Winning strategies for research agencies: Connecting research & human experience

At Forsta, we get to see both sides of the research and experience industry. Not only do we work with hundreds of research agencies around the world; we also work with some of the world’s most dynamic and forward-thinking client organizations.

Many of the world’s largest companies use our technology to understand their audiences, identify opportunities and improve experiences.

This unique position has helped us see how successful innovators are bringing together the disciplines of Customer Experience, Customer Insights and Market Research. They overcome internal silos to pursue a holistic understanding of their most important stakeholder: the customer.

We believe this philosophy will shape the future of the research & experience industries, and we have a name for it.

We call it Human Experience, or HX.

Human experience unites the capabilities, data and technologies that help companies understand the people they serve. It’s underpinned by software, but it’s really a philosophy and a framework.

It’s about creating joined-up insights about people – be they customers, colleagues, patients, citizens or any other group.

These whole person insights come from connecting qualitative and quantitative research; integrating behavioural data with feedback; and working across market research, user research, customer experience and employee experience teams.

Many research agencies already do this and are capitalizing on the movement to HX. The benefits they see include:

• Better quality insights for their clients that combine different signals and methods
• Agency growth from new customers beyond the traditional market research or consumer insights department
• New revenue streams with income from continuous monitoring, behavioural data or strategic workshops – not only primary research
• Higher revenue growth from new HX categories: CX Management, for example, is forecast to grow at 18% annually between 2021 and 2026 [1] – vs 3% for established market research [2]

This ‘shift to HX’ manifests itself in several ways, such as adding experience management to research capabilities or design insights projects that seamlessly connect quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

Dublin-based agency W5, for example, measures business customer satisfaction with voice, mobile and data services for eir Large Business using Customer Effort (CE) and Net Promoter Score (NPS). This program helped to deliver reduced churn, improved revenue and significant long-run cost reductions.

Elsewhere in the world, Brazilian research consultancy Albar Research wanted to understand the roots of childhood obesity across Latin America. They combined online surveys and smartphone diaries to collect rich insights from parents and children across the region.

There are many more examples like this elsewhere on the Forsta website, where you can read stories of agencies building human experience capabilities around a core of market research.

More winning strategies for Market Research Agencies

Read more about Forsta’s take on the coming golden age for research agencies, and the key strategies being implemented in our full white paper.