Energizing Market Research with Custom Panels and Online Communities

How leading utilities are benefiting from market research innovations.

In the last five years, custom panels have brought tremendous benefits to market research teams across multiple industries. More recently, online communities have started to replace traditional qualitative methods like in-person focus groups. At FGI Research, we help many of the country’s leading utilities draw maximum benefit from custom panels and online communities alike. Every utility client sees promising results as it adopts these up-and-coming market research methods. Below is a summary of key benefits that utilities are generating:

#1 –Savings: Market research is a major expense for electric and gas utilities. Their core studies often include customer satisfaction trackers, concept and ad testing, and saturation studies. Altogether, the cost for these studies can eclipse a million dollars or more per year. Properly implemented, custom panels and online communities can help a utility’s MR department shave off 20-40% of these research costs. Even when trackers require multi-modal designs, the cost savings from using custom panels and online data-collection are huge.

Custom Panels

Custom panels (often called proprietary panels or advisory panels) are pre-recruited groups of people which can include customers, prospects or members. Companies and other organizations continuously engage these groups using a wide variety of survey and research methods.

In many respects, the custom panel should form the foundation of today’s market research. It provides a trusted source of sample that can be readily tapped to unlock critical opinions and ideas. The custom panel can be enriched with transactional data, segmentation scores and other behavioral and attitudinal information. Unlike third party sample sources, custom panels give companies immediate access to the voice of their customers.

Don’t Delay: Embrace the Brave New World of Market Research

Market research continues to change at an unprecedented rate. What is driving this change? Simply put: the intersection of new technologies and new customer behaviors.

The technology drivers include Internet communications, custom panel tools, community platforms, and new survey methods. In turn, customers are rapidly adopting new methods of communicating with each other and the companies they trust for goods and services.