Your company has decided it's time to gather customer feedback, and you have been tasked to find a vendor. You have a limited budget and you don't have much experience in market research, if at all. You search online, and ask some of your peers which solutions they have used in the past. You decide to go with one of the many survey platforms out there, because they offer a bunch of question types and, even better, they have templates for all kinds of research topics you might want to run. So off you go creating your first survey, using the questions provided in one of the templates, and maybe adjusting or adding a few to the best of your ability. A few things might happen: 

1 – Your project is a success. You easily breeze through creating your survey and are pleased with the results when they come in. Of course, this is the best scenario.

2 – You have questions specific to your business that you want to ask, but are not sure how, and the templated questions available don't take you where you need to go. So you stall. Or,

3 – You write your research (with which you are more or less pleased), deploy the survey, and start getting results. But you realize that the results don’t really answer the questions you had in mind, or that maybe there was a better way to ask the questions. But you don’t know how, and now the project is over so it's too late.

 It is true that there are some great survey platforms on the market today. And many do in fact provide templates and “ how to” guides to help you write your research. There are two issues to consider, though: expertise and time. Let’s first look at expertise. As you go about building your research, you might see that the templates­­­­­­ available can only take you so far and do not have all the ingredients needed to answer all of your business questions. If you are unsure of or don’t know how to ask a question in order to yield the results you need, you might hit a wall. The way questions are asked can mean the difference between good and bad data. If done improperly, this can lead to wrong conclusions and faulty decisions. This is why it’s worth it to engage the expertise of someone who knows how to formulate market research questions so that your research is optimized and mistakes aren’t made. Now let’s look at the time factor. Even the best research guides and templates will necessitate at least a minimal amount of self education in how to write a research question. Given everything else on your plate, is learning how to properly write market research the best use of your time? Or is it worth the relatively small investment in hiring an expert to do the work so that you can focus on your key priorities?

Experienced market researchers will take the time to understand your research objectives and ensure that the questions are aligned to your strategy. They will structure the research in a way that makes sense to the respondent, and will use the best wording, question types and scales so that the data yields the most relevant results. Perhaps most importantly, they will think of questions that you may not have considered. For example, if you are running a survey on brand positioning,you may be asking questions about communications tone, brand associations, and so on. But you may not have considered that brand opinions may differ by the age of your customer, and therefore not think to include questions that cover demographics. An experienced market researcher will look beyond the curve and be able to anticipate such scenarios.

They can also help when it comes to analyzing the data. Most platforms come with built in tools that will allow you to visualize your data at the aggregate level. However, doing more refined cross tabulations and a “deep dive” into the data usually requires an analysis plan and exporting the data to another tool or using a more robust data processing engine. A market research consultant can take care of this for you, or at the very least help guide you in your data analysis.

So before asking your customers for feedback, think carefully about your best approach. Remember, their time and goodwill is valuable (and limited) and you don’t get that many kicks at the can to solicit their opinions. To be sure that you are maximizing their time – as well as yours, consider using the services of a trained market researcher. Yes, it is an investment, but the rewards of obtaining valuable data and insights to help guide your business decisions will be worth it.