Journalists and newsrooms are inundated with ever more data, information, and press releases that highlight survey findings in hopes of grabbing reporters’ and readers’ interest. While many surveys are poorly done and grossly self-serving, findings from other research surveys continue to generate newsworthy stories.
Consider this view recently expressed by a business columnist at the Chicago Tribune:
Data quality will suffer if respondents are bored with long surveys
It is hard to resist the temptation of asking “just one more question” when you’ve got an engaged respondent answering your survey questions online or on the phone. But it is crucial to do so because plenty of research shows that longer surveys result in bad data. Survey respondents may be willing to answer just one more question, but at some point the quality of information you get from them declines. Survey respondents become inattentive and offer lazy answers, or worse, they offer quick random answers just to get the survey over with.
At Versta Research we have a few rules of thumb for survey length based on (1) academic and industry research measuring data quality, (2) conversations with colleagues and suppliers throughout the industry, and (3) our ongoing experience of what works and what does not work. The maximum survey lengths we typically recommend are: (more…)
If there is a downside to the success of research in helping organizations make smarter decisions, it is the belief among some business colleagues that research is needed all the time, everywhere, and for everything. It is manifest in an obsessive focus on dashboards, KPIs, analytics, customer satisfaction surveys, pop-up website surveys, net promoter scores, and one of our personal favorites (not really!), metrics.
“Metrics” is the buzzword for measures or measurements. And the problem with focusing so much on measurement is that we lose sight of what we are measuring. We were reminded of this in a recent New York Times essay by Robert Crease, a professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University. Crease argues that in obsessively focusing on measurement: (more…)
One lesson I have learned serving on the board of the American Marketing Association in Chicago is that for most companies, research and marketing can no longer be separated. Why not? Because marketers now deal with immense volumes of data. If they want to make smart decisions and execute campaigns effectively, they need to use that data. And who best to help them find, interpret, and use data than the research team?
This became even more clear at our AMA event two weeks ago, where Luanne Calvert, vice president of marketing at Virgin America talked about her team’s effort to build an airline customer loyalty program from scratch. One of the challenges, she noted, was making sense of their data. “We have tons of data,” Calvert said. “There’s so much we barely know what to do with it. We are just starting to get a handle on it.”
Effectively dealing with tons of data requires a thoughtful research approach, which, by the way, does not necessarily mean doing yet another survey or creating a dashboard of mindless metrics. In our view, it means the following: (more…)