Editor’s note: Ahmed Mohamed Fouad is AVP, head of customer insights, Riyad Bank, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  

In February 2016, Quirk’s published an article titled, “The impact of survey duration on completion rates among Millennial respondents,” which looked at a study that found there’s a major dropout inflection point among Millennial respondents after 15 minutes. 

While the study doesn’t represent all countries, the sample indicates the need for marketing researchers to keep their eyes open to apply a customer-centric approach when dealing with Millennial respondents. 

Ideally, a customer-centric approach is the suggested model to make the business successful. The approach keeps the customer at the heart of business decisions. The market research industry should apply a customer-centric approach for several reasons: 

In some cases, survey satisfaction effects a respondent’s future participation in research. Studies show a high correlation (r2=.72) between respondent satisfaction and the likelihood for participants to accept a future survey invitation (within online panels and clients).

Surveying respondents is like conducting a chemical experiment, only researchers are mixing human characteristics (e.g., emotion, feeling and confidentiality) instead of chemicals, making the task more challenging. 

Creating an effortless and engaging experience for respondents is not only good for the participants, it improves the quality of the responses you receive. 

Studies show how important respondent experience is, as well as how necessary it is to adopt a customer-centric approach while dealing with the respondent. 

Respondent experience management (RXM) is an on-going program that measures at different stages to ensure that market research exercises are designed around respondents’ expectations. 

In order to have a positive respondent experience in place, the ERMBI model is...