Views from the Hills by R. E. Stevens, GENESIS II (The Second Beginning) E-Mail views@aol.com

Personal Observation on Accountability and Delegation

Over the past two decades, I have seen a growing trend to more and more delegation of responsibility of consumer research studies to field services by corporate market research departments. I have some serious reservations about this trend. While there are many good field services, there are many that fall very short of the required expertise to effectively fulfill the required tasks. Actually, in many cases the persons given the responsibility of execution (and at times design and analysis), would not meet the minimum requirements for employment by the sponsoring company.

For the present, I'd like to focus on the executional phase of research. It has been my experience that those collecting the data for our research are frequently made up of personnel that cannot find full-time employment and have taken a part-time job on a minimum wage scale. There are exceptions such as Sorensen Associates Inc who have developed strong field resources which include a training program, evaluation and certification of individual interviewers.

I have also seen cases where a very competent consultant was contracted to design and execute a research project. But because of a limited staff, the consultant needed to subcontract the execution to one or more field services and in some cases those field services further subcontracted to another firm. Each step from the source of the research origin potentially adds extra cost, along with the loss of control, continuity and quality.

One of the most serious and disturbing practices is that of phantom interviews. It is a practice that I have seen on more than one occasion but that is a topic of itself for a future Views.

Having said this, what do we do? Be extra careful about who you select for your jobs and increase your field auditing. We are in this situation usually through down sizing of our staff or a reduction in our budgets. While this is our reason for delegation, I have seen that most consulting services and field services have also been caught in the same down sizing and cost reduction cycles further increasing the problem of reduced quality.

We frequently hear that we should "Get Closer to Our Customers," I believe we must also "Get Closer to Our Partners in Research." We need to know not only what they know, but how they do their job. Do not only look at what they intend to do, but observe what they actually do. (Be a mystery observer or even a participant.)

We can delegate the task, but we still are accountable for the quality of results.


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