Even if there are sufficient incentives to take surveys in a particular panel, respondents take them just for the sake of taking those surveys and hence it only reduces the quality of information received at researcher’s end.

Solution:

I believe solution lies in the structure itself, in the very design. Surveys are usually very monotonous by design and feel.
After taking a certain number of surveys it becomes difficult for a respondent to give right answer to similar questions and even tend to get confused, or worst they won’t take your survey at all.

Gamification is all about designing your system, in a way that makes the whole experience of taking surveys interesting and hence engaging more respondents, at the same time increasing adoption rate.

Question that arises next is, how can I implement these techniques to improve my existing response rates??

There are some key elements to every survey that decide on the response rate of the survey once it is administered.

These are:

1. Visual appeal and theme:
   1. Theme chosen should appeal to the respondent group that you are going to administer your survey to.
   2. Then there are some basic things to consider like:
      1. Colour of the background and font used:
         1. Black colour gives us a hint that it is receding away from us and light colours like yellow and white gives us a feeling that they are emerging out of the picture and coming in front.
      2. Rule of the thirds:
         1. You divide a particular layout by two horizontal and two vertical lines and you’ll have a matrix layout in front of you.
         2. Now the point where one horizontal line meets other vertical line is a point where the focus of a person lies while looking at that layout.
         3. So if you’re planning to include some graphics of interest, better place it at these locations, it could help improve quality of response significantly.
2. Usage of graphics in scales for measurement:
   1. Instead of conventional radio buttons, sliding scales could be used.
   2. Instead of text like “good”, “bad”, “worst”, smiley could be used.
3. When there is some sort of branching or benchmarking, complex logic involved.
   1. There is always a better way to take respondent from one page to the other.
      1. Different type of transitions and animations can be used, while transitioning him from one page to the other.
      2. Using more of graphical content then using text or conventional scales.

In the end it all comes down to how interesting the whole process of administering the survey is, if it is interesting and engaging enough, I don’t think you’ll ever run short of quality responses.

The reasons for this increased growth can be attributed to following factors:

1. Organizations want to understand the market landscape while the global economy recovers, before planning and executing their marketing strategy.
2. Increased focus on emerging markets in the APAC region.

It becomes all the more important and an area of concern for many organizations to understand the current consumer spending trends, and competitive landscape before they go ahead and plan their marketing initiatives.

According to a research report by Forrester group, consumers are interacting with each other at a global level, through various social media platform like facebook, twitter and thus influencing buying behaviour irrespective of the geographical territories. Now this calls for an increased emphasis on gaining global insights as well.

This increased inflow of information from various interfaces has impacted the Product lifecycles as end consumer are making more informed decision now and this has a deep influence on their buying behaviour, hence one of the major challenges for many organizations is to understand this change on a real time basis and adapt their strategies swiftly.

Now this raises two challenges in front of the market research companies:

1. To provide their clients with real time insights about the latest trends in the market.
2. To reduce the time involved in preparing these insights by adopting the best in breed processes and constantly innovating these existing methodologies and processes.

Increased focus on Emerging markets and APAC region:

With most of the US/Europe markets getting saturated and exhausted, multinationals are now eyeing the APAC region, reason being the increased disposable income with the consumers and thus increased spending trends.

So now these MNC’s are trying to capture maximum of this share of wallet that lies with consumers of these regions and the companies who are already enjoying a good market share want to retain and expand their business and to measure the effectiveness of their marketing programs they have to understand the customer satisfaction levels hence the need for market research reports.

Recent reports show that there has been a paradigm shift in the buying behaviour of consumers, across the newly emerging markets.

This change can be attributed to following factors:

1. Increased disposable income with consumers.
2. Increased Brand awareness amongst people due to availability of timely and effective information.
3. Impact of information flow from Social Media platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc.
4. Opening up of markets for entry of other players, in various segments providing the consumer with more choices than ever.

Market Research: Conventional Practice

Market Research has been conventionally carried out through the Pen and the paper way, Most of the time resulting in longer turnaround time of projects, inefficiency and poorly laid out quality control procedures to establish the credibility of data collected on to the field.

Market Research: Driven through best in breed IT solutions

With increased pressure on MR companies to reduce the turnaround time and deliver insightful reports to their clients, role of IT in improvising current processes becomes a very crucial one.

It is very important to choose just the right IT solution for your needs, and this depends totally on what research processes are crucial that can turn out to be a bottleneck when it comes to reducing turnaround time of projects, maintaining the data quality and efficiency standards.

How IT solutions improve existing research processes:

1. Time: We have been talking about reducing turnaround time in this entire post, and well this is one of the most pressing needs of the hour.
2. Cost: Using right IT solution in the long run can definitely help you in cutting down cost adding hard dollars directly your bottom-line as with increased efficiency MR organization is able to take up more projects as compared to the case where IT solutions are not at all a part of the present Research processes.
3. Quality: IT solutions by capturing critical location based information, and with some other features like Time-stamping the data make it very easy to establish the authenticity of the data collected.

Thus improvising on the three most important constraints of any project, IT solutions become essential for any organization looking to improve upon its existing operational and research processes.