Panelist Quality of External Lists vs. Feedback-Focused Communities
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Apr 25, 2008
Market researchers are becoming increasingly concerned about online panelists who are participating in surveys for personal gain rather than simply to provide feedback. As a result, vendors are offering new solutions. This month alone Peanut Labs won an award for its Optimus data quality technology and MarketTools introduced its TrueSample certification program.
The MarketTools announcement quotes Doug Doyle, director of market research at Microsoft, as saying, "Microsoft has found that trust in external sample quality [emphasis added] is the number-one challenge facing online market research."
This is the huge difference between surveying external lists and internal lists of customers, resellers, employees and other key constituencies. MarketTools states that "TrueSample is a three-part process aimed at ensuring authenticity in survey respondents. It provides objective assurance that survey respondents are real, unique and engaged."
Feedback-focused communities such as those used by our customers already ensure that survey respondents are "real, unique and engaged."
Real: Because feedback-community members are recruited from existing company records of customers, prospects, employees and investors, you can be assured that these are real people with real relationships with your organization.
Unique: Your organization already expends resources to validate that each customer record in your CRM system is unique, and most likely has similar data-scrubbing procedures already in place for other databases of important constituencies. EFM Community can be synchronized with these databases to leverage your existing investment in ensuring unique responses.
Engaged: The fundamental challenge of external sample research is weeding out respondents who are merely answering questions randomly in order to qualify for prizes. Incentives offered to customers and employees are typically tokens of appreciation that are not going to encourage respondents to distort their answers to qualify; these respondents value their relationships with your organization and want to see those relationships improve. The desire to strengthen that relationship provides the ultimate in engagement!
Such concerns about external list quality provide compelling reasons to develop internal communities for many research initiatives.