SURVEY CONSULTANTS

Some business people think it's a waste of money to hire survey consultants.  "Survey consultants are just out there to make money, they don't do anything special." 

After all, doing surveys isn't rocket science, right?

Wrong.  Survey research isn't rocket science, but it IS science--if it's done correctly.  And if you don't understand that science and know how to put it to work for your business, it could spell disaster.  You can make the wrong decisions, because you didn't know how to get the right information.

That's why survey consultants exist.  Good survey consultants are worth their weight in gold, because they understand how to use survey science to get the answers you need to build your business.  That's why people hire survey consultants.  There's a REASON you get 17.6 million Google hits when you search on "survey research."

WHAT SURVEY CONSULTANTS CAN DO FOR YOU

Why are survey consultants important?  Let's supose that you want to measure customer satisfaction.  That sounds easy--you shouldn't need a survey consultant for that.

If you decide to ask your clients or customers, "How satisfied are you with Product X, overall?," you might find that 60-70% of your clients tell you that they're either "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with Product X and decide to make no modifications at all--after all, if it's not broken, why fix it?

But if you asked your customers whether they'd recommend Product X to a friend, you might find that only 40% say yes.  So much for the customer evangelists you thought you had.  If you asked them whether they'd buy Product X again, if given a choice, you might find that only 35% say that they're either "very likely" or "somewhat likely." 

If a survey consultant brought you THOSE evaluations of Product X, you'd probably start thinking about what you need to do to improve Product X.  And you'd be right.

How could you get such different results?  The reason is that any form of satisfaction is tricky to measure.  If you use the wrong measure, you can easily overestimate satisfaction--which could lead to the wrong decisions about your business.

That's why smart business people hire survey consultants.  Good survey consultants know that getting you the right information is a tough job--but one that's critically important for your business.

What Survey Consultants Do

Ever play golf? I found out quickly that, to be a good golfer, you have to do a myriad of things correctly.  Doing any one of those things incorrectly can throw everything else off.  That's why I don't play golf.

But as a survey consultant, I have to do exactly that--ensure that I perform each step correctly.  Every phase of the process - identification of the question you want to answer; research design; development of a sampling schema; development of the instrument; coding, cleaning, data analysis; and interpretation - must be done well. As survey consultants, we understand that.

How do you know we're good survey consultants?  Our research has been funded by such agencies as the National Science Foundation.  We've worked as survey consultants on a host of government contracts, for such agencies as the US Army Corps of Engineers--including the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, following Hurricane Katrina--and the Minerals Management Service.

Our survey research services can help you:

• Understand where new markets lie
• Understand what customers in existing markets want.
• Understand what your employees need to do their jobs more effectively.
• Measure the satisfaction of your employees to predict retention and turnover.

As survey consultants, our job is to help you through every stage of the survey process: work with to isolate the most critical questions your business needs to answer and design a survey to answer those questions. Then, we can either administer the survey for you and analyze the data, or give you the tools you need to administer the survey yourself.

Contact us for more information about our survey consultant services.