Meeting Today’s Business Needs: Collaboration is More Critical than Ever

To coincide with the launch of Toluna Start — the industry’s first and only end-to-end real-time consumer insights platform — we assembled leading consumer insights professionals from major brands like Facebook, CVS, Visa, and more, to share their critical business needs in the areas of New Product Development, Collaboration, and Brand and Communications Research.  We’re delivering our findings with you both in video and this blog posts series.

How familiar are you with the concept of doing “more with less”? If the answer is very, you’re not alone. The pressure is on for organisations worldwide, fueling the need for efficiencies at every stage of the process to drive quality insights at pace.

But how? By breaking down silos while putting automation and technology to work for you. It’s about meeting the need for speed, quality, ease of use, flexibility, and value — all at the same time.  In light of today’s changed workplace, and new demands, collaboration goes beyond working with your own team more efficiently, to other teams and functions within the organisation to answer business questions more effectively.

And it’s made possible by agile collaboration, as our customers share.

• CVS: “I don’t think we will go back to the old timelines — we have prioritised our agile research.”

• Moy Park: “We like to share research results with a very large distribution list. Through COVID-19 we were running our tracker to review consumer shopping habits and could feed that straight into our forecasting models two to three times a week, and the ability to feed that insight into the business in real time was critical to business planning.”

• Colgate-Palmolive: “The finance operations team has become more interested in what we are doing, so it’s no longer just marketing and product that are interested in consumer insights.”

Uncovering shared pain points unlocks agile research.

Market research has changed dramatically over the last few years, and that pace of change has only accelerated over the past several months. In building Toluna Start, we talked to organisations of all kinds to identify shared challenges — then alleviate them.

What we found were a handful of common pain points that turned into drivers of quality agile research.

• Speed: Today, quality insights are often needed in hours or days…not weeks. Using pre-templated questionnaires and a preferred design (or one our researchers provide based on best practices) means less wasted time and resources.

• Quality: There’s no need to sacrifice quality for speed. Technology puts best practice methodology at the heart of solutions, along with pre-templated questionnaires and data visualisation tools. Senior insight leads can also share standard frameworks with their teams.

• Ease of use: Whether it’s DIY or fully serviced, intuitive tech is a non-negotiable. The ability to visualise results has to be clear, too, so they can be shared with stakeholders or across teams. Pre-designed dashboards make a standard way of viewing data simple.

• Flexibility: Nobody has time for a rigid experience. Even automated solutions demand a greater level of customisation and flexibility. Think additional questions and DIY-assisted to fully serviced.

• Value: Speaking of “more with less,” it’s especially important today. Having automation factored into every step keeps costs down. The inherent ability to collaborate and share projects, questionnaires, data, and results across organisations also drives efficiency and scalability.

• Technology: In today’s world, we expect great tech that works for us. While tech and automation aren’t separate drivers, they alleviate the above challenges and make agile research a reality.

• Integrated Panel: Access to respondents within platform ensures that you’re receiving up to the minute, real-time responses from the right people, who’ve been vetted, and deliver meaningful insights.

Changing times means pushing further, faster.

The global pandemic has accelerated changing consumer needs and behaviours. What a target audience wanted a month ago may be totally different from what they expect today. That means less assumptions and more insights are needed to drive organisations forward.

This is true across industries in keeping a finger on the pulse of consumer behaviours, attitudes, and preferences. Consumer spending and habits are changing, and insights help businesses reset priorities and maximise opportunities. For example:

• Gaming companies are testing new products to meet the increased demand as people spend more time and money on media and entertainment services.
• Subscription service providers are testing new services and content as demand increases.
• OTC and household cleaning product providers are testing new claims on existing products.

Sometimes organisations need to turn insights into action in as little as 24 hours, then share them just as fast. This underscores the benefit of collaborating via a real-time consumer intelligence platform for organisations tasked with doing more with less. Speed aside, key benefits include:

• Efficiency: Having a team on the same platform builds efficiency and familiarity with technology and functionality.
• Scalability: A standardised way of working provides a framework in place for sharing projects, allowing for scalable solutions for every research need.
• Quality control: Using a centralised platform enables senior insight leaders to control the approaches, questionnaires, quality standards, data visualisations, and norms.
• Development: Less experienced users can access automated, standardised solutions using trusted measures to support development.
• Stakeholder engagement: When stakeholders aren’t involved in setting up projects but need real-time access to results, they can be easily shared to help decision-making.

Having the ability to share projects, templates, and results within one platform supports agile research environments and efficient, effective knowledge sharing.

Learn more about Toluna Start by scheduling a demo here.