Online Panels Don’t Have To Be an 800-Pound Gorilla

Online panels have long been an effective tool in a researcher’s tool belt. Going by names such as AdvisoryPanel or Panel of Experts, online panels provide clients with a wealth of knowledge and insight that can directly influence business-critical decisions.

And they work. I know there are differing opinions on this, but my belief for the past decade has remained unchanged:  When well-crafted and well-tended, online panels provide clients with a significantly wider array of benefits than do one-time studies or surveys.

Of course, helping your clients plan, design, launch and grow an online panel can be intimidating. It’s time-consuming, requires marketing expertise, and necessitates the need for a robust data-tracking and analytics engine. Even as recently as five years ago, many market researchers shunned the use of online panels because they took way too much time and resources and were, frankly, not cost-effective for either the researcher or the client.

That’s changing. Today, some market research companies have online panel solutions that incorporate best practices and technological advances, making it quicker and easier to get an online panel up and running and, more importantly, provide clients with accurate information based on sound data. To be sure, it’s a fantastic solution to add to your product suite. But as I discovered, it was a lot more challenging than anticipated and took a long time to get good at.

What follows is the story of our company’s experience building its first online panel, what we learned, and what we’ve done to make the process so much more efficient and effective now.

In 2000, OnResearch had the fortuitous opportunity to partner with a well-known technology brand for the sole purpose of helping it meet a specific business need. After lengthy investigation, conversation and deliberation, we ultimately recommended they create an Advisory Panel. It would be comprised of a statistically significant sample of qualified thought leaders from their target industry who would help our client decide where and how to expand its service offerings.

We convinced them by enumerating the benefits of an online panel.  Just to name a few:  Panel owners get to tap into the expertise of like-minded professionals without the cost of internal headcount or external consultants; they can get unbiased opinions about where their business is lacking, what makes their customers tick and what their competitors are doing; and they can expand their business opportunities and circles of influence – a sweet byproduct of being associated with industry experts.

What’s not to love?

They were on board. Contracts were signed. We were jazzed. And when the back-slapping and high-fiving ended, we took a good, long look at what we were now contractually obligated to provide … and freaked out.

It’s not that we didn’t have the skill or expertise.  We did.  It’s that we didn’t have the process.  The tribal knowledge. The tools. The stuff that experience and trial and error gives you.

Our major obstacle was how to set up the backend, both the database and the data-tracking methodologies that fed it.  How many levels of segmentation should there be? What types of business rules are needed? How can we quantify and categorize actions and responses? Can we do that across all online channels?  Can we identify common characteristics and affinities that allow us to dive deeper?  Can quickly analyze thousands of data points and distill them into business-critical insights that the client can actually use? Keep in mind, there was nothing in place for this and nothing we could purchase off-the-shelf that was robust enough to meet our needs. And the clock was ticking on meeting schedule.

This fundamental challenge turned out to be a blessing, ultimately becoming the foundation for our online panel solution, which combines years (now) of panel-creation experience with ever-better technologies that help us collect and analyze enormous amounts of data faster and accurately.

Some of the key advances we’ve incorporated include the ability to communicate to panel members via any online channel (e.g., traditional email, social media sites, RSS feeds, SMS), thereby better ensuring they’re reached in the manner they prefer.

Additionally, all data is tracked to the individual level, meaning we know—real time and across time—every communication and opportunity a panel member has received, and every action and response the panel member has provided. This dataset allows a comprehensive degree of in-depth analysis to be performed, which often uncovers interesting nuggets that can impact the client’s business decisions.

Improvements to our scoring system have significantly increased the ability to flag business-critical information, giving the client time to put strategies in place. For example, identifying at-risk panel members and automatically launching a sequence of steps to intercept attrition.

Most interesting has been the ability to merge behavioral data with survey response data; that is, what panel members actually do and what they say they do.  Countless reputable studies have proven that actions and words don’t always square, even among the well-intentioned members of anAdvisory Panel. Since quantitative and qualitative data are intimately related to each other, gathering both data components—and adding other demographic and geographic factors to the mix—illuminates a much clearer picture, which further enables the client to make better business decisions.

Like everything in the digital space, online panels are in constant flux as new ideas, technologies and business needs push different sides of the envelope. But from my perspective, the fact remains that online panels are very effective in helping businesses that need much more insight than a single study or survey can provide.

Although they are still time-consuming to implement and nurture, the technological advances of online panel solutions continue to make the process easier, increase efficiencies and let you re-focus on the results instead of the administration.

Client Breed #1: The Low-Tech Client

How to Spot One:

Looks confused and disoriented when discussing anything high-tech, calls rather than emails, wants everything to be faxed. The Low-tech client needs to go through everything twice to get it, but will then happily take your advice.

