Market Research Blog

(Full) Service With A Smile: The Anatomy of a Full-Service Consumer Insights Firm

If you’ve worked with a full-service consumer insights and consulting firm before, you may already know about all the areas of expertise that go into executing clients’ research initiatives.

In case you haven’t, here’s a quick look at the types of teams that support custom research and consulting efforts and how their unique skill sets might benefit you and your company. These may differ a bit from firm to firm, so I’ve included some features and practices specific to Decision Analyst, which I think are best-in-class.

Client Service

Your research partner, from start to finish. Members of client service teams work with you to understand your unique business questions, problems, and opportunities. Leveraging their understanding of your business, the vertical market, and the competitive landscape, they design custom research solutions and work with all other teams across the organization to execute your projects. Personally, as part of a client service team, I love building long-term relationships with clients to develop a deep understanding of their business and to act as an extension of their insights or marketing department. It’s very rewarding to help solve business problems and make our clients heroes at their respective companies.

Programming

Custom-programmed online surveys are at the heart of many research efforts. From complex shelf sets to choice tasks to custom-built solutions on the fly, no order is too tall for the programming team that I’m fortunate enough to work with. They also help balance clients’ business objectives with respondent experience and are careful to employ accessibility best practices for those with disabilities.

Quality Assurance

Every department in our organization follows rigorous quality assurance processes, but the QA team itself provides invaluable oversight throughout the life of a project to ensure the highest quality results. Quality Assurance reviews include questionnaires, programmed surveys, in-progress survey data, crosstabulations, reports, and more.

Sample

Sample departments manage studies from a sample perspective, whether using proprietary panels, trusted panel partners, client-provided sample, or a combination of these. Fielding of projects is closely monitored, and sample adjustments are made throughout the process to keep timelines on track and the sample balanced. Robust fraud prevention, pre-screening, quota management, and supplier allocation all help ensure quality sampling.

Data Quality

In addition to running automated fraud checks, a dedicated team also checks online survey data for signs of fraud—such as frequent IP address changes, bots, high-risk IP addresses, country mismatches, irrelevant or repetitive answers to open-end questions, speedsters (answer the survey much faster than average), straightliners (answer most ratings with one code, like all “5” ratings), and more—and removes questionable respondents.

Coding

The Coding Department analyzes and categorizes responses to open-end survey questions, turning important respondent input into quantifiable data that can be further analyzed. A team of multilingual coders helps our clients hear from customers and prospects across a variety of languages. It’s most useful to do the coding in the respondent’s local language so that any nuances of the language are not missed or misunderstood.

Tabulation

If you love digging into crosstabs as much as I do, then you’ve got the Tabulation Department to thank for the orderly assembly of your research data. Requests for complex data management, calculations, weighting, and tables are a breeze for these data pros. And of course they can provide datafiles in any number of file formats.

Advanced Analytics

For many studies, the Advanced Analytics team helps to determine the appropriate sampling design and advanced analysis methods used to get the best data to answer business questions. Popular services include key-driver analysis, market segmentation, product and line optimization, pricing research, volumetric forecasting, and more. Basically, this group helps our clients look like rock stars to their stakeholders and execs. The ongoing joy of working with this team is that they’re not just math geniuses—they’re strategic, marketing-minded thinkers. They can explain even the most complex analysis to any audience in a meaningful way.

Qualitative Insights & Innovation

Qualitative professionals use a range of well-established methodologies from traditional focus groups and depth interviews to ethnography and heuristics to large-scale qualitative (big qual) and more. Our qual team is expert at combining the right techniques for any business problem. And for help with innovation and ideation, this team also brings you the Imaginators®, our proprietary online community of exceptionally creative individuals, who rank among the top 4% of the general population in idea-centric creativity.

Field Research

The Field Department facilitates fieldwork such as store intercepts, focus groups, taste tests, in-home usage tests, phone surveys, and other custom projects. At our company, this group also maintains and continually evaluates an international network of data collection subcontractors.

Information Technology & Security

IT keeps our online surveys (and entire company) running smoothly and securely. And because protecting clients’ confidential information and data is of the utmost importance, Decision Analyst is committed to maintaining its certification to ISO/IEC 27001:2022, the international standard for information technology and information security management.

Software Development

Perhaps not common to most research firms, our organization has a fantastic software development team that has built proprietary software including STATS™ (available for free download), as well as Logician®, the robust survey-programming software that’s the foundation of our online surveys.

The teams here at Decision Analyst are always ready to help strengthen your business through custom research and consulting. Please reach out if you think we can be of assistance.