM integration
Salesforce.com is one of the leading CRM tools in the market. Connecting the Salesforce platform to the surveys via a simple integration allows custom variable data to flow to and fro between platforms when activated. Collecting feedback closes the loop of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). By surveying customers, you have bridged a critical gap in CRM by adding customer satisfaction to your list of CRM data points. Salesforce integration brings together two essential systems for managing customer data, CRM, and surveying.
Using salesforce integration with surveys provides the ability to consolidate data collection and insights. Bringing two powerful platforms together allows brands and enterprises to understand their audience better and monitor macro and micro market trends. It also helps with evaluating important parameters such as purchase decisions, customer satisfaction, customer effort score calculator, etc.
Marketo integration
Marketo provides you with the ability to tailor efficient marketing automation campaigns. Using the Marketo integration with surveys provides a gateway for the flow of data from the automation platform to the survey platform. You can leverage custom variables from Marketo with your surveys and also send relevant individual survey response details to the tool for better intelligence. Integrating surveys with Marketo provides the ability to learn more about customers without ever leaving a native ecosystem. Get real-time customer feedback directly updated in your Marketo database.
The most significant use case of using Marketo integration with surveys is the visibility it provides brands and stakeholders to manage large marketing spends and optimum utilization of marketing resources. The integration with surveys allows brands to monitor consumer trends, purchase behavior, and even customer sentiments.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration
The Microsoft Dynamics integration with surveys allows you to connect your CRM tool with customer data and let custom data flow to the survey tool, and then survey data flows back into the CRM tool automatically. The integration with surveys allows you to have greater control of your audiences, deploy quick studies, and collect quick insights from your audience. Collecting data directly into MS Dynamics offers more flexibility to gauge customer and prospect behavior and also helps with monitoring various parameters such as customer satisfaction.
Capturing new leads and monitoring trends and the behavior of existing customers is vital to brands, researchers, and stakeholders. Using the Microsoft Dynamics integration with surveys, you can automate the process of smart data collection and get deeper insights into customer behavior with multiple touchpoints with your brand. You can also get a holistic view of the customer and purchase journey in a single unified, scalable model.
Hubspot integration
The Hubspot integration with surveys allows administrators to monitor customer trends and live data and gather robust customer intelligence and data. The integration provides the ability to take raw survey data and turn it into insights that matter. Right from capturing lead data to lead scoring, workflow management, lead scoring, and more – integrating surveys with Hubspot provides an excellent solution for insightful customer data management.
Tableau integration
Tableau integration with surveys is one of the most efficient methods to bring data visualization and survey data together. With this integration in your studies, you can push real-time survey data to the tool to create living dashboards and generate reports and insights that matter the most to your stakeholders. Toggle the Tableau integration with your survey platform and easily connect to data, visualize, and create interactive, shareable dashboards.
Using Tableau integration surveys provides the ability to turn raw survey data into quick and easy-to-consume reports. The data analysis is in the form of interactive dashboards and worksheets, and it allows survey creators the ability to offer immediate insights when asked. Role-based access reports, too, are easily set up and shared and hence make the survey data collection to analysis a compelling process.
Google sheets integration
The Google spreadsheets integration allows users to connect their Google suite account to the survey platform and enable automatic data sync between the two platforms. Enabling this integration allows for survey administrators to receive real-time survey insights in Google sheets. This integration can be set up for existing sheets or tabs or even to create new tabs.
The survey platform integration with Google spreadsheets is beneficial in the scenario where the survey data needs to be populated in real time for the administrator to view. This integration allows the ability to run reporting and analytics on data that has already been collected and also to ensure that the survey data comes directly from the platform in an easy to consume tool of your preference.
Online market research panel
More than 20 million panel members
As a full-service provider for agile market research, we offer you an online panel (B2B & B2C), which includes more than 20.000.000 panel members spread across all continents and different business segments.
The sample selection for your market research studies is easy and is based on more than 300 profile data that the panel members provide when entering the online panel. The selection is quick and easy using our panel software.
Online panels are the most important factor for Agile market research because, as we have seen, it helps you get access to the right audience within a few hours and also give you the flexibility to run research on any geographical demographic. We also offer you a wide range of special panels.
Our specialty panels
Small Business Owners
A deeply profiled and highly engaged community of small business owners. Our small business owners panel has over 100,000 members ready to participate in research studies.
Builders/General Contractors
QuestionPro’s Builder panel offers unparalleled value by providing big box stores, such as Lowe’s and Home Depot, a front-row seat with professional home builders and contractors.
Mobile Users
More than 500,000 global active smartphone users who are Uniquely Identified with Device Identifiers (UDID), pre-screened, and highly qualified to participate in research studies.
Gamers
Our gamer panel is carefully recruited to target true and light video gamers but also taking into consideration certain key industry trends to ensure a well-balanced and representative panel.
Registered Voters
The first nationwide panel of likely voters available to conduct online polling, ad testing, focus groups, and in-depth interviewing among registered voters across the United States.
Pet Owners
Our Pet Owner panel is carefully recruited to ensure a well-balanced and representative panel of pet owners.
High quality through permanent monitoring
The QuestionPro online panel within the market research platform is subject to permanent quality controls. It also has QuestionPro via a technologically advanced data quality check engine that reliably detects bad responses. New panel participants have to answer a comprehensive catalog of questions with data on their living and work situation in order to be admitted to participate in panel studies.
