by Leslie Rich, VP of Client Service at CivicScience:
I’m thrilled to join the very bright and motivated team at CivicScience! I’m a geeky researcher by nature and knew from talking with everyone here that I would have no trouble fitting in, as we all share a love of research. From my first conversation with John (the founder of CivicScience), I was intrigued by the company’s offerings and unique place in the market research industry.
When I was working for a large global research company, we continually had clients telling us we needed to be faster, more cost-effective, and more insightful when it came to solutions to their business problems.
Current traditional online survey methods are:
- Expensive (meanwhile, clients had little budget to work with)
- Require long fulfillment windows (clients needed this info yesterday)
- Sometimes utilizing questionable sampling methods (who were those respondents – a.k.a. professional survey takers – agreeing to take a 35-minute survey anyway?)
CivicScience offers groundbreaking solutions to these client concerns. We have a unique ability to provide deep insights about consumer segments without sacrificing respondent privacy, shockingly fast and at reasonable costs. The CivicScience InsightStore™ provides a wealth of data enabling clients to get research answers quickly at a great value. And the data science allows clients to uncover unexpected insights, with significant differences popping up that you may not have expected a priori.
In my short few days here, I can already see the use cases: find out who your customers are, and who can be persuaded to become customers – where they are most likely to shop, what’s their favorite fast food, how do they consume media, etc. Instead of settling for a traditional research company with an omnibus study that could, in fact, be quick and low cost, CivicScience can provide the same cost and turn-around time with additional data profiling.
For example: A financial industry client I previously worked with needed to check incidence for consumers owning a specific type of credit card. Sure, an omnibus was able to deliver that information, along with standard demographic profiling. But CivicScience would provide all this plus additional rich profiling – such as their current personal finance practices, sentiment about the economy, media consumption habits, even their current mood – in a short time frame at similar costs, providing much more added value to the client.
Another use for these capabilities is to help clients understand where potential partnership opportunities lie, and another area of help is where they should spend their marketing and advertising dollars. Other clients I’ve worked with had been searching for a solution like this – “Am I spending my ad dollars in the right place?” That would likely be one question about media consumption in a 20-minute survey that was expensive and time-consuming. How has the target audience’s perception of Brand X changed over the past year? This would have required multi-phase tracking studies requiring a long field window from traditional vendors. Both of these business questions can easily be mined through CivicScience in a one-stop quick project.
Many Fortune 500 companies have already added CivicScience to their vendor roster and have compelling case studies to show for it. And the team here involved in developing and innovating the platform are continually improving the software and user experience for clients, instead of just keeping a static solution chugging along. Various enhancements launch every 2 weeks. Yes, every 2 weeks! Unheard of in my old world of big vendors. Being nimble and working with clients to provide what they need ASAP is a big plus.
There are some research methodologies for which I would still recommend the big, traditional research companies for, of course. Like a conjoint with a monster design or an online community for insightful qualitative information… but the innovation in this small but growing company astounds me. And it’s a definite bonus to have fun debates about which type of chicken wing you prefer (drums vs. flats) then go field that question to find the deeper insights. Or to create a whole eBook on this stuff and give it away for free.
I’m excited to be the newest liaison between CivicScience and our clients! Check out some case studies here and let me know what you think.