The Highs:

The Low-tech client will rely solely on your sage wisdom for all things technology related. They will look to you as your technology saviour and will stroke your ego with their reverence of your knowledge and advice.

The Lows:

The low-tech client will need to be handheld through everything from setting up their email to opening up PDFs. Charge accordingly. They can also be particularly frustrating if they decide to ‘work it out themselves’. A Low-tech client’s idea of how a website should work for example is often not pretty.

How to Work With One:

The low-tech client needs to be handheld. Make sure everything technical about a job is in writing for them to reread at their leisure. This will save you a lot of time explaining things repeatedly. It’s also best to just accept that you will not be using a lot of the technology that makes our lives easier these days (email, online project management etc) and should instead budget in time for phone calls, faxes and face to face meetings.

It is very easy to start to patronize your low-tech client unintentionally. As you can imagine, this can damage your relationship and even worse hurt their feelings. Make sure you balance the playing field by asking for their input in the areas they know about – their business. This will keep them happy stop them feeling the need to weigh in on your area of expertise – which can waste everybody’s time.

Finally if you work in technology, make sure that your Low-tech client knows how to use whatever product you give them!

Check out the other in the article over at- http://freelanceswitch.com/clients/12-breeds-of-client-and-how-to-work-with-them/

We have all experienced it. The lazy shop attendant, the rude waiter, the shopkeeper that just doesn’t think his business even needs customers.

Our experience with these people and businesses often leave a lasting impression for a variety of reasons. In some cases we actually made a purchase from said business either out of necessity or the need to keep one’s sanity whilst the kids are screaming all the way through Westfield.

What often does not leave a lasting impression for us is when we have a positive customer service experience either pre, during or post purchase. Is this because we have come to expect a level of mediocrity in service that we only care to remember the disastrous and not the pleasant and helpful?

My recent experience in needing to purchase a new television (my beloved plasma died in a power surge) is not only a poster-child for the negative above, but a shining example for the positive.

Like many tech lovers out there, I relish the opportunity to purchase a new item and enjoy researching the various options available as well as digesting all manner of opinions and reviews. Having a short period of time to do my research when our TV departed this world, I went straight to the review blogs and hit up friends on Twitter for all manner of recommendations.

Within a few hours I had read all the reviews I could handle, and the tweets were coming in thick and fast recommending particular brands and answering the eternal question of Plasma vs. LCD (I went for Plasma).

Armed with the latest product knowledge from reviews and recommendations, I headed up to the Local Westfield to see what the local retailers had and if there were any decent specials. I visited David Jones, Myers, Harvey Norman, Dick Smith, Bing Lee and JB HiFi- this is where things got interesting.

Only 2 of the retailers even had staff interested in talking to customers, and of those only one was helpful. This ended up being on of the most positive buying experiences. The sales rep at JB HiFi was incredibly knowledgeable and honest (a rear quality). He mentioned reviews on blogs that I had read, and swayed me away from a more expensive product as it’s advantages were not worth the cost. I ended up receiving a good price for the unit and made the purchase on the spot.

Such a positive experience can leave a lasting impression on a consumer for years to come and cement the foundations of a positive and ongoing relationship with the brand. Additionally what many organisations, big and small, fail to understand is that one happy customer is worth a hundred more if they talk about their experience (the same is also true for the negative- with negative consequences).

In an age where conversation happens at the speed of light, and positive and negative experiences and feeling are shot around Twitter in an instant, organisations must pull out the proverbial finger to make sure that their customer service and overall customer experience is not just satisfactory but extraordinary.

My first thinking was to simply scroll to the bottom of the most recent email and click the unsubscribe link. Much to my surprise, there was no such link to be found. Although they had taken the time to include about 4 paragraphs of terms and conditions relating to the offers within the newsletter, they had not included one of the most standard (not to mention required by law) features of a newsletter.

Instead there was simply an ‘Update Details’ link at the bottom of the email. This link took me to the Virgin Blue site and requested me to login with my Velocity number and password- neither of which I dad on hand nor should need to unsubscribe.

Feeling a little annoyed, I placed a post on twitter about the oversight, and gave it an @ reply to Sir Richard Branson. You can see the post below:

Next is where things TOTALLY turned around and forced me to not only praise Virgin Blue but prompted me to write this post.

The following day, just shy of 24 hours after my original post (23 hours an 47 minutes) I received the following tweet from Virgin Blue:

It is great to see brands monitoring what is said about them online through different social media, and very pleasing that they are taking the time to reply to individual post such as the one I sent. This is in stark contrast to the way that Jetstar seem to be using Twitter, as illustrated in Tiphereth Gloria’s Digital Tip blog post today Jetstar’s 5 cent Fail Sail.