My apologies, gentle reader, for the fact that I appear to have fallen off the Earth for the past several months — work has been exceptionally busy, and I haven’t had much time to look at research ssoftware. I can tell you that right now I am using Qualtrics and having a great time with it.

In other news, I came across a particularly good article on the web site of the National Council on Public Polls by Sheldon Gawiser and G. Evans Witt entitled, “20 Questions a Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results.” Im not a journalist — but what I find particularly helpful about this article is that it helps me understand the way other people are viewing (or should be viewing) my research and gives me some great things to think about when I’m putting together my own projects.

Some of the key questions include:

• Who did the poll?
• Who paid for the poll and why was it done?
• How many people were interviewed?
• How were those people chosen?
• What group were those people chosen from?
• Are the results based on everyone who was interviewed?
• How were the interviews conducted
• What is the sampling error?

Etc, etc. There are 20 questions in all, and each question is followed by a detailed answer. To read the article, go to the NCPP web site.

Customer research, taken out of its appropriate marketplace context, can be extremely misleading. Consider the scenario presented by Lior Arussy of the Strativity Group who in a recent DestinationCRM article where a research firm, after conducting a study to help a client indentify key loyalty factors to build greater customer relationships, came back with a finding that the most important thing the company could to to retain customers was to "excel in invoicing."

Lior argued (and I agree with him) that from the customer’s perspective accurate, on-time invoices — like clean bathrooms or safe rides at a theme park — aren’t reasons that most customers are going to do business with you. Sure, they’re important to maintain and ultimately speak to the gestault of how people perceive your business (nobody wants inaccurate invoices) but nobody is really going to choose you over your competitor if your greatest claim to fame is that you have the most accurate billing system in the business.

Says Lior:

"The goal of customer experience is not simply to stop upsetting people, it is to delight them and maximize revenues and loyalty. It is essential that market research surveys–and the client companies they purport to help–target and measure true experiences that help competitive differentiation."

To derive insight from research takes more than just good methodology and execution — it also requires an understanding of the business that your in and enough knowledge about your customers to be able to interpret the results in such a way leads to meaningful, actionable findings. In other words, you can’t simply leave it up to your research firm to go out, do a survey, and report back with results that you can immediately integrate into your business. You also need to bring to the tables your own experience and your own knowledge of the business at every stage of the research in order to ensure that the results that you get make sense in the context of your work.

Read Lior’s article at DestinationCRM.

Phil and Ken Berry of BayaSoft recently gave a presentation at the 2006 American Marketing Association Research Conference designed to "equip market researchers with the tools and knowledge to design questionnaire documents that can be easily converted into online surveys, with minimal pitfalls." If you’re working on surveys and would like a little guideance to help you improve your communications with your programmers, it’s worth a read.

The presentation is available at the BayaSoft web site.