Why should research agencies partner with you for better collaboration?

Market Logic Team

With stacks of work piling up on researchers’ desks, it’s always a challenge to manage collaboration with research agencies. Fortunately, it isn’t as daunting a task as you’d think. Collaboration takes a clear process and the right tools to make for smooth sailing.

Last week, Caro explained how collaborative research management tools can lower the workload on both ends (for clients and their agencies), by providing clear guidance throughout the project process.

So, why should market research agencies use tools to boost collaboration with clients? Of course, stronger partnerships deliver better outputs to strengthen the business. But agencies also benefit from greater awareness of their contribution to the business. Market Logic clients and their agencies collaborate to produce new research on a platform that also promotes the results of a search and re-used by all marketers. So in addition to presenting results to the management team (and hoping they won’t start gathering dust a few weeks later), all the results can also be searched and found when anyone asks a relevant “What do we know about …?” question. Even better, click a search result to see the underlying report, and the name of the research agency that delivered it. In this way, online collaboration builds the agency’s reputation and lays the path for more research requests in the future.

What about the clients – what do they get out of this partnership? When clients and agencies collaborate online to run a high-quality organization from planning to execution, they reap many benefits. For example, client-side insights managers can:

Run a knowledge check against new research requests to prevent duplication
Share best practices for briefs and methods across project teams
See who requested a proposal, commissioned the agency, uploaded results, etc.
Quickly overview work in progress by any dimension – market, brand, category, researcher, agency, and so on
Easily access all results and data, from the executive summary and final deck to the questionnaire and underlying SPSS data
Recommend agencies to colleagues, trip advisor style, based on custom factors like actionable results, timeliness, and savings

… while their stakeholders can instantly access the latest insights to self-serve answers to business questions.