The NPD Group, Inc. (NPD) is a Market Research company, operating in 20 countries, interviewing 12 million consumers a year, and monitoring consumer purchase data from over 165,000 stores.
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The NPD team is realistic – and proactive – about the challenges with getting consumers to complete surveys and to keep those that do engaged throughout the process. After breaking into the online research arena a decade ago with the creation of online panels, the company has used Confirmit Horizons to ensure they are able to meet their clients’ ever-growing needs.
In this case study, you’ll learn how NPD Group has been able to work closely with Confirmit to drive their business forward. This includes:
- Using the Confirmit AskMe App to drive a strong respondent experience
- Collecting the right information in the right way to allow customers to make the best business decisions possible
- Working more quickly and efficiently than ever before to stay ahead in a competitive landscape.
Breaking into the Mobile and Online Arena with Confirmit
Over the years, NPD has found that surveys are a critical component to the type of analysis they strive to complete for its customers each day – but are realistic about the difficulties with getting consumers to take surveys.
This means being proactive about finding solutions to fight survey fatigue and increase response rates. Surveys need to be a certain length in order to capture what’s really happening in the market and how changes impact an individual consumer’s shopping habits, but it can be difficult to capture interest and maintain engagement throughout the survey. Because of this, NPD has had to get creative and survey consumers in a variety of ways to get a total picture of a consumer’s shopping lifecycle – where they are shopping, when they are shopping, how they are shopping, for example.
This is where the Confirmit and NPD story begins. “Once NPD broke into the online arena, with the creation of its online panels, we knew we needed to find the right partnership, and continue developing and nourishing that partnership over the years,” said Jean Davis, SVP of Global Panels, The NPD Group, Inc. “Since that point, NPD has used Confirmit Horizons – so much so that we’ve been able to grow with Confirmit, particularly in the mobile arena. Once we found Confirmit and made the decision to engage with them, all our immediate needs were met, and we knew we could grow as a true partnership, together in the industry.”
Specific features of the online panels that are critical to the NPD program center around the ability to provide respondents with the complete mobile experience – SMS texting, incentive distribution, help desk, and more – all which tie back into a back-end panel management system to track completes, communication, as well as sampling. Because of the constant industry changes, NPD has had to continuously keep an open dialog with Confirmit, so they can change their data collection processes as necessary to ensure they are providing their clients with what they need. Specifically, NPD leverages many of Confirmit’s features, including mobile optimization, proprietary functionality, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to hide questions once they’ve been answered (e.g. demographics,gender and age). NPD also uses the Confirmit AskMe app, which allows participants to take part in multimedia or text surveys without an internet connection – wherever and whenever it suits them.
This app has provided respondents with an increasingly easy and seamless experience, significantly helping to fight the ongoing battle against survey fatigue. Davis continues, Confirmit has been instrumental from the start in helping us collect the right information in the right way to get our customers’ insights on which to make the best possible business decisions. Beyond that, we are always searching for what more we can be doing for our clients, and Confirmit is always at the forefront of that discussion, offering solutions and new ways to integrate their technology into our offerings and research analysis. Confirmit is consistently helping us get more sophisticated by helping us analyze how we are collecting data on the back end, and decide how we want to format it to make sure we get our customers what they need.
Through this dynamic partnership, and NPD’s constant desire to evolve and grow as a company, they have been able to get results to the clients quicker and more efficiently. Furthermore, NPD is able to scale up, for example launching global trackers, and in a much shorter timeframe than previous iterations. With the help of Confirmit, NPD can accurately estimate when these surveys and trackers will launch and know exactly what metrics need to be measured. NPD knows that by using Confirmit, they are getting the reliability and standards they need to collect the right data for its clients in order to produce optimal results. Thus, this is a more efficient and cost-effective way to get the business up and running in the Market Research sector.