What is the relationship between the high-quality recruiting of respondents and long-term profit of the company?
Read the article at https://www.marketologi.ru/publikatsii/stati/4433/
If your company is one of the market leaders, and you have high customer loyalty rates in the rating of mobile applications in the play market, and satisfied users, then when investing in your website or conducting usability testing of a mobile application, we advise you to consider the costs associated with launching a recruit as an investment in the product itself. This will help you to realize that it is not worth saving at all stages of this process, including recruiting respondents. After all, it is the correctly selected target audience, the real users of your product, who can share what they are not satisfied with and appreciate the merits of the product or service and will be able to give an objective assessment of your company. And if the recruiting of participants in your research is carried out poorly, then instead of objective information you will receive a random set of irrelevant answers. And based on this "information" (meaningless and useless), with a high degree of probability, you will make the wrong decision. The result of which will be the loss of time, resources and reduced profits. Then it would be better not to conduct research at all, and not to waste time and money on recruiting.
And if your company is not a market leader, and the company's management does not believe that it is necessary to allocate a sufficient budget for research in order to obtain accurate data on the output, in this case, we recommend doing the following:
Send mailing to your customer base and invite respondents from it who will be your target audience. It is necessary to indicate the cost of the remuneration, which will be proportional to the respondent's time spent at work. The income level of an “ordinary” respondent can be taken at the level of the average in Moscow (or in another city in which the study is being conducted). The level of remuneration of "experts" should be commensurate with the rates accepted in the field of their professional activity. The amount of remuneration for such “ordinary” respondents can be 1500-2000 rubles (in Moscow). In the mailing list, we immediately indicate the amount of remuneration, we ask you to take part in the research and contribute to the development of the market, and the product in particular. Then we call those who responded and invite them to the office or offer to participate remotely, for example, via Skype. If necessary, the respondent can direct you at all the stages of working with the application recording the process by shooting a video from the phone screen where you will see yourself all possible bugs of your mobile application. For example, in one of the companies it was not immediately possible to establish that it took a long time to receive an SMS code. It took ten of these successful videos and the company received feedback from the audience, which helped to eliminate the problem that reduced the response rate significantly. Now it is imperative to take half of the respondents who are not your clients. Naturally, it is better to do this through a specialized recruiting agency. Non-customer respondents can also be interviewed in the office or remotely and then analyze the recording of their phone screen.
One more tip!
It is better not to conduct testing if you are not sure that it will be of a high quality, in confirmation of this, you can only worsen your rating in the play market or search positions. If a potential client enters the site, he will immediately leave it, because the usability of the site is not well thought out, the search engines will subsequently remove the site's positions in the search, which will just as badly affect the company's profitability later.
So, conducting usability testing or interviewing is a very crucial stage. Before starting it, you need to find a reliable partner, in which you will be completely confident. Only a highly specialized company can help with this.
How "high-quality" recruiting differs from "low-quality"
High-quality recruiting is when you clearly describe what kind of respondents you need for research and you have completely selected the right participants according to the given criteria. For example, you have indicated that you need respondents who are individual entrepreneurs and have opened a current account in the last 6 months, you initially indicate the list of banks in which the respondent opened an account and set a quota that you need only 10 people with 5 different banks from the Top10. When recruiting, you made sure that this person really did all the processes on his own, he can immediately describe all the processes and difficulties that he met on his way, you will immediately fix these cases. For example, he told you that he went to the first site (of the bank) where he wanted to open an account, the site froze and the form with the filled data was not saved, as a result he went to the competitor's site. When testing a site, it is worth recording this information and check whether the data is saved on your site when a person enters it, so that he does not have to enter data several times in the event of a freeze on the site. Otherwise, you will see, from an uncertain speech that the person did not have experience in opening an online IP account, does not understand this topic, cannot describe the whole process, by interviewing such a respondent you will receive irrelevant data that will not help your company to improve customer service but only harm, because the developers will make additions on the site that the potential client will not appreciate, and later he will immediately leave the site and will not place an order.
It is important to keep in close contact with the recruiting agency while working as a team. In the course of work, you will see whether this company is interested in your success, whether you can discuss the details of your projects with the head of the company, to what extent this person is available to you, this is also one of the indicators of a client-oriented company that does not put the service of recruiting respondents on the stream.
One of the examples is our last case; a request from one of the companies specializing in usability testing. They made a project for the state portal, the respondents they needed for the survey were owners of premium car brands purchased over the past two years, there was a quota for the number of "horses" from 170. There was also a quota for specific brands and the year of release. The range of the cost of these cars started from 2.5 million rubles. When we prepared a commercial proposal for this company, including the budget for recruiting - 10,000 rubles and the remuneration for the respondents of this target audience - 10,000 rubles, the manager said that there was no point in further discussion. That means, we did not fit into their budget, which was fundamentally wrong, we are sure that they conducted the testing, but who participated in the testing? This is an irrelevant target audience. The site that is tested on this target audience will not be successful and, the only thing that saves the situation can only be that the customer of this company was a state monopoly organization, which did not go into the details of the project and, most importantly, the issue related to recruiting.
