Definition: A survey consultant will provide your company with expertise in planning and launching a survey and analyzing the results. These surveys can be used for customer, employee, or general market research. A good survey consultant should be well-versed in data science and programming, allowing them to solve a wide range of problems.
These seven survey consulting services offer planning, design, development, and support to help complete your survey project. Because every project is different, some firms here may be a better fit than others.
This article will also include tips on planning a survey consulting engagement and an overview of the skills a consultant should possess.
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 | $100 hr | Customer and employee satisfaction, MaxDiff, Conjoint. |
| 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. |
| Conjointly | Not Listed | Product testing, logo testing, Kano modeling. |
| ICF | Not Listed | Telephone interviews and in-person interviews across the country. |
| Toptal | Varies | Hire your own freelancer based on skill sets. |
1. SurveyKing
SurveyKing consulting services can help with anything from survey design, distribution, and analysis of the results. The survey 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 at $100 per hour and no minimum project size.
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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Conjointly
With almost every imaginable research question available on the platform, Conjointly is an excellent choice for advanced research projects. They offer a full stack of consulting services, including survey creation, data analysis, and AI-based text analysis.
If you’re looking to conduct product or market research, especially with tools such as Kano models or A/B tests, consider contacting the Conjointly team to get started.
6. ICF
If you need help sourcing respondents for telephone interviews, in-person surveys, or research, ICF is the company you should use. In addition to helping you source respondents, they also offer a full stack of consulting services to help you design and deploy your survey.
ICF has experience across the United States with federal, state, and local agencies, universities, nonprofits, and for-profit organizations. Its team of statisticians and subject matter experts ensures that the responses you gather from your project will turn into actionable data.
7. Toptal
Toptal is a freelance platform that connects businesses with independent professionals, including survey consultants. It claims to represent the top talent by screening thousands of applicants monthly—accepting fewer than 3%—to ensure only the top tier of freelancers are offered.
If you’re looking to vet and chat with your survey consultant, then Toptal is a good choice. You can borrow from experts, some of which might be in a niche industry you need for your project!
Planning a Survey Consulting Engagement
The most crucial step of a survey consulting engagement is defining clear, actionable research objectives. This will help shape the questions you include in your survey, avoid collecting irrelevant data, and improve how you collect responses.
When defining your project objectives, consider immediate and long-term ones. For example, if you want to measure employee satisfaction, your survey should include a Net Promoter Score question. This question could also be used in future surveys to establish benchmarks.
Survey distribution is also a critical component of a survey. Depending on your project type, a different collection may be best. An embedded Net Promoter Score question in an email might help increase responses for customer surveys. A union survey could benefit from a QR code. Market research about a hypothetical product would be best suited for a survey panel or audience.
Determine how you’ll present and analyze the results. Depending on what you need, this can help shape what consultant you hire. If you’re doing segmentation, statistical tools such as statistical significance are essential. Consider incorporating AI and sentiment analysis to categorize open-ended feedback to get actionable insights.
If the end users of your data want a PDF file, then that should also be an essential point to consider. A consultant well versed in HTML and CSS could create a custom PDF dynamically, enabling you to reuse the report for future studies.
What Skills Should a Survey Consulting Service Have?
When hiring a survey consultant keep these skills in mind. This will ensure you find the right firm or person for your project!
Communication Skills
A consultant skilled in listening to and addressing your needs is extremely valuable. This will ensure that even the fine details of your project are understood. A consultant who quickly responds to emails or phone calls will be there for you to address any problems that may arise in a project.
Industry Expertise
Depending on your project, you may need a niche industry expert. This can help identify issues that you may not be aware of. For example, SurveyKing is heavily involved in creating union surveys. Some clients have wanted to use ranking questions to create the most important items for contract negotiations.
However, ranking only shows one side of the equation. MaxDiff goes beyond ranking and will identify divisive attributes. With this tool, needs can be assessed by seniority, location, or job type. Without industry expertise, unions would have missed out on valuable data.
Data Mining
Many survey consulting projects first require data to be organized to help distribute the survey and define the scope. This could include pulling email addresses from a customer relationship management system or identifying current opportunities to shape survey questions.
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.
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