A few blog posts ago, we spoke about how customer experience matters in market research and what are some of the things you can do to keep your clients happy. Yes, the clients want to have a great experience working with you. However, they also want to achieve good results with the help of your services.

As we said before, the client’s needs go beyond getting the job done. Yet, their core goal is to complete their project on time with your assistance.

Here are some things you can do to amaze your clients while helping them bring their business to another level:

1. Ask Questions and Suggest Changes

Do not assume anything, and do not try to guess what the client meant. It is better to ask the question and get a straightforward answer than to guess and be wrong.

Gather your team during the briefing session, check if they have any questions or concerns about the project and share them with your client.

If you forecast the fieldwork will not be showing expected results, you should advise your client to relax the quotas. Take caution in these situations. Make sure you have facts and figures to present before you ask for a relaxation of the quota.

2. Allocate More Resources to Complete the Project

When the deadlines are tight, and there is less time to do the work you need to start thinking about a different approach to the workload.

Try bringing in more team members to help out with the project. Having more hands on deck means the workload will be evenly spread within the team, and you will fully recruit a project before the deadline.

If your team is already swamped with other studies, you could consult with your client to get outside assistance for the project. There is no shame in seeking out partner’s support if you believe it will help you finish the project on time.

3. Travel to Another Location to Do the Fieldwork

Sometimes the client’s quotas can be specific, and they could require participation of respondents who visited a certain event, purchased a product at an exact location, or went to a concert.

This year, we worked on a study that required talking to HCPs who were attending the World Congress on Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases (WCO Conference) in Krakow. Respondents were doing a short qual interview prior to the conference, or a survey afterwards.

Soon after going in field and recruiting from the comfort of our offices, we realized that we will have a tough time completing this one from our European offices as we were targeting a niche audience. Although respondents were coming from all over the world, some of the countries only had a handful of healthcare representatives. The solution: a couple of our team members went on a business trip to Krakow, reaching out to HCPs directly at the conference.

If the quotas require such specifics, make a trip out of it! Gather a few team members, get out of the office and try doing fieldwork in the actual field.

4. Provide First-Hand Feedback

In case that we find ourselves struggling with a study, we always reach out to experts from our panel for advice. Once we explain the criteria we have set, and the issues we are having achieving it, the respondents explain why we are faced with this challenge, and how to overcome it.

This usually requires study modifications. Yet, the clients appreciate the feedback as it helps them reach proper people, ask the right questions, and get the insights they are looking for.

Next time when your fieldwork efforts are failing, try calling one of your trusted respondents for a piece of advice. They are the experts on the topic, and their insight is invaluable in these cases.

In Conclusion

Finishing the job you got hired to do with utmost quality is always the goal, and sometimes it will require going the extra mile.

Develop and nurture the relationships with your clients by regularly executing the job in a timely matter, while providing that excellent customer support we talked about earlier.