Let us take a look at some of the data quality checks and balances
- Accuracy: Regardless of how many respondents have taken your survey, from what location, and from what device
- Complete: Flagging missing, duplicate, copied, and repetitive data; Thus, what is presented is comprehensive data.
- Standardized: Errors are avoided by standardizing each response in a correct format, especially when the data sets are numerous.
- Credible: The survey responses are always from reliable sources, but when they are not, such responses are flagged to be removed from the data set.
- Timely: Irrelevant of the device used and time taken to complete the survey, the data quality tool will always present you with accurately interpreted data collected from multiple devices.
Build a consumer Community for agile market research
What is a consumer Community?
Create a stand-alone branded website for your members. Easily accelerate the customer base with our purpose build community tools. Use push notifications, alerts and mobile technology. We provide you with a one-click solution to post surveys and share member comments on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.
The goal of a consumer Community is to understand your customers’ needs and expectations and make intelligent business decisions based on insights from real-time analytics.
Let us now talk about some key features of QuestionPro communities
Centralized community web portal
A community web portal is defined as an online tool that is created to manage an online community. This community can either be an extension of an offline community or a stand-alone online community. The web portal is a cloud-based platform where an organization can onboard members and then collect insights to identify and evaluate brand preferences.
With QuestionPro’s web community portal, you can create an in-depth online community that is an extension of your brand values. This helps to create a high recall value for existing members in the existing web portal. It also helps to onboard new community members.
Therefore, the web community portal is a structured and streamlined online portal that helps to engage with your selected community members and derive powerful insights based on their feedback and opinion on various topics. This can be achieved using multiple qualitative market research and quantitative market research methods such as surveys, Ideaboard, topics, and discussions, polls, etc.
Panel management
Panel management is a process to manage a research panel (a pre-qualified community), that helps in a research study by contributing their insights and feedback to an ongoing quantitative or qualitative research. Panel management software and tools are used in the present day to effectively manage the community.
Some key advantages of panel management are:
- Focus on targeted research: With panel management software, organizations or companies are drawn to the ease with which they can send online surveys to a targeted group of members and receive immediate feedback. This saves the time and effort of a researcher and the data obtained can be relied upon.
- Expect better results: Since the research is more targeted there is a certainty of obtaining better and timely results. With panel management software, the panel members can be carefully chosen and grouped. These members usually have expertise in the subject matter or have the same interests and beliefs.
- Respondent profile: Panel management software allows companies to build a robust profile of panelists and use these profiles wherever they are suited. These panelists can be reused for various research studies that need to be carried out.
- Less turnaround time: Since the panelist is the ones who are willingly participating in the studies, they send back responses within the time frame that has been allowed to them. Online surveys work wonders here. Respondents tend to respond better to online surveys.
Live Dashboards
The community health dashboard gives you the overall summary of your community. It gives you a graphical presentation of members’ profiles and their status.
You can find the below data in Community Dashboard:
- Leaderboard: The leaderboard shows the top 10 members with the highest points.
- Sign Ups: This will show the number of members signed up to the community.
- Verified: This section displays the total number of verified members.
- Sessions: Total number of logins by the members. Each login is counted as a single session.
- Member Activity: This Shows the modules (Surveys, Profile, Topics, Discussions, Ideas, Polls) that have been more frequently used by the members.
- Member Distribution: This section shows the different regions from which the members have registered in the community.
- Profile Completion: This section shows the number of verified members who have completed their profile.
- Member Source Overview: This gives you the count and percentage of the number of members signing up from different sources.
- Member status: This section shows the number of verified, new, unsubscribed and the members with emails bounced.
Qualitative Research method
Qualitative research methods are designed in a manner that helps reveal the behavior and perception of a target audience with reference to a particular topic. Researchers make use of qualitative research techniques when they need to capture accurate, in-depth insights. It is very useful to capture “factual data”. Here are some examples of when to use qualitative research.
There are different types of qualitative research methods like an in-depth interview, focus groups, ethnographic research, content analysis, and case study research that are usually used.
Mobile App
The QuestionPro Communities mobile application allows you to better engage with customers by giving real-time community insights. With push notification and geo-location surveys, it is easier for members to stay active in your community and share experiences on the go; by participating in activities like discussions, polls, surveys, and many more…helping you get the pulse of your community, enhance your relationships, know your customer’s needs, identify key drivers and make informed business decisions.
QuestionPro Communities app powers you with a convenient way to engage with your community on the go, it allows engaging with your community like never before and has a simpler and easy-to-use interface. Application is available for Android and iOS-based devices.
Gamification and rewards
A good point system is the key community engagement and keeping an online community thriving over time. Members are drawn to points as it’s an immediate incentive for completing a task within an online community. A good point system will have a variety of points available for every activity in the online community. In turn, your online community will want to gain as many points and redeem them for tangible rewards.
Members can earn points for activities they complete such as signing up for an account, completing surveys, posting ideas, polls, and more. Users can redeem these points for custom rewards. These rewards can be gift cards such as Amazon, Visa, Starbucks, Fandango and much more.
Multilingual community
Supporting 50+ languages, including double-byte character sets such as Chinese and Japanese, and Right-To-Left languages like Arabic and Hebrew.
Conclusion
With QuestionPro, you can conduct agile market research projects quickly and easily.
The platform is designed with flexibility in mind to meet your needs as an organization or a researcher – whether it’s the automation of certain tasks like interviews that require only one set answer each time they’re asked, conducting studies on subjects without interruption due to their location across different countries around the world; all while maintaining visual consistency throughout even when using multiple languages at once!
