Brainstorming for the next client project
A WORD WITH THE RESEARCH & INSIGHTS TEAM
Franziska, Jan and Tim present their market and user research projects in this interview.
Team Marketing & Communication:
Dear Franziska, dear Jan, dear Tim, what are your tasks as the Research & Insights Team in the Future Aftersales department at VWGIS?
Franziska: As the Research & Insights Competence Centre, we are responsible for supporting agile and user-oriented software development and services in better understanding user needs and thus maximising the added value for users.
Originally, we were commissioned by the DIAS programme, i.e. Digital After Sales, in which we support the global renovation of the software landscape in the after-sales area for our five core brands with market and user research projects.
Jan: We started the DIAS programme four years ago and quickly realised that the actual users of the software to be developed should be much more involved in the development. As a result, we have built up a Europe-wide community of retail employees, which we are constantly expanding. We can easily ask these test persons about the challenges and processes in the dealership at any time. With our data, our colleagues in the DIAS programme can then develop their software better, faster and more precisely.
In order to be able to survey a large number of test persons and manage the community at the same time, we have licensed a survey tool called Survalyzer. With this we have almost created a USP for ourselves, as such software is hardly available within the group. In the past, Volkswagen liked to outsource the implementation of market and user research projects to agencies, but this was increasingly cut back in connection with Corona and other economic restrictions. We quickly realised that our work could support not only the DIAS programme, but also other programmes. We regularly receive enquiries from within the group, even though we have hardly done any active canvassing so far.
Project discussions and the design of questionnaires via Survalyser are part of the daily work of the Research & Insights team.
Marketing & Communication Team:
That sounds really exciting! How do you basically go about preparing market research analyses? What approach have you established here?
Jan: Basically, our clients approach us with their problem, question or challenge, which is usually still relatively vaguely formulated. Our approach is therefore to work out a suitable research design together (number of respondents, type of survey, etc.). The next step is to operationalise the problem (create questionnaires or guidelines for interviews). In this process, we work in close partnership with the clients, because they are often the experts in terms of content.
Afterwards, we take care of the survey or interviews and prepare the analysis in parallel. After the pure data analysis, we develop recommendations for action and further measures for our clients so that they can solve their problems based on our results.
Franziska: Depending on the aim of a study, we use descriptive analyses by looking at frequencies and percentages and see whether bivariate or multivariate methods can be used. In other words, we want to identify correlations and find differences between different groups. This can also go as far as conducting cluster analyses, depending on the context of the study. We can make use of quite a large "toolbox" of different research methods here, so that we can analyse almost any question well.
Tim: Exactly, at the end we dive deeper into the data and see if we find any exciting clues that we might not have thought of at the beginning of the survey. Then we ask ourselves the question: What could be the reason for certain differences in the statements? Are there perhaps variables that are interrelated and correlated?
Marketing & Communication Team:
What are your goals as a Research & Insights team? How do you implement them and make them measurable afterwards?
Tim: If, for example, a software or a service or a process works better for the user after a (re-)launch than it did before, or if our client implements the recommendations for action we developed after working with us in order to make better decisions, then we have achieved our goal. In the future, we will also conduct small satisfaction surveys with our customers after the end of the project and thus be able to measure our performance very directly.
Dear Franziska, dear Jan and Tim! Thank you all for the insightful and interesting interview and for advancing the VWGIS with your know-how. We wish you continued success with your user research projects!