The Growing Importance of Automation in Market Research
With technology developing faster than ever before, businesses are compelled to keep up with the latest innovations just to remain competitive. The Market Research industry is no exception. In today’s high-pressure marketplace, clients are demanding faster turnaround on projects and will not tolerate errors or late deliverables.
The volume of data and information requiring analysis and interpretation is becoming overwhelming. There is now the constant pressure to accomplish more, in less time and Market Research firms can no longer afford to analyse and visually present their client’s data manually. In today’s market, the utilization of chart automation software to generate automatic reports is no longer merely an alternative – it has become an invaluable necessity.
The manual generation of reports is time consuming and prone to errors and omissions due in large part to simple human error and deadline pressures. Checking and re-checking reports to avoid sending these mistakes to your clients also eats up valuable time and staff-hours. In contrast, producing automated charts, graphs and reports directly from your research data ensures precision, accuracy and drastically cuts your turnaround time.
But not all chart automation software is created equal…
Key Features to Look for in Chart Automation Software
Before you decide on which software to purchase for your business, you have to make sure it fully meets your needs. To work at an optimum level, your automated charting software should provide the following 5 features:
1. Flexibility: Your software should be able to combine data from multiple sources including tables, reports and databases.
2. Powerful calculation capacities: The reporting software should be able to calculate nets, trends, indices, percentages and significance on any table or chart, even if they aren’t present in the original tables.
3. Varied data manipulation options: If your software cannot handle data manipulation such as ranking, concatenation and conditional selection, you will not be getting the most out of your reporting.
4. Ability to set formatting rules: In order to dynamically highlight significant or unexpected values, your software must allow you to set your own formatting rules.
5. Filtering options: Your chart and report automation software must be able to leverage powerful filtering options on your original tables to extract percentages and frequency counts, round decimals and manage significance letters.
It is no longer a question of whether or not your market research firm should make the move – the question is simply which software you will select, and how much time and money it will save your business.