Panel Management Best Practices
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sat, Jan 23, 2010
Once your organization puts a basic panel in place, you can begin gathering research more systematically and more regularly. You will see greater response rates as panelists are randomly selected to occasional surveys rather than being invited to every survey.
The results of the Vovici/CGA Customer Experience IQ study show which panel management practices are the most important to focus on. Each best practice was correlated to a customer loyalty index, in order to determine which practices had the highest positive correlation to loyalty.
For panel management, integrating data from CRM into the panel had the highest positive correlation (0.57) to customer loyalty, though it was practiced by comparatively few organizations. By integrating data, surveys appear smarter and more engaging to respondents, who are not asked to provide information that they have provided in the past; surveys with integrated CRM data can branch to relevant sections of the questionnaire based on that hidden data, making the survey more targeted.
Panel management enables organizations to coordinate feedback projects across the entire organization (0.47 correlation to loyalty), reducing survey fatigue by minimizing surveying of the panel. Using the panel to develop a 360 degree view of customer experience is also a key best practice (0.41 correlation), as is using the panel to conduct trend analyses, tracking customer attitudes over time (0.40 correlation).
The results of the CE IQ study will help you prioritize which best practices you should put into place first.
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