Editor's note: Melanie Courtright is executive vice president, global products and client services at Research Now.

The automation of market research has been talked about in various guises for several years. Many, if not all, of the evolutionary steps the industry has made have been born out of the demand for a quicker and cheaper route to enhanced knowledge and understanding to inform business decisions. The most obvious and far-felt example occurred roughly 15 years ago, when the industry began transitioning from phone- and paper-based surveys to online data collection. Data collection firms (like Research Now) pioneered the use of software algorithms to recruit and sample respondents at a massive scale and at speeds that were previously impossible. Of late, additional automation has occurred in the fields of mobile research, data analysis at a massive scale (big data) and behavioral research, to name a few. Some commentators expect that automation will continue to improve the research experience, specifically around speed.

In July 2016, Research Now conducted a survey among its key corporate buyers to gather their views on the automation trend. When asked what is most important to them in terms of automated research, real-time results (56 percent) and “instant” results (52 percent) come out on top. Also, 75 percent of the participants believe that the ability to share with others is a “must have” feature within an automated tool, eliminating the need to do much (if any) of the heavy lifting on their own.

In the 2016 Quirk’s Corporate Researcher survey for this report, corporate clients were asked about the greatest challenges they face when conducting research: 42 percent of survey participants said that “not completing a project fast enough” was always or often a challenge. Furthermore, 58 percent of participants said that speed was either very important or extremely important when choosing which research technique to use (ranked third after a representative sample and proven methodology). Users of research want their research output quicker! 1 2

As this demand for faster research continues, efficiencies are being sought by the industry across the whole research process: design, sampling, data collection, analysis and reporting. We are also seeing research buying behavior change – the unbundling of services across the research project cycle allows research buyers to benefit from specialized expertise and, in some cases (and often with carefully considered compromise), a speedier delivery.

Clear opportunities

The principle of automation is for the task to be undertaken automatically, without human involvement. So, for Research Now, as a panel company, we have recognized some clear opportunities for research process automation: automated sampling, automated survey scripting and automated visualization of data (through online reporting dashboards or tools).

One new way our clients are taking advantage of automated sampling is by incorporating their proprietary customer segments within our panel, so that they can quickly and easily target specific customer types based on their chosen research objectives. This saves them (and us!) tremendous time as we can be quite thoughtful about how we reach out to respondents while improving qualification and completion rates and lowering our clients’ costs.

An emerging methodology involving automated scripting is the use of templated, pre-built questionnaires with minimal changes from study to study, usually limited to only the specific brand or product category being tested. This process eliminates time-intensive survey scripting and ensures that the results are collected in a standardized manner, which allows for their use in benchmarking and other normative analyses. A residual effect of this process is that it forces the researcher to be quite thoughtful in their questionnaire design, which generally results in a higher-quality data collection process. We have seen this process be most effective for recurring studies like concept and creative testing.

Of course, automated data visualization represents a substantial time and cost savings, as many software tools can quickly process complicated data files and display the results in easy-to-understand layouts. These tools allow researchers to handle much bigger data sets and spend less time creating (or re-creating!) common charts and graphs.

We’ve combined various elements of the automated research process to develop Research Now Marketplace automated research, a standardized set of common research studies that take advantage of the benefits described above. To ensure we had the mind of the researcher at heart, we got our research experts together and determined the questions that needed to be asked in order to obtain the research objective for each topic, including an experienced researcher monitoring the inputs to ensure quality data will be delivered. Many other research suppliers are also experimenting with automation techniques to provide high-quality research in a quick and cost-effective manner.

A mixed understanding

Our clients have a mixed understanding of what “automated research” means to them. When we asked them to tell us in their own words, we had responses such as, “Not sure,” “I have no idea,” “Not sure – haven’t heard the term before” and “It does not mean anything.” Some consider it to be “surveys triggered by an event or at a specific time” while others believe it to be “real-time reaction from consumers.”

Clients recognize that automated research is research not requiring human interaction or intervention and point to specific elements of the research process: “Automation of various areas of research that previously required human intervention, such as sentiment analysis, using text or speech analysis, to gather qualitative information about a respondent’s views.”

There is also the view that automated research is characterized by a self-serve approach, as well as automated reporting/results dashboards with little to no analyst involvement. While true, we believe that automation is not always exclusive of human involvement but rather lets machines handle tedious process tasks while allowing researchers to focus on the more interesting elements of research design, insight-generation and business recommendations. When properly used, automated research techniques should make the researcher’s job more fun!

In addition to there being some confusion as to what automated research might be, very few of our corporate clients can name any providers of automated research, with most people not knowingly having purchased any type of automated research. However, the majority (84 percent) of our corporate clients surveyed believe that it is very important to have a trusted and well-known panel source behind any automated solution.

As you will recall, our corporate clients mentioned that “instant” results drive the need for automated research. This is echoed across the market research industry with pressure on the panel companies to provide rapid data collection. This can be driven by certain industry segments and, in our experience, this comes from media agencies, PR firms and end-corporates. They may have different reasons for exerting this pressure and in some cases compromises have to be made; the more we can do to deliver the speed without the compromises, the better.

Respond to the demands of the market

Industry experts and commentators agree that existing market research companies and data providers need to find efficiencies and respond to the demands of the market – if we don’t, someone else will. I recently heard an interesting observation that the disruptive players in marketing research don’t consider themselves to be “in” market research. What industry experts don’t necessarily agree on is when automation is going to make a difference. Earlier this year, for example, I was told that automation was going to be a big thing this year.

Quite naturally, changing a research technique can be hard and cause angst within an organization. Some of our clients have objected to automated research techniques due to their perceived need to customize every research project. Of course, many research projects require unique methodologies and we don’t expect all research to utilize automated techniques. However, for many of the routine, recurring research objectives that an organization deploys (concept testing, ad testing, branding studies, customer satisfaction, etc.), automated research provides tremendous benefits vs. “reinventing the wheel” for every project.

Fundamentally, corporate researchers are being called on (and are calling out) for immediately actionable insight and the pressure for faster research delivery will be unrelenting. Using technology to enhance the speed at which we conduct research is essential for success in market research.