Field Interviews

Field interviews are performed when more detail is needed. They are usually performed in conjunction with site visits to maximize our research resources. Field interviews allow us to target specific parties tied to a company’s operations or customers, collecting more relevant data, including sales figures and early warnings of company policy changes. Field interviews also allow us to ask follow-up questions when collecting responses, narrowing in on information that answers key investment questions.

We target different groups of customers and employees in our field interviews, according to the goals of the study. This includes people who buy the products (customers), people who use the products (customers), people who sell the products (employees), and people who make the products (employees).
The interview skills that our trained staff have enable them to interact with these target groups on a level that no other research, financial or otherwise, allows. For this reason, we consider field interviews to be one of our most powerful market research tools, and something that fund managers and investment professionals find to be an incredibly unique source of research.

The process begins with a discussion with the client to determine the research goals. Field research is often wasted with poor preparation, so we discuss key questions and assumptions, especially when a response could change our client’s investment thesis.
A set of interview questions is then designed and confirmed by the client before we perform an initial site visit and two to three interviews to help refine the question list and uncover any problems in our interview process. These early checks are an essential part of the market research process that challenge client assumptions before wasting dozens or hundreds of man-hours. We also find that they are not done in many traditional market research firms, wasting client money.
Following collection, the data is analyzed and the findings are shared with the client, along with all interviews in full transcript form.
From this point, we either plan follow-up studies using one of our many market research methods, or conclude the study.