Phone Interviews Or Focus Groups? Market Research Tips To Live By
Market research, like market sizing, target marketing, market segmentation, product positioning, pricing, and customer satisfaction research, requires great information for the results to be reputable. Getting trustworthy client or prospective client data requires great data compilation.
As a start up or an expansion stage company, if you’re speculating how to undertake your key research and you are trying to decide between collecting information via a focus group and telephone interviews, the following scenarios below will aid you in deciding when telephone interviews work better than focus groups:
Phone interviews are preferable when the kind of research you’re carrying out is complicated: If you’re carrying out a study that demands your respondents to reply to multi-step questions (e.g., applying an enterprise application), it’s less trouble-free to guide every respondent through the set of questions on the phone. In a focus group atmosphere, this is only going to get confusing and chaotic.
Phone interviews present you with a “cleaner read”: In a focus group, respondents’ thought processes could be very easily influenced by other group members. Since phone interviews are one-on-one, respondents’ replies are less subjective and more their own.
Phone interviews are more “anonymous” and are better for gathering classified and in-depth data : With a telephone interview, you can keep the respondents’ answers private. Respondents needn’t have to answer questions in front of a group of strangers, which might prevent them from being honest. The one-to-one relationship with the interviewer on the phone can aid in remedying this.
Phone interviews make it much easier to make contact with your target audience: Maybe there aren’t too many of your target market in the location/region you’re running your focus group. Telephone interviews let you to “cherry pick” prospects from across the country, and even the world.
You have inadequate time and intend to get started with your research immediately: With phone interviews you can begin interviewing as soon as you have your first recruit. You won’t suffer the time lag that you’d otherwise have with getting a group of respondents together, deciding on a location, a moderator and planning an entire event; you can do your telephone interviews by yourself.
Better participation from respondents: Since respondents can take phone calls from anywhere, they can be more flexible, which increases the chance of contribution in the study. Also, the same faces tend to show up at focus groups; telephone interviews allow you to talk to new people from new markets. So, with phone interviews, not only can you get more input, but you can also get better quality input too.
Telephone interviews are much cheaper: In-depth focus groups can get extremely costly. Not only do you have to pay for the moderator to lead the session, you also have to pay him/her for summarizing the information and presenting it to you. In the case that you want to attend the focus group yourself, you have to add in the cost of your travel, lodging and other expenses, along with the financial incentives needed to pay respondents for their participation. Conversely, if your telephone interviews are short enough, often times you can get by without paying anything.
Faria Rahman assists our portfolio with research initiatives.
