Market research: When to do phone interviews over focus groups

Market research, such as market sizing, target marketing, market segmentation, product positioning, pricing, and customer satisfaction research, requires good data for the results to be credible. Obtaining reliable customer or prospect data needs good data collection.As a start up or an expansion stage company, if you’re wondering how to do your primary research and you are trying to decide between collecting data through a focus group and phone interviews, the following situations will help you determine when phone interviews work better than focus groups:

Phone interviews are better when the type of research you’re doing is complex: If you’re doing a study that requires your respondents to answer multi-step questions (e.g., implementing an enterprise application), it’s easier to walk each respondent through the set of questions on the phone. In a focus group environment, this will get confusing and chaotic. Phone interviews provide 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’ answers are less biased and more their own.Phone interviews are more “anonymous” and are better for gathering sensitive and in-depth information: With a phone interview, you can keep the respondents’ answers confidential. Respondents don’t have to answer questions in front of a group of strangers, which might hold them back from being open. The one-to-one relationship with the interviewer on the phone can help solve this. Phone interviews make it easier to reach your target audience: Maybe there aren’t too many of your target customers in the location/region you’re running your focus group. Phone interviews allow you to “cherry pick” prospects from across the country, and even the world. You have limited time and want to get started with your research right away: With phone interviews you can start interviewing as soon as you have your first recruit. You won’t have 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 phone 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 participation in the study. Also, the same faces tend to show up at focus groups; phone interviews allow you to talk to new people from new markets. So, with phone interviews, not only can you get more participation, but you can also get better quality participation too. Phone interviews are much cheaper: In-depth focus groups can get very expensive. Not only do you have to pay for the moderator to lead the session, you also have to pay him/her for summarizing the data 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 required to pay respondents for their participation. Conversely, if your phone interviews are short enough, a lot of times you can get by without paying anything. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts or counter arguments.

Market Research Interview Questions: Choosing the Right Style

This is a very important piece of the market research interview script design process, as it will be a major determinant of the quality and usability of the data your market research interviews produce.

There are many types of questions that can be used in a market research interview to extract different types of information at different levels of specificity from an interviewee. Below is a list of some common market research interview question types used in market research interviews with short descriptions and a short review of the pluses and minuses of each question style:

1. Single-Response Multiple Choice Questions: This is a multiple choice question that restricts the respondent to a single selection out of a listed group of options. While single-response questions constrain the choices of the respondent, they are much quicker to answer and much easier to analyze.
2. Multi-Response Multiple Choice Questions: This is a multiple-selection multiple-choice question that allows the respondent to select all answers that apply to them. This question type allows a questioner to extract a significant amount of information from a respondent in a short amount of time that is easily analyzed, due to its restricted selection format. However, this question type can also lead to incomplete responses, as respondents sometimes opt to only select one choice instead of all choices that apply. Validation questions can be added to the script to verify the accuracy of these responses.
3. Fill-in-the Blank Questions: This is a short fill-in-the-blank style question that does not restrict the respondent to a limited selection of answers. This question type allows you to collect detailed responses, but is very difficult to analyze because the responses are not standardized.
4. Free Response Questions: This is a multi-line, open-ended response question. This question type allows you to extract very detailed answers, but is extremely difficult to analyze because the responses are not standardized.
5. Rank Order Questions: This question type allows the respondent to rank a selected number of items or images based on preference. The responses to these questions are generally restricted to a list of numeric selections that are drag-and-dropped, pull-down-selected or restricted write-in. These questions are difficult to moderate over the phone, but can be very effective in determining relative preferences.
6. Single-Select Matrix Questions: This question type allows you to ask several questions consecutively using the same response scale. This question format can be used for dichotomous responses (Yes/No or True/False), multiple-choice questions or likert scale questions that measure level of agreement with a statement (Strongly Agree, Agree, Indifferent, Disagree, Strongly Disagree). Matrix questions can lead to a tendency among respondents called straight-lining, where an interviewee chooses the same or nearly the same response for every item, even if it doesn’t accurately reflect his/her thoughts. The reason this happens is because doing so is easier than carefully considering each question. However, the advantage of matrix questions is that it allows an interviewer to cover a whole series of questions quickly and it generates standardized responses that are easy to analyze.
7. Multi-Select Matrix Questions: This question type allows you to ask several questions consecutively using the same response scale. This question format works with multi-response multiple choice questions. This can be very useful on a phone interview when you do not want to have to read the selection categories for every question. This works very well when asking questions about competitors or marketing mediums that have matching responses across a series of different questions. This style of question suffers from the straight-lining tendency. Similarly, this question style can also lead to selective response memory where the responder only remembers the first or last response options offered. These questions often require validation questions to ensure accurate data, especially for important questions.

Effectively designing your market research interview questions will save you and your research team a ton of time when it comes to analyzing the results of your research because it will eliminate the need to standardize responses. Thus, you want to limit the number of free response and fill in the blank questions that you incorporate into your market research interview script.