One of my favorite annual tasks is writing the overview of results from our survey of client-side researchers for our Q Report, which comes out each September. (Head over here if you’d like to access the digital version: https://bit.ly/2MZKq9b.) I love reading the candid comments that our open-ends elicit – they are often quite honest, funny and thoughtful and I think they serve as a form of therapy, allowing researchers to get annoyances large and small off their chests.
A theme of this year’s study was communication – with internal customers, with external customers and with vendors. An open-end about vendor communication drew some snide comments but, in the main, many responses mentioned having no problems at all or actually having such good communication with vendors that no improvements were needed – a fact I want to acknowledge, lest our vendor readers feel like I’m piling on. (True, comments of the “Everything’s fine!” ilk aren’t as compelling to read as those with a little bite to them but it’s important to balance the kind with the critical, right?)
The main themes of the answers centered around problem areas that have arisen in past Q Report surveys: vendors overpromise and under-deliver; they inundate prospective customers with e-mails and cold-calls; they don’t take the time to understand the researcher’s business or its particular needs; they data-dump 100-page PowerPoint decks rather than concise, actionable reports.
Need for dashboard
Along with those traditional problems, this year there were several expressions from client-side researchers of the need for some sort of dashboard or other Web-based, centralized way to communicate with vendors, whether it’s project-related or RFP-related. As one commenter below mentions, there are a whole host of security and compatibility issues to deal with, but clearly client researchers see a need for streamlined, centralized interaction with vendors. Perhaps ease of communication could be a point of differentiation for research companies to highlight in their marketing?
Would very much like to automate the request/reply process and improve the speed of effective communication.
I wish they were on our instant messenger service. It would be much easier.
Would like a solution that integrates into our existing SAAS marketing insights platform so they can deliver proposals, SOWs, briefs, surveys, reports and presentations, etc., through the platform so it becomes part of the collective consciousness (and is NOT living in e-mail chains).
It would be nice to know what’s happening during the RFP process. Feels like the RFP goes out, then falls into a black hole until the vendor decides to respond. Are they talking it over? Letting it sit? Waiting for a dept. to respond?
I’d like a project portal vs. sending e-mails back and forth.
I wish we had a file sharing system with our partners that was compatible with our online security protocol.
Mutually beneficial
Respondents to our survey had many good things to say about their vendor partners and clearly want the relationship to be mutually beneficial, so if you’re a vendor reading this, as in many business situations, it’s best not to take things too personally.
We (in corporate research) have to pull plugs, change directions, do things that seem to make no sense, based on our internal demands and pressures. Sometimes I think vendors don’t quite get that – they think we’re bad clients when we’re actually bobbing and weaving the best we can. Also, there are many wonderful research companies and we don’t have enough work to go to every one we think highly of. It’s hard on the other side but when we don’t give you a job it may have absolutely no reflection on how highly we think of you.