Portals for B2B research

What do you want from a research portal?

They can be designed and used to meet quite a range of different goals, so it's well worth thinking about what you're hoping to get out of yours.

But perhaps you didn't think you needed one at all?

For many years the assumption was that portals were a tool for business to consumer (B2C) surveys, and not for business to business (B2B) ones. They lend themselves well to large amounts of quantitative data, with interactivity making it easy to roll out granular results to a large audience across the business so that they can drill down to see the information most relevant to them.

In most B2B surveys that's not really what's needed, but that doesn't mean portals don't have their place.

We've found with our B2B clients that portals come into their own not so much for reporting, but before and after the reporting stage.

Fieldwork

Our portals update in real time during the fieldwork period, based on both web and telephone survey completions, which means that clients can read and respond to customer feedback as it is received, as well as having a realtime sense of how the headline score (whether CSAT or NPS) is developing.

This makes the survey feel much more like a live process, rather than a project with a fixed end date, and means that you can start going back to customers to thank them for their feedback (and pick up any issues) much sooner.

Follow ups

After the survey is complete, the portal can become a platform for closing the loop with customers.

Having seen the scores and comments from their customers, account managers can use the closed loop module to record their actions and conversations with customers. This is much better than trying to navigate a Word document or Excel spreadsheet, and also makes it easy to see at a glance which customers have been folowed up or are still pending.