Bonus Insights

In addition to the standard methodologies of telephone surveys, web surveys and focus groups, WestGroup offers a variety of other technologies and services.

Listed below you can find additional services in more detail that we offer. We encourage you to contact your WestGroup representative for more information.

Mystery Shopper Studies

Determine how to improve sales and service performance. Professional shoppers make personal visits or telephone calls to your place of business, follow a pre-determined scenario, and objectively rate the quality of service and sales effort.

  • Identify your company’s strengths and weaknesses.
  • Objectively measure sales and service performance.
  • Document additional information such as facility appeal, how long a customer had to wait, or the number of times the phone rang before being answered.

This evaluative tool assesses the quality of service.

The Shopper Study is a valuable training tool. It is very important to adopt a “catch employees doing something right” approach to the study. If implemented before you begin any in-service training, the Shopper Study will pinpoint areas needing improvement which can then be effectively addressed and corrected through training.

Applied as a tracking study, ratings tell the story of improvements and downfalls over time. In a competitive environment, a Shopper Study can also supply information about the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, revealing specific opportunities and threats for your institution.

Bulletin Boards

An online “bulletin board” is a qualitative research technique that allows for extended discussion over a period of time.  Participants log in at times and from locations that are convenient to them, answering questions posted by a moderator.  Researchers can choose how much of the online discussion participants can see. Participants are asked to come onto the board once or twice a day for shorter periods – for example, 3 days – or less often for longer running boards.  While the average group size is 17 to 20, boards have been conducted with 80 or more participants.

Benefits of Bulletin Boards

  • Allows for more time than the standard focus group to cover broad subject matter
  • May result in richer responses as participants are not rushed to answer questions
  • Provides the moderator with an opportunity to give participants a variety of exercises/tasks during the study
  • The ability to ask “masked” questions (those participants can see only after they have responded); this eliminates any issue of group influence
  • Convenient for participants
  • Clients can observe the process as it unfolds
  • Eliminates travel expenses, time and hassles

 Potential Applications:

  • Ideal for B2B or other audiences that are difficult to convene due to scheduling and/or geography
  • Ad or other concept testing
  • Studies dealing with sensitive topics or issues that provoke strong opinions
  • Studies in which participant-created stimuli are used

Text Analytics

In its most basic form, text analytics is an automated way of combing through a large volume of data, such as responses to open-ended questions, focus group transcripts, call center logs and social media content, to understand what is being discussed.  In addition to content, this tool is often used to evaluate sentiment.

Benefits of Text Analytics

  • Quickly analyze vast amounts of unstructured data
  • Quickly categorize sentiments such as likes/dislikes and positive/negative
  • Software allows for customization based on client needs
  • Allows users to query the database using search words/phrases
  • Add richness to reporting by enabling researchers to identify and include relevant verbatim comments

Potential Applications:

  • Customer Experience / VOC studies / call center logs
  • Analyze qualitative research text prior to quantitative instrument design
  • Qualitative transcripts
  • Social media listening

 

otherservices

WestGroup Research has collaborated with research experts for over 60 years. We have designed our services to provide the best insight for our clients, so they can focus on the research.