Automation Tools for the Market Research Industry
Throughout my career in market research, I’ve created dozens of automation tools—ranging from single-purpose macros to complete toolbars—to make work easier and faster for myself and my colleagues. Where could automation help your company? This list might get you thinking:
- Questionnaire builder (Word) featuring automatic numbering of questions, renumbering of questions, response choices, and programming instructions, simple creation of Likert rating scale tables, a library of commonly used questions, and many other time saving features. I can also do Excel-based questionnaire builders. A free trial version of this tool can be downloaded here.
- Proposal writing toolbar (PowerPoint) saves many staff hours putting together professional-looking proposals and presentations, featuring branded slide modules, case studies, team bios, and a variety of visual assets.
- Qual screener builder (Word) with many of the same features as the questionnaire builder, also automatically creates an Excel recruiting grid for the field agency to report on prospective participants.
- Supplier database (Excel) keeps tabs on sub-contractor capabilities, performance, usage, and contact information.
- Project History database (Excel) helps salespeople summarize and quantify company experience with a given methodology, industry, or type of respondent.
- Trend spotter (Excel) quickly identifies and highlights upward or downward trends in tracking crosstabs based on specified criteria.
- Wave adder (Excel & PowerPoint), transfers the latest wave of tracking data from crosstabs to a table on a slide, even if wording has changed slightly, and automatically marks signficant changes and trends.
- Transcript stacker (Word) joins multiple transcripts from separate qual sessions into one document, making it easier to search and find verbatim quotations.
- Transcript Word to Excel converter (Word & Excel). Starts with Word format transcripts from qual research and helps you tag them and export them into Excel columns, so they are easier to analyze and search by question/topic.
- Significance tester (Excel) quickly highlights statistically significant changes.
Contact Bryce to discuss developing similar tools to speed up your research process.