A cursory Google search will reveal dozens, and potentially hundreds, of market research agencies vying for your business. This is why choosing a market research agency can be difficult. It is especially difficult if your company does not have anyone who has experienced with conducting research.
Narrowing down which agency to choose can be tricky, and there are a number of things to consider when selecting the right one. Price will obviously be a deciding factor for many businesses, but you should never select a company based on price alone. This article is meant to give you an insight into how to choose a market research company.
Below, we’ve listed a number of questions that you should ask your market research agency before signing the contract. If a company doesn’t have adequate answers, move on to the next. There are plenty of other agencies who will be able to find out what you need:
Do the Research
What is your process for designing and implementing research?
Any research firm should be able to walk you through their research process from start to finish. It might not know every detail of what the project is going to entail (yet), but they should be able to easily explain how project design and implementation. It should be apparent who will do the research design, data collection, data analysis, and results collation.
Who will be conducting the physical research?
If you’re considering contracting a research firm, the work history of their employees should not be a secret. It should be very clear what employees are the “boots on the ground” collecting data on behalf of your company, and what makes those individuals qualified to conduct research. You have to feel confident that the research firm you choose has experienced staff that is equipped for the tasks ahead of them. What is your hiring process for choosing research personnel?
Is your firm experienced with conducting research in different cultures? Do you have an example?
Regardless of your company’s location or target audience, it’s important to hire an agency that has worked with diverse demographics. Throughout the course of any study—large or small, researchers encounter individuals from different backgrounds and cultures. If a research team isn’t prepared to account for cross-cultural variation, it’s likely that they will overlook important factors impacting the study being conducted. Further, having a team with cross-cultural experience will help them avoid making potentially offensive mistakes while representing your company.
Don’t be afraid to ask for an example of a company’s cross-cultural experience. There’s a big difference between researchers that have a theoretical understanding of cross-cultural work and those that have actual real-world experience working abroad in different environments.
Can I have access to the raw data as the study progresses?
It’s important that the consulting firm you choose is transparent with all the steps of the research process. Part of that transparency is giving you access to the raw data whenever want to see it. Even if you’re not highly skilled in scrubbing or analyzing data, having access to the raw figures is a way to stay involved and keep the market research team honest with their work.
What is your data cleaning process?
Many good studies have been ruined by poor data management. It’s certainly not the most exciting aspect of conducting research, but it is extremely important. All data needs to be “cleaned” or “scrubbed”. Cleaning data most commonly entails looking for duplicate data, scanning the data for unusual or unexplained outliers, and carefully logging any changes or corrections that might need to be made to the data. Data cleaning can be extremely tedious and not everyone is familiar with how to properly scrub data. For this reason, data cleaning is sometimes skipped over by the research team—this is a terrible mistake and can sometimes have huge consequences for the results of research.
How will the summary of results be presented?
Before you ever sign a contract with a research firm, it should be clear how you will be receiving the results of the study. Companies obviously can’t tell you the results of research that hasn’t been conducted, but it should be clear how you’ll be receiving the final report. Will there be a brief write-up, a slideshow presentation in your office, or a Skype conversation explaining your research outcomes? You need to discuss these details before you decide to sign with a company. It’s important that information is presented in a way that works best for your company.
Has the research firm ever worked in your industry before?
It sometimes helps to work with a research firm that has launched products in your industry. This isn’t always necessary because many of the tenets of good research remain the same regardless of the type of industry you’re working with.
If a company has some experience in your industry (or a closely related field) they might already be familiar with some of the hurdles specific to your company’s work.
Get the Best Results
Don’t be afraid to ask questions about the market research team you’ll be hiring! It’s the job of a good research team to seek answers to your questions; therefore, they should be capable of answering the very basic queries we’ve laid out above.