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Top qualitative research companiesA guide to finding the best match for your needs

Two companies can propose the same number of interviews and deliver very different work. The difference is who hears your customers, how they make sense of what they hear, and who helps you decide what it means. This guide names no firms; antedote is a strategic research and innovation consultancy.

Settle what you need to understand.

  • Why people choose or switch.

    A proposal should show how it will get past the first answer to the reasons behind it.

  • What people do as well as what they say.

    Look for time with people at home, in store or on their phones, and a plan for setting what they do beside what they say.

  • How an idea or a story comes across.

    Ask how people will meet it, as they would in life, and how what they say will change it.

  • How all of this differs between markets.

    You need moderators who know each market, and a way to compare the markets side by side.

Ask your AI assistant what you need to understand.

Describe what you need to understand, and where.

Ask for sources and for what the assistant doesn’t know. Use a summary with nothing confidential in it, or an AI tool your company has approved for it.

Treat the answer as the start of your own investigation, then meet the people who would do the work.

A prompt to copy. Fill in the blanks first.

I lead consumer insights at a [category] company. We need qualitative research to [understand why customers switch / see how people use our product at home / hear how a new idea comes across] in [markets].

Using current web sources, suggest qualitative research companies that have published work like this, and link each source. For each, say why it may fit, what it has shown and what we would still need to check, with one question to ask the people who would do the work. Don’t guess who would moderate, and don’t invent fees, references or results. If you can’t search the web, help me define selection criteria instead.

Questions that separate proposals.

Most questions can be approached in more than one way. Interpretation is where the work earns its fee, and these questions show how a team goes about it.

  • Tell us about evidence that changed your first interpretation.

    A specific contradiction, what was reconsidered and why.

  • How will you tell a revealing account from a pattern?

    Comparison across people and settings, with uncertainty stated plainly.

  • Who will moderate, interpret and work with our team?

    Named people, their relevant experience and roles, and whether they stay through the recommendation.

  • How will you run it in our other markets?

    Moderators who know each market, and how the markets will be compared.

Customer understanding, put to work.

For the customer support case, the needs framework was written so support, product and customer experience teams could all work from the same account, beside the operational data the company already held.

Meet the people who would moderate.

Meet the people who would moderate and interpret before you commission, and ask what they have done that is like your project.

Ask, too, whose voice the plan leaves out. Our view of who isn’t in the research shows why it matters.

Then ask to speak to a past client, with their permission. A useful question for them: how did the team respond when customers said something your business did not expect?

If you also need to know how many customers think this way, our guide to choosing a quantitative research company covers that choice.

If you need to know why your customers do what they do, in one market or several, that is the work of our qualitative research.

Tell us what you can’t yet explain.

Bring what you can see customers doing, and the decision it feeds. We’ll suggest whom to hear from, and how.

Talk to us hello@antedote.com

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