In This Issue
A client team member kindly took the time to provide us the following feedback from her colleagues who received our summary of a recent survey: “I read your summary below — this is amazingly helpful! I’m so excited to dive into it in more detail but didn’t want to wait to comment about how great this is!” We look forward to providing similar high-quality reporting to you and your teammates!
Questions? Click here to send us an email with your request.
- Vol. 15, Issue 3, March 2020
Hello!Instead of our usual lighthearted, banter-filled issue, this month, Research with a Twist acknowledges the unique and challenging time we are all experiencing and suggests some ways that CSR can help.
Thank you, as always, for working, playing, conferencing, presenting, meeting, eating and drinking with us, and we all look forward to the time we can resume doing all those things in person. In the meantime, stay safe and stay well. If you have any questions, please contact me at csrinfo@csr-bos.com.
—Julie
Going the (Social) Distance
Like many of you, we have been monitoring the COVID-19 situation closely through the CDC, national news sources and the local news resources where our employees and clients work and live. We are taking proactive steps to help ensure the safety of our employees and clients, and conferring daily on the developments affecting areas where CSR personnel and our clients are most active.
That said, we’d like to take this opportunity to remind those of you who may have forgotten, and inform those of you who may not know, that CSR has been running its entire business virtually for over 15 years. When we started work-from-home arrangements, we were one of few companies to do so.
Over the years, we’ve developed and grown our capabilities to leverage all virtual office capabilities available, including laptops, smartphones, video conferencing tools, online focus group and video interview tools, document-sharing platforms, etc. This means that we have had the programs and processes in place to deliver exceptional client service from a virtual environment for many years, and are well-seasoned in successfully managing the challenges and opportunities inherent with such arrangements.
We’d also like to briefly update you on our experience with surveys that are currently in field. So far, we are happy to report that we have experienced no noticeable decline in the willingness of targeted audiences to participate in surveys to date. We have launched studies with employee benefits brokers and HR decision-makers in the past two weeks and have completed fielding with generally the same efficiency as we experienced prior to the outbreak.
Finally, as most of you know, one of our most compelling strengths lies in our capabilities to conduct in-depth interviews with highly valuable target audience members, and distill the results into unique, actionable insights. There is no better time than now to leverage the skills of a seasoned partner with deep experience in the ability to recruit and keep engaged your most important clients and prospects in telephone or online interviews — whether you need as few as ten or as many as two hundred.
For CSR, using phone and online channels for qualitative research is not a backup solution when you can’t invite people to a focus group — these are and have been our favored methods for conducting research for a long time.
Here’s the Twist: Your health and safety, and of our team members, are important to us. We are following all travel and social distancing recommendations, and remain dedicated to serving you during this difficult time.
Mixology (Putting Research into Practice)
If your upcoming research plans include in-person focus groups, don’t cancel or postpone them. Let us show you how phone or online interviews and groups can get you the same, or better, results:
- Participants, moderators and clients can participate from the comfort of home. Suits, ties, and makeup are optional!
- Enthusiasm to participate has generally been high, as many executives are unaccustomed to the relative isolation of working from home and appreciate the opportunity to share opinions with others in these settings.
- Participants can schedule calls when it’s convenient for them, and don’t have to scramble to get to a facility at a specific time.
- Obviously, health concerns associated with travel are minimized, and other logistic issues, such as child care for after-hours meetings, have likely already been addressed.
- As always, we believe in-depth interviews yield deeper, more insightful responses because each participant is given ample time to think about and respond to questions.
- Also, in a work-from-home virtual environment, there is less concern about participant bias, speakers are assured they won’t be overheard by colleagues in nearby cubicles.
A client team member kindly took the time to provide us the following feedback from her colleagues who received our summary of a recent survey: “I read your summary below — this is amazingly helpful! I’m so excited to dive into it in more detail but didn’t want to wait to comment about how great this is!” We look forward to providing similar high-quality reporting to you and your teammates!
About Us
The Center for Strategy Research, Inc. (CSR) is a research firm. The “Twist” to what we offer is this: We combine open-ended questioning with our proprietary technology to create quantifiable data. As a result our clients gain more actionable and valuable insights from their research efforts.
