Last month, my colleague and Confirmit’s new CEO, Kyle Ferguson wrote an open letter to the Market Research industry, outlining our commitment to researchers and insights professionals. Like Kyle, I am new to the Confirmit leadership team, but my background and my passion is solidly MR. 20 years ago, I founded Dapresy, a technology company focused on delivering ground breaking new ways to present data.
This year, Dapresy merged with Confirmit. I believe that our newly expanded company brings something truly unique to the Market Research industry. In fact, as Chief Product Officer, I’ll make sure that’s exactly what we do.
What does that mean, though? It means that Confirmit will provide solutions that will make your MR business more successful. We will measure our success by that of our clients. We are, first and foremost, a technology business and that won’t change. However, our goal is to be much more than a vendor to our clients. We want to be a real partner, an extension of your team that will help you to differentiate your business – particularly at a time when innovation is key to meeting the needs of the research buyer.
Market Research businesses have faced similar challenges for many years, and the past few months have exacerbated them. My focus is to help resolve those challenges, focusing on three key areas that are critical for MR agencies.
Efficiency
Efficient production has been the byword of successful MR almost since its inception. The ability to scale, to deliver results to clients as fast as possible, while trying to balance cost and quality will never go away. We are working on enhancements to our technology that will make your production more efficient at every stage.
Naturally, a big part of that is in the area of data visualisation. As researchers, PowerPoint is a go-tool tool for sharing findings. It’s a powerful one, and one which we will continue to use as clients request it. But we also know that it is not always the best way to present insight to an audience – and this is an area where I believe MR can deliver greater value to consumers of research. And one in which the combined Confirmit and Dapresy solution can deliver huge savings in time and production cost. Naturally, bringing together world-class data collection and data visualisation is also a definite efficiency gain too.
Innovation
A critical role of the modern market researcher is helping clients to make the right business decisions. Many MR firms are increasingly akin to consultancies these days, with a focus on interpreting data and providing guidance as much as collecting and analysing it. As a researcher, you need to make the insight you deliver easier to consume for people who are not data geeks. And that means innovating in the way you deliver it.
I call this the democratisation of data – innovations that make data accessible to everyone. The idea of everybody having the insight they need at their fingertips to fuel their decisions is one most people are in favour of. But, of course, it looks hard. It is hard. That’s why we are working to enhance our data visualization tools to automate as much as possible. So you can give your clients what they need, in the format they need it in. Without spending weeks on production.
Research clients demand a wide range of deliverables so the modern MR firm operates with a broad ecosystem of technologies; not only for data collection but for analysis and delivery as well. I want to ensure that our platform becomes an integral part of any innovative MR technology ecosystem by empowering researchers to connect it with the widest range of tools possible; from complex analytics tools to BI systems. You should be able to tailor our technology to your business, not the other way round.
Expansion
As I said at the outset, we want to be more than a technology provider. This means supporting your business, not just your research projects. Smart MR agencies are always looking for new ways to create value for their clients. Many of them building their own, proprietary solutions that deliver easy-to-use tools to empower their clients to run their own mini-projects or to deploy surveys on their own websites. For me, this is an area where we can really add value. We already have clients like Userneeds running incredibly innovative, bespoke programmes based on our solutions. My vision is that any agency with a smart idea can use our platform as the foundation to bring that idea to life.
Our commitment to you
Both Confirmit and Dapresy are old hands in Market Research, but we are at the beginning of our journey together. Integrating our technology and our people can’t happen overnight, but you’ll be seeing changes very soon. And those changes will help you to drive your own developments. We’d love to have you along for the journey.
We are here to help you win more business. End of story.