Who will test our service and how do you guarantee a quality sample?
When you work in the field of UX or research, you should understand that if you work for a company that does not put its reputation at the forefront, but can carry out such projects, its image will indirectly affect your authority in the market as an expert. Therefore, the key point is to convey to the management that the tactics of work have been chosen incorrectly or to change the company since such organizations do not make the market better through constant dumping. At the output, goods and services are produced that do not meet the needs of consumers, do not help the market as a whole to become better. The consumer is willing to pay more and get a better product or service. This key point must not be omitted. Do not chase the price as described in the example above. Initially, you need to go to a market professional.
How do audiences differ in price?
Here we can take the following example. You are recruited for a research, your monthly income is about 80 thousand rubles or 3650 rubles for one working day. How interesting is it for you to take time off from work and come to the study if the motivation in monetary terms is 1000 rubles? We understand that this is unacceptable and we need to value the time of a person who is willing to spend time and take part in the research. And it will take him 2 - 3 hours. Adequate remuneration for a respondent with such a level of income will be 1500-2500 rubles, depending on additional requirements for him.
What other factors affect the level of the payment for respondents?
When assessing recruiting, it is necessary to understand whether it is needed for the respondent to consume some narrowly specialized services or buy goods not from the masses of the market. If the research will be carried out remotely, various difficulties are often encountered, and especially if the testing is remote and not moderated, assuming that the respondent will record his screen and take part in the survey for 20-30 minutes, at the exit there are often failures, the screen or voice is not recorded, the person missed the question when answering and so on. As a result of the interview, it is necessary to redo it, or the person began to participate and could not complete the study due to constant bugs in the system, this very often happens in our practice, therefore, for this type of study, you need to lay a reward in the region of 500 - 1000 rubles in order to take into account possible technical difficulties in the budget and increase the respondent's motivation to participate.
If this person lives in Moscow, the cost of remuneration below the indicated one entails the recruitment of respondents who do not work at the moment or often participate in research to earn money, let us return to assessing the budget enough to imagine ourselves in the place of the research participant.
And how much do you need to pay for the recruiting itself (to the agency)? And why is it worth paying that kind of money? Back to the question about low-quality recruiting.
With regard to the cost of the agency's work, it will consist of the cost of remuneration for the respondent, at least 70% of the cost of remuneration for the participant will be recruiting. In this case, the Agency will have the opportunity to pay attention to the project, check all respondents, take confirmation from the research participants that they really belong to the required target audience, the agency will also be ready to take over the process of organizing the payment of remuneration to participants, tax on the amount of transfer of remuneration will be about 10%. Plus, this will include a service commission for organizing the payment of remuneration to research participants, the work of full-time employees, bonuses, payment for company services that help in recruiting.
If the company is not the market leader and the research budget is small, what is it?
Here, of course, we will return to the above scenario where we initially have a wrong budget for the study. If we recruit a respondent, he is a resident of Moscow with an income of 80 thousand rubles, the remuneration for the participant should not be lower than 2000 rubles. Otherwise, you need to understand that at the end you will receive a sample with a significantly lower level of income (in fact). If this is not critical for you, then of course you can omit this point. But if your target audience is the people with a given income and you understand that respondents with lower income are not your potential customers who can afford to buy your product, do not conduct research. Or do your research, but ask only your existing customers, it is better than getting an irrelevant data. Yes, you will not be able to hear the opinion of your competitor's customers, but you can also use the information that you receive from your clients. For example, take customers who have a history of buying from your competitors. They've ever made a purchase from them and ask more about the experience. And then when the company's management makes a decision and allocates the necessary budget for high-quality recruiting, you will receive additional relevant data already from the lips of your competitors' consumers. This is a better option than just spending your budget. Your function is to convey this information to your management, after a while it will thank you. This is proven practice over the years!
In Moscow, respondents have to pay 1.5-2 thousand rubles because the average salary of the respondents is about 70 thousand per month (that is 3 thousand per working day). Can we say that in other cities, respondents can / should be paid 50 - 65% of the average daily earnings / average wages in the region? Or should there be other ratios?
Regardless of the region, we must take into account the motivation of the respondent and the reward, these points are related. Until our mentality changes and people begin to feel that they are contributing to market research, as is the case in other countries, but it is also taken into account that the respondent should receive a reward as a bonus for participation. Here it will also add up in proportion to the respondent's income level, the key point of how to avoid errors is to put yourself in the respondent's shoes. Would it be interesting for me (my friend, spouse) to be recruited for this study and receive a bonus of 60% of my daily income as a bonus? If so, great, you are heading in the right direction!
Research is a mathematically precise science on the one hand and like your doctor on the other. Only a narrowly focused specialist and expert in his field can provide a professionally good service. He does not do anything else and achieves a high level of professionalism. Thanks to a well-chosen target audience, the client has the opportunity to monetize his application or website.
Conducting a research is your investment in a product and a competently conducted research with correct conclusions drawn from it is your position in the market as a whole!