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.

#2 –Quality: Utilities dramatically improve the quality of their market research when they conduct studies from their own custom panel, for several reasons. First, a custom panel with FGI provides a private source of sample that we recruit from the utility’s customer file and use exclusively for their research. Second, FGI Research stresses the importance of appending in-house data such as segmentation scores and customer usage information to a utility’s custom online panel. Commercial online sample sources simply cannot match the depth, quality and reliability of data that such a well-constructed and -managed panel provides. Finally, a utility’s online community (especially when it incorporates both qualitative and quantitative elements) yields data and insights that go far beyond the results generated by traditional focus groups.

#3 –Speed and Flexibility: Custom panels and online communities combine to form a ready and reliable platform for any number of real-time market research applications. For utilities, this means that studies launch quickly and field efficiently. In most cases, FGI’s utility clients can conduct multiple studies in the time it used to take to complete just one. They can much more rapidly determine the feasibility of a proposed study and design an approach that will meet their analytical, budget and timing requirements.

Custom panels and online communities help gas and electric utilities generate better, faster and more cost-effective market research for their internal clients, which in turn helps them satisfy those clients more effectively. Even better, new insights from innovative research methods fuel superior decision-making across the board, so a utility can see gains in its overall performance.

David Wilson
CEO
FGI Research

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.

Once established, the custom panel serves as a trusted platform from which to launch a host of compelling research methods, including quantitative surveys, quick polls, online communities and focus groups, trackers and social media validation studies. For companies with active market research efforts and a sufficient number of customers, custom panels have quickly become a must-have solution.

David Wilson
CEO
FGI Research

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.

New technologies and customer behaviors have formed the perfect recipe for a revolution in market research. Going forward, market research must fully embrace these new technologies and behaviors in order to continuously understand and appropriately serve today’s customers.

Custom online panels are fueling the market research revolution and FGI Research is a recognized pioneer and leader in custom panel technology and managed services.

But panels are only the tip of the revolution. As more and more consumers flock to the Internet to communicate, learn and share ideas, market research is expanding into online communities and social media mining. These are rich new sources of valuable and real-time market intelligence that are unlike anything we’ve seen before in the market research industry.

Companies that fail to embrace these new tools and methods (custom panels, online communities, and social media mining) will quickly find themselves out of touch with customers and their broader target markets. Let’s briefly consider the case for each new market research tool.

David Wilson
CEO
FGI Research