This is the title of a recently-released report based on a survey of CASRO members conducted in August and September of 2006. (The full report is here: http://www.consultcambiar.com/news/The%20Future%20of%20The%20Survey%20Research%20Industry.pdf .) As its title suggests, the report is focused on how CASRO members see the future of our industry, both in terms of the key challenges we face and the ways in which client needs and expectations may change.
The challenges seem to fall in three broad areas: respondent cooperation, technology, and staffing. The cooperation issue tops the list with 72 percent of respondents identifying it as a major issue for the next five years. It is hard to think of anything more pressing than figuring out how best to convince people to tell us what our clients need to know to make informed decisions. The principal concern in technology revolves around the ability to make the needed investments to stay competitive, both in terms of collecting and processing survey data as well as delivering it to clients. The third issue of staffing breaks down into several different areas with over half of respondents concerned about some combination of research skills, ability to sell, and account management.
A major issue driving the concern about staffing is the expectation that clients in the future are going to want a lot more from their MR partners in terms of business knowledge, consulting, and even strategic planning than they have in the past. The skills that CASRO members believe will be important going forward reflect that expectation. They include having knowledge of and understanding client business issues, the ability to consult with senior management, and the ability to tell a story. But topping the list is the ability to integrate data from different sources, something that will be increasingly important as we try to deliver more holistic solutions to clients than we have tended to deliver in the past. For a variety of reasons, the longstanding tradition of designing and conducting a primary research project and then reporting the results may well give way to reports that rely on a variety of primary and secondary data sources. The ability to absorb, analyze,and synthesize all of this into a compelling story for the client will be a key skill.
All that said, it is interesting to look at the specific roles that respondents say will comprise a successful research company in 2016. They are project managers (80 percent), analysts (78 percent), account managers (77 percent), research managers (74 percent), statisticians (70 percent), IT specialists (64 percent), and consultants (64 percent).
There are also a few interesting disagreements:
- Fifty-seven percent disagree that in order to be competitive they will need to offshore some of their processes.
- Fifty-nine percent also disagree that they need to have all of their functions in-house to ensure data quality and integrity.
- The report says: ". . . CASRO members emphatically do not believe that all research will be panel-based in ten years!" The precise distribution on this item is not reported.
And finally, just 45 percent of respondents say that they would recommend survey research to their children as a career. Do what you will with that one.