High quality service

To celebrate 75 years in the business, we have invited BMRB managing directors and chairmen, past and present, to write about issues concerning the market research industry. The fourth in this series of articles is by our former managing director, Richard Silman, who worked at BMRB from 1990 until 2001.

High quality service . . . . and no, I am not referring to Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon (or will it be Federer in Beijing?).

In the early part of the last century my grandmother spent a number of years ‘in service’. Maybe that degree of care and attention to one’s ‘clients’ was excessive but, at the same time, there are lessons we could and should derive from it. In today’s business world I believe that although the project price is sometimes one of, if not the key driver in the decision making process, our focus should also be on how we provide the best service that we can, whether it be to our clients, our shareholders or our people

People, and the bonding of their skills and talents into an effective and loyal team, remains one of the significant challenges facing managers of today.

I look back at my time at BMRB with a great deal of fondness. Why do I say that? Firstly, I was blessed with a great team. David Ogilvy once said that you should “stand on the shoulders of giants” and I was very fortunate to have people of the calibre of John Samuels and Tim Bowles to help and guide me through the management challenges, whilst being supported by the likes of Andy Brown and Jenny Davis.

As I look back I realise just how important it is for all senior managers to help and guide the next generation. In addition to my time at BMRB, people such as Mike Kirkham and Didier Truchot have had a strong influence in defining what and how I manage. We all take training and development seriously but all too often this is confined to research methodology and technical skills. These are, of course, critical, but we all need to play our part in the wider development of the people we are fortunate to work with.

As managers we are here to serve our clients and our shareholders but we are also here to serve our colleagues and our communities. All too frequently in business the focus has too much been “What about me?” rather than “What can I do?”.

Areas such as corporate social responsibility or sustainability, are increasingly taking root within companies and I hope and believe will continue to grow stronger. The opportunity for everybody to be involved in aspects wider than just the business itself is, I believe, very important. The skills that anybody can learn, or develop, through volunteering can be hugely beneficial not just for the individual concerned but also for the community and the business.

At a recent Cares conference, Dame Julia Neuburger, in discussing the increasingly important role that volunteering plays in the lives of young people, highlighted that volunteering opportunities provided by companies are becoming one of the key criteria used by graduates to guide their decision making as to which company to join. This is further emphasised in Sport England’s strategic plan for 2008-2011 – “Volunteering is a particular strength of community sport, within England some 1.9m people volunteer in sport for at least one hour per week, equivalent to a full time workforce of over 80,000 employees.” Source: Active People Survey – Sport England.

What we have observed in many of the employee satisfaction studies that we have completed is a much higher satisfaction level, with both their job and their company amongst ‘volunteers’ compared to ‘non volunteers’.

Motivating people is a critical part of our business and this applies not only to our employees but critically applies to our respondents. Much is written these days about the growth of online panels, and the creation of ‘professional respondents’ but a significant part of the work that Ipsos conducts in the UK is still face to face interviewing. Response rates remain very important and the skills our interviewers have to use to gain acceptance and agreement from respondents is of ever growing importance.

Another key development is the role of technology. Originally the technology was used by the interviewers (eg Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing – CAPI); then the technology was generally used by the interviewer and the respondent (eg double screen CAPI) and now, increasingly, the respondent is being asked to use the technology to provide the data eg GPS technology, mobile phone, single signal detection, 2D bar codes. Some of this technology is still in development but, as with any journey, it is important to remember how far we have come, not just how far we have still got to go. On some of these developments we may not be (yet) where we want to be but neither are we where we used to be.

In closing, I was particularly struck by the writing of John Wesley when he said “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can” – he must clearly have been an early marketeer – spotting the need to get the what, who, where, when, how and why right.

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