What Insights Pros Want from a ResTech Platform
At aha insights technology we talked to some of our most active and loyal corporate market research clients to get a sense for how we’re doing. Nothing too formal. Just some open and honest conversations with a moderator about their ResTech needs, what we do that keeps them loyal to us and what the future might hold for the insights industry.
This is the first in a series of blogs where we’ll share some of the insights we gleaned from these conversations. Hopefully they can help you as you think about your insight needs and culture.
We discovered some interesting commonalities among our most loyal and active clients. Within their corporate environments, they stand out as being quite entrepreneurial, independent, creative, spirited, strategic and… well…curious as can be. All of these qualities contribute to them consistently coming up with ideas on new and interesting things they want to learn about their consumers or customers.
In short, they think of themselves as “true researchers” who focus completely on digging deeper to get insights their organizations don’t yet know they need.
This mindset positions them as leaders and elevates the importance of insights within their company. They just love trying new things and coming up with new ideas. They get frustrated with “templatized” products in the ResTech world that force them to do things the way that technology dictates. That process – which can often be a reality based on corporate contracts – limits their creativity and flexibility to try new ways of understanding motivation. They prefer flexibility, value collaboration with their insight partners and look for creative activities that allow them to dream up new ways to ask questions and develop innovative tasks for their consumers.
They recognize that not everyone in insights is like them. Corporate insight environments have a fair share of administrative chores that can turn people more into project managers than creative, independent-minded, deep-digging researchers. They see this as a different mindset or culture that can develop within an insights department in a corporation. It’s a reality…just not them.
“We can dream it and they’ll build it” is exactly what one of our most loyal and active corporate clients said to our moderator about aha. This notion of creativity and flexibility was the sentiment that kept her coming back to us. She said, “We’re actually crafting the design of our methodologies, crafting the research plans and not asking a vendor to play that back to us. We already know what we want and how we want to approach something.”
What many of these creative, “true researchers” want from an insights platform is more of a canvas than a template. The tools, resources and flexibility that give them a wide range of possibilities. And then the collaboration with key people within aha who assure speedy implementation and efficient analysis.
When asked about alternative technology-based solutions, these clients often come back to the notion of being limited in two ways – the technology itself that dictates the way they must operate and the lack of human support/interaction at most tech-based platforms. When asked what she would say to a peer at another company about what sets aha apart, one client said, “Would you rather have a platform to be on or a platform with people to work with?” Even when these creative-minded, “true researchers” know what they want, they are stimulated and reassured when they know there’s a person on the other end who truly gets what they want to do.
Do you see yourself as more of a true researcher than a project manager? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Likely somewhere in between. If you see yourself as a true researcher already or really want to lean into that mindset, reach out and we’ll help you customize approaches that let you flex your creative muscles and go beyond the limits you might be experiencing in the ResTech world.
