Definition: These 4 survey consulting services offer planning, design, development, and support to help complete your survey project. Whether it’s for customer satisfaction or market research, a survey consultant will ensure you collect the data you need.
A good survey consulting firm should have a wide variety of skills and an all-encompassing platform to ensure your project can be completed from start to finish. The skills include data mining, knowledge of research questions like MaxDiff and Conjoint, statistics, and business intelligence tools.
Below is a quick summary of these 4 consulting services. A detailed review and ranking of each are also included later on in this article.
| Company | Rates | Key Offerings |
|---|---|---|
| SurveyKing | $50 hr | MaxDiff, Conjoint, statistics, customer satisfaction, employee engagment |
| Qualtircs | Not listed | Customer experience, research questions, Fortune 500 experience |
| Alchemer | Not listed | Integrations like Service Cloud, JIRA, Tableau, research tools |
| Sawtooth | Not listed | MaxDiff, Conjoint, statistics |
What Skills Should a Survey Consulting Service Have?
Often a survey project can involve multiple steps. For example, you might need to gather customer metrics, implement research questions, or export survey data to other tools. Understanding these points will ensure you can hire the correct consulting service.
Data Mining
Many survey consulting projects first require an understanding of current data to help define the scope of the survey. This could include organizing customer data to find present trouble spots, organizing customer email lists, or identifying what current products are selling best.
SQL is an essential tool in data mining as it is the language used to access data within a database. A good consulting firm can help create queries and view to help your company access the required information.
Knowledge of Research Questions
To get good data, you need to ask good questions. MaxDiff will help your company identify what is least and most important. Conjoint is similar and will allow you to measure the most important attributes and pricing. Gabor Granger is another tool to help map demand and projected revenue curves. The firm you work with should be familiar with these tools and recommend them to you during the survey design.
Statistics
The research questions mentioned above all use a statistical model on the backend to display results. Logistic regression is used for MaxDiff and Conjoint to help you predict the most valued attributes. Depending on the project and survey design, a custom statistical model may need to be created.
For Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction surveys, open-ended text questions can be automatically tagged to a category using natural language processing. Depending on your industry, the tagging might need to be done with a custom-built model.
Business Intelligence Tools
If your company wants to export the survey results to a dashboard tool such as Tableau, then ensuring the firm you choose understands business intelligence tools is crucial. You’d want to create a SQL view as the source data with most BI tools. To save the survey data to your servers, you might want to ensure the firm you work with has a survey API.
1. SurveyKing
SurveyKing consulting services can help with anything from data mining to survey design. The platform includes all the needed research question types such as MaxDiff, Conjoint, Gabor Granger, and Van Westendorp.
SurveyKing offers a separate Net Promoter Score report, making measuring and tracking customer satisfaction metrics easy. In addition, segments can be created to view results by region, something the consultants can help guide you with.
The anonymous survey feature is perfect for employee surveys. Simple consulting projects on best practices and survey design can help even the smallest of firms implement an employee feedback process.
SurveyKing is an excellent survey consulting service with simple, transparent pricing and no minimum project size.
SurveyKing Consulting Key Points
- All research questions are part of their platform
- Can help build custom statistical models
- Separate Net Promoter Score reporting module and implementation
- Truly anonymous surveys for employee surveys + help getting started
2. Qualtrics
Being one of the largest online survey platforms, Qualtrics also offers consulting services. From design to implementation, Qualtrics can help you create the perfect survey.
Qualtrics strongly focuses on experience management, which means constantly monitoring customer interactions to find ways to improve. If you’re waiting to develop a large-scale experience program, then Qualtrics is an ideal option.
Their survey platform has a wide variety of question types, including MaxDiff and Conjoint. Unfortunately, the platform doesn’t have pricing research questions, like Gabor Granger or Van Westendorp, but a consultant can help you create the logic of the questions using other question types.
Qualtrics Consulting Key Points
- Focus on experience management
- Has worked with many Fortune 500 companies
- The platform offers some research questions
Alchemer Consulting
Another sizeable online survey platform, Alchemer, also offers consulting services. One of their most extensive selling features is integrating your surveys with other services such as Slack, JIRA, and Salesforce Service Cloud. This helps automate what actions should be taken after you get a response, such as logging a help desk ticket.
The platform does offer MaxDiff and Conjoint but not Gabor Granger or Van Westendorp. They provide users with unique question types like a continuous sum and a heat map. Their consultants can help guide you on when to integrate those question types into your project.
Alchemer Key Points
- Offers help with integrations into other platforms
- Can help with custom reporting like PDFs
- The platform has a few research questions available
Sawtooth Survey Consulting
Known as the go-to platform for advanced survey research projects, Sawthooth offers consulting services with a strong focus on analytics. If you need help with Conjoint analysis, including a custom Conjoint design, then Sawtooth is the best option.
Their consulting staff has a wide range of experience from education to market research and banking. They can help you run the entire survey project or provide support to help you run strides yourself.
Sawtooth Consulting Key Points
- Focused on analytics and Conjoint analysis
- Lots of different industry experience
ABOUT THE AUTOR
Allen is the founder of SurveyKing. A former CPA and government auditor, he understands how important quality data is in decision making. He continues to help SurveyKing accomplish their main goal: providing organizations around the world with low-cost high-quality feedback tools.
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