Lessons from Professional Panel Providers
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Apr 09, 2010
Vovici researched the best practices of 30 panel companies to identify key techniques that your firm can use to build a vibrant panel of your own customers. A customer panel helps treat feedback as an asset.
Why look to panel providers? Since panel companies sell access to their panels to third-party market researchers, these are organizations for whom the panel is literally an economic asset. They have put considerable time and energy into building and managing this asset for the long term. They've confronted issues that managers of internal panels haven't had to worry about yet.
To conduct our research, we downloaded the ESOMAR 26 answers prepared by 30 different panel providers, managing panels around the globe. The ESOMAR 26 is a standard list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) meant to assist research buyers as they decide which panels to work with.
The results are not representative of anything other than what these 30 companies claimed when they wrote their answers. Twenty-nine of the firms were selected from the Top 100 Google links for "ESOMAR 26"; we added Knowledge Networks to make it an even thirty. The e-Rewards document was actually for the ESOMAR 25, an older iteration of the FAQ. Some of the documents were written recently, while others were composed a few years ago.
Panel providers' ESOMAR 26 answers are marketing documents. They have not been externally audited for veracity.
Despite these caveats and concerns, the ESOMAR 26 provides important insights into what panel managers believe the market finds important.
I will be sharing the results of this research in the blog today [Sample Sourcing Lessons from Panel Professionals] and in subsequent weeks. For the full results, download our white paper, Panel Management Secrets: Lessons from the Professionals, or view our recorded research webinar of the same name.