Five Ways Engaging Research Can Engage Your Business

The New Year is provides a great opportunity to take stock of the past year while simultaneously looking forward to business goals for 2012.  Almost all business goals, at their core, relate back to engagement; customer engagement, employee engagement , and market engagement .  There are many ways to engage, and while research isn’t the only method of engagement, it can be an important and effective method.  Here are five ways to kick start the year through engaging research.

  1. Engage your Customers:  Engaging research provides an avenue for customer engagement where you can stay close to your customers by actively asking for their opinions.  The simple act of asking signals that you care what they think; acting on their feedback further reinforces their importance to your business.  Collaborate with your customers to investigate custom satisfaction, product innovation, branding, positioning, promotions, messaging, pricing and more. 
  2. Engage your Employees:  Employees are the face of your organization and have the biggest influence over your customers and your business.  Engage your most important resource to find out firsthand how your company is performing and how it can do better.  Don’t restrict your employee engagement to employee satisfaction surveys; think broader.  Engage them in other corporate initiatives, social events, product development, training or the roll-out of new systems.  Engage your employees and your customers will benefit too.
  3. Engage with the Market: Add to employee and customer intelligence by layering on information about the market in general.  This includes your valuable data about your non-customers and competitors.  Find out where your brand and products fit in the larger competitive landscape and discover emerging trends in your sector.  Access non-customers and competitive intelligence through market sample which can be sourced through any online sample vendor.
  4. Engage your BI:  Business intelligence (BI), leveraged from your internal databases and systems, provides invaluable information about your customers but it only provides the behavioural side of the equation.  Integrating BI with CI (customer intelligence) gives the perfect marriage of behavioural and attitudinal data, giving you more depth to the view of your customers.  Too often, BI data and research data are analyzed in isolation blocking an organization’s ability to connect the dots.  With a bit of effort to connect BI with CI you will find that the whole truly is much greater than the sum of its parts.
  5. Make Engaging Communications:  Not all communication is created equal.  But all forms of communication are a reflection of your brand, whether targeted to employees, customers, investors, or non-customers.  Before communicating with your various stakeholders, test your messaging with a smaller group.  Get their input in order to make your messaging and communication materials even better and more effective. 

 

Engagement infers a two way process where both sides contribute and listen.  Research can be the perfect vehicle for facilitating the engagement process.  With online surveys and forums, organizations can use engaging research to create meaningful conversations and dialogues to actively listen to the opinions and thoughts of your stakeholders.  Kill two birds with one stone by using engaging research to engage your customers, engage your employees and engage the market.

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