OPINION24 March 2010

Treating respondents right

In today’s Ideas Rush session at Research 2010, Jeffrey Henning of Vovici spoke about the importance of treating respondents right.

In today’s Ideas Rush session at Research 2010, Jeffrey Henning of Vovici spoke about the importance of treating respondents right.

Especially in customer sat surveys, Henning said, “We have to think of them first as customers and a distant, distant second as respondents. The worst thing we can do with them in a customer satisfaction survey is to dissatisfy them.”

This made us wonder how many agencies have “respondent care” or “respondent experience” departments? We’d be interested to hear from anyone with those combinations of words, or similar, in their job title.

Robert Langkjaer-Bain

@RESEARCH LIVE

8 Comments

Sam Berteloot

15 years ago

Hi Robert, we have a focus on participant (not respondent) experience and we have an internal team working on Participant Experience both in terms of programming but also wording, language, ... One of our programs called the Watsons was on the blog here: http://www.research-live.com/encouraging-co-creation-between-research-and-respondents/4001939.blog We have other projects that are created together with our participants ... eg feedback button per question sending the feedback immediatly to the responsible of a specific project. Sam InSites Consulting / TalkToChange.com sam@insites.eu

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Sam Berteloot

15 years ago

I'm sure a lot of agencies might be interested to share learnings and I was wondering if anyone would be interested in a platform to share these things? Good and bad examples, R&D research, ... Let me know, I'm willing to see how we can set this up together! sam@insites.eu twitter.com/samberteloot

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Jeffrey Henning

15 years ago

Thanks for the writeup, Robert. I haven't seen it - agencies for the most part aren't concerned, because the respondents aren't their asset. From an agency perspective, "there are more where they came from." The access panel providers, on the other hand, do invest in participant satisfaction, because it is crucial to their long-term sustainability. I bet there are some people out there with "Panelist Care" or "Panelist Experience" in their titles.

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Gyurka Jansen

15 years ago

Well, as Jeffrey states, at a panel provider 'participant satisfaction' is very important. For the company I work for (SSI) this means that; yes we do have a team that focuses on the 'experience' from a design point of view and one that will look into the experience of the actual survey. Of course that has limitations that you can probably think of yourself, but yes, such teams do exist. An other thing is an initiative like research-voice.com, which is supported by agencies and panel providers alike.

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Michael Conklin - Chief Methodologist - MarketToo

15 years ago

As an access panel provider I agree that the respondent experience is particularly important to us. To that end we have been developing tools to predict respondent experience based on the questionnaire structure and features. This finally gives us a metric with which we can start a conversation with our clients about improving their questionnaires. Just saying the questionnaire is too long has proven to be an insufficient method of pushback. Now we can make suggestions on how small changes in structure can improve the respondent experience and the overall data quality.

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Sam Berteloot

15 years ago

Hi all, Interesting posts! InSites is indeed working for a big part on our own research panel, which is an asset in our case. As for panel supplier we all know, based on our experience as we opened our panels for a while, that they often have nothing to say in the survey design or questioning ... I agree that they try to do their best but often the agency has programmed the survey and asks the question and sampling is all they need. On the other hand we need to go further than just agencies, as Michael states, we need to educate our clients in this. Sam

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Robert Bain

15 years ago

Thank you all for your comments. I get the impression that, among agencies at least, it is still the exception rather than the norm to give someone specific responsibility for this.

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Charles Pearson, Managing Director of EasyInsites

15 years ago

As custom panel specialists at EasyInsites, this approach is core to what we do. We are trusted to look after a client's consumers, customers, subscribers, and/or employees who choose to participate on our client's custom panel. We constantly strive to be respectful, professional, supportive and responsive in everything we do from the sign-up process, to the survey instrument, to the frequency with which we contact them and invite them to participate, to providing and fulfilling their incentives, to sharing results content and news to help further engage them in the process, to responding promptly and completely to their queries. As a result, response rates and attrition rates in custom panels when managed properly are far superior to access panels. Even when access panel companies have a focus on the respondent experience, they are limited by the fact that (1) they do not design the surveys; (2) the look of surveys run on their panel is inconsistent since they do not script in most cases; and (3) their ROI is greatly enhanced by using these respondents as many times as possible.

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