Benefits of Multi-Company Surveys Part 3

In the last two articles, we've looked at some of the benefits of running a multi-company survey – essentially the act of measuring the same items for competitors in addition to your own company. But often in survey research there is a give and take. Today we'll look at some of the weaknesses of running this type of study.

In House Studies These types of studies are difficult to do in-house. There is too much of a risk that your company's involvement and branding will bias the results.

However, outsourcing your research is often too costly depending on the company you choose to run it. You would need to either find a good way to run the survey in house that won't affect your results or outsource to a company you trust to perform the research for you. Longer Survey Another more blatant problem is the increase in survey length.

This could be mitigated by the value you get from using the same sample, because you are comparing within-research, rather than assuming the results represent the rest of the population. Still, it is something that could increase the dropout rate. Larger Sample You may also need a larger sample for the data itself to be meaningful.

You do not know that you'll get respondents that will have a lot of experience with each of the competitors, and you don't want to make a judgment about a competitor (or your own company) based on too small a sample size. Getting a large sample is important, so that you can be certain that you have a representative result about each company you compare against. Different Data Finally, because your data collection method is different from a standard satisfaction survey, it's not always possible to assume the results of your study would be the same if you ran the survey independently.

This can cause some problems with tracking changes, because while your overall scores may change for the better, it's hard to know if your own services have improved or a competitor's has gotten worse.

Still, despite these weaknesses, this is a style of survey that may be worth attempting. You can gain a lot of very valuable information from this type of study, learning not only about your own company but also how it rates with your chief competitors. It's easy to see why this research can be valuable for your business.