In an increasingly digital world, businesses have the potential to learn a lot more about their customers. Website clicks, online store browsing, and payment transactions can all provide businesses with an unprecedented amount of data. Data that can provide clues about customer behaviour and trends.

Building a robust consumer panel

The potential of consumer data to unlock deeper and more valuable customer insights hinges on that data coming from large, robust, and actively managed consumer panels. And that starts with a “respondent-centric” approach to panel recruitment and data collection.

Recruitment should occur via carefully selected recruitment channels managed to ensure quality throughout the recruitment process such as telephone interviews, rather than a public registration page. This creates a direct relationship with panellists, which in turn protects against fake users and self-selection bias.

Consumer panels also need to be large enough to be truly representative of the population. Using a diverse range of methods and sources helps ensure the large response volumes required to generate statistically significant results.

In addition to robust recruiting methods, quality consumer market research panels also require a great deal of curation and active management. Small incentives and rewards, for example, keep panellists invested and reminds them that the answers they provide are important. Ongoing checks and other quality assurance measures also help identify and weed out speeders or fraudulent users.

In summary, quality consumer data can help businesses gain more and better insights from the ever-increasing amount of internal customer data already at their fingertips. And the preferred source for that data are results of surveys conducted with robust, well-managed consumer panels.