New technology has improved the ability of leading organizations to learn about their customers in many ways.  One example is the Customer Advisory Board - a proprietary online panel made up of an organization's customers or stakeholders.   As researchers strive for ways to do their work "better, faster, cheaper," the Advisory Board is a tool that connects on all three.

Chadwick Martin Bailey combines our research expertise with the ability to build and manage custom panels/client advisory boards that have several benefits:

Better:  More Sophisticated Research

Customer Advisory Panels provide better research in a number of ways.  For one thing,  they enable more sophisticated online methods to be substituted for telephone surveys or focus groups.  Also, the panel tracks the responses from every study each member participates in, so there's much more data to analyze for any one project.  Finally, the Advisory Board is often structured as a portal, where customers can get access to special information and resources as well as complete surveys.  Client relationships are important in every industry and the Advisory Board makes them feel more like a partner, and not like a lab rat.

Faster:  Quick Turn-around

Once an Advisory Board is built, members can be reached almost instantly via their email.  And since they have already agreed to participate in periodic research - they respond much faster and in greater numbers.   This enables researchers to greatly reduce the time needed to complete a research project.  It also enables them to act upon unexpected questions or events on short notice.

Cheaper:  Less Expensive Projects

The largest investment in creating a Customer Advisory Board panel is in the initial setup and recruiting.  Once the panel is set up - each individual project adds very little in cost (much less than doing the same project ad-hoc.)  Researchers can do more work with their available resources. 

It's important to note that Customer Advisory Boards (and panels in general) are not the best fit for every project.  For example - since it's difficult to make an Advisory Board blind, they're not as good for projects where your organization wants to remain anonymous (e.g. customer satisfaction or competitive comparison studies). 

However - in a great many instances, Customer Advisory Boards are a way for companies to do better research; more frequently; for less money than they spend right now.

Send us an email and learn how to increase the speed and effectiveness of your customer research while reducing your overall costs.

 

Our current clients include Bank of America, PBS and Wachovia Bank.