"These are interesting times” is something I am hearing almost on a daily basis, business for most people has taken a back seat. Money and health are both at the forefront of people’s mind, we all want to stay safe and look after the most vulnerable of our society, whilst keeping our businesses afloat. Now more than ever is a time to help each other, so that we can all keep on going. Thinking on our feet and adapting to this ‘new world’ is the key to all our businessesand we are going todo just that.
We are always telling each other how great it is, that we live in a world where connecting with people is so easy. Nevertheless, never before has it been so important, not only on a personal level so that we can talk to our family and friends but also from a business perspective. The market research industry has predominantly always relied heavily on the premise of human interaction. To repeat the mantra of staying at home, going out for essentials like food and medication or to take a little exercise, goes against the standard methodology that our business is built upon. Therefore, we have had to adopt innovative ways and find new tools to run even the most basic research projects.
FieldPoint was born out of one of the best-known market research recruitment agencies in the UK, iPoint Research. With over 17 years in the industry, we have found that over the years more and more recruitment and project management have come hand in hand for our clients, as it helps them deliver projects more efficiently. With iPoint Research facilitating the recruitment and FieldPoint providing the technology and project management, we provide a full package.
As market research recruitment specialists, we have actually been working online for years, as we’ve found that it’s the easiest way for us to share and recruit projects.
Anyone can use these tools - you just need to be determined to weather the storm and find a way through. I would just like to share with you one example of how FieldPoint hashelped our client achieve this, in our current climate. As is quite usual, the original brief was to run multiple focus groups across the country to discuss marketing and innovations for a very well-known UK national charity. The project was in field and had been fully recruited when disaster struck and we were suddenly plunged into uncertainty. With the UK moving into a total lockdown status, the choices were simple, cancel, reschedule or move online. You may have guessed it; the choice was to move this to online focus groups.
We were then faced with some basic issues; the moderator was a self-confessed technophobe and was really not comfortable with this, not knowing where to even start. We needed to keep this as simple as possible, so our team agreed to runtesting / training sessions until they were comfortable with the technology. Thankfully this was much simpler than they had anticipated and within 3 sessions they held the confidence to setup and run the sessions themselves.
These days we have the technology and the skills to be able to move some of our work online with many tools such as Zoom, Google Hangouts and research industry focused tools such as; InterVu, Confimit and Webcreator Suite(There are many more…). All have their individual strengths and it’s really just a case of selecting the right tool for the job that you are most comfortable with and meets your individual needs. Check them out and let us know in the comments below your thoughts. If you have any other tools that you think might help or other success stories, then please share them below as well.
iPoint and FieldPoint combined, we pride ourselves in our industry knowledge and technical expertise, therefore being able to transform any project large or small online. If you need any advice on any of these systems we are using to help facilitate these projects, please just ask.
If we can help you keep your business and our industry moving right now, then that's atthe forefront of our minds.
Let’s keep britain talking
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FieldPoint and iPoint Research
