Boston Research Services, Inc. is a full-service quantitative market research firm located in Boston, Massachusetts. The company manages a proprietary panel of business respondents with specialty panels in various industries including: Healthcare, Finance, IT, Education, MFG, Transportation, General Contractors (Painters, HVAC, Construction, etc.) and General (all other industries). BRS does everything from methodology development, survey design, fielding, data processing, analysis and advanced analysis of data, report writing and presentations.
Of the services you offer, is there one in particular that is still emerging, and you feel holds the most unfulfilled promise? If so, why and how do you see it evolving / helping your clients in the future?
We are most well known for our panel, and that is our bread and butter, but we have so much talent within our methodology/design and analytics teams. We are really focusing on selling our full-service capabilities in 2024. We have so much to offer there.
For several years now research companies have realized they can’t simply deliver insights, but need to consult closely with clients to help them implement and communicate insights across their corporations to have a real impact. How are you going about this?
When conducting full-service research, especially where we are a part of the analysis, we always include a round table discussion on “what’s next”? What do we do with this data? How will it be implemented? Within six months we always follow up to check on the progress and see if there are any unanswered questions we can address, any secondary research, tracker or additional primary research needs we can assist with. This has proven to be very effective for our clients as it helps them review our original goals and see what progress has been made to address said goals.
How do you see the role of the research methods that you employ changing as data streams continue to proliferate and analytics becomes more sophisticated? Clients are expecting more real-time data and analytics so they can implement changes as they are happening rather than act on things that were happening last month. Whether it’s clickstream data or monitoring transactions in real time, these are having an impact on the pace and time of the types of analytics used, as well as the delivery modes and methods being employed.
If you had to identify a single obstacle to gaining better insights – what would it be?
Fraud, Fraud, Fraud! As soon as someone invents a technology to tackle a particular type of fraud there is another way these fraudsters can get in. It’s an ongoing battle for the Panel industry and their software/security teams. It will always be an ongoing process. We have fraud detection software in place that helps detect these folks but you really have to have your IT Team on speed dial in case any issues arise.
What is the number-one area of improvement your business is working on?
Building the panel is the main goal right now. We are also working towards more sophisticated methods of respondent verification.
What are the most common problems that brands bring to your door?
Brands need to be able to bring the right message to the right audience at the right time. In order to do this they need to know what their message is (value proposition) who their audience is (market segment) and when to deliver the message. Segmentation has always been an invaluable tool to discover who the target audience is and that is something we still see as a constant in 2023 going into 2024