In the beginning, full-service consumer insight products were the only game in town for corporate research teams. But that meant significant expenditures—in both money and time. It often took weeks to get answers to questions at the heart of important research studies, delaying teams’ progress and allowing competitors to sail past them in the marketplace.
DIY and full service—the far ends of the spectrum
Enter DIY, the time- and cost-effective alternative. Self-serve consumer insights platforms meant that research teams could get answers to their burning questions in days—and sometimes hours—rather than weeks, and for a price that didn’t strain their budget. It was a welcome alternative to full-service engagements that could sometimes stretch on for weeks.
But here’s the catch: with a strictly DIY approach, researchers are alone in the wilderness, with nowhere to turn when problems arise. (And, of course, problems always arise.) That’s especially problematic for today’s smaller teams trying to respond to a constantly-increasing number of requests from across the organization. Researchers simply don’t have the time for the learning curve built into even the best DIY programs. DIY forces researchers to tackle projects on their own, with a multi-stepped process often leading to significant bottlenecks. Think about it: you’re on your own from survey creation to analysis.
On the other hand, while full-service research was once the holy grail, it is often difficult to justify both the expense and the time it requires. And its processes can prove limiting, leaving researchers with a lack of control and no opportunity for input.
Your new solution
The answer is a hybrid solution that brings the best of full-service and DIY together in one package—creating a unique, new solution. At Toluna we’ve baked our methodological expertise into the Toluna Start platform, helping researchers remain agile in a fast-moving marketplace. And the DIY aspect of the solution allows teams to stay deeply immersed in their research and constantly involved with colleagues across their corporate landscape, in effect solidifying their entire organization into one unified team. At the same time, however, researchers have real-time access to experts who can guide them over bumps in the terrain. That expert support means they have ultimate confidence in survey results—a quality sometimes missing in strictly DIY programs.
The Toluna Start platform creates a seamless and collaborative environment that provides access to reliable results across an organization and in real-time, further solidifying an organization. That means teams across the company can confidently move forward with product development and marketing campaigns, staying abreast of the competition in the constantly shifting sands of the global marketplace. Toluna Start is an island of certainty in a world that seems to grow more uncertain with every passing day. It’s a solution that had to come.
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