Face-to-face surveys are one of the most common way of gathering public opinion or customer satisfaction where customers come to the venue (e.g. a shop, sports centre, theatre or town centre).

Compared to telephone surveys and online/mail surveys, face-to-surveys offer significant advantages in terms of the amount and complexity of the data that can be collected. For example, face-to-face surveys can be significantly longer than telephone interviews. The interviewer can also assist the respondent with difficult questions or ease data collection by using showcards or visuals. They also offer advantages in terms of quality control and sampling (who is selected to answer the questions) without prior need for contact details.

Telephone surveys are a great way to contact respondents who are geographically spread out or who are busy such as managers/ directors although our experience in surveying Local Authority managers and business owners/ senior managers.

For this reason telephone interviewing is most often used for business to business surveys

Telephone based fieldwork interviewing is also considerably more cost-effective and quicker to complete than face-to-face interviewing and has a better response rate than self-completion surveys.

If you have up-to-date contact information then online surveys are a good way of giving everyone in a population the opportunity to contribute to research.

Online surveys are quick, cost effective and a simple way to reach an audience. However they tend to have low response rates, and because respondents are self-selecting they can lead to sample or results bias.

Mail surveys are sent to a preselected sample of people, with instructions on how to fill out the survey and return it. It has historically been one of the cheapest methods of survey distribution offering people the chance to participate in research in an anonymous way which is particularly useful when dealing with sensitive issues.

However, mail surveys take a long time to complete, are expensive when dealing with large mailings (it can sometimes be cheaper to do telephone surveys) and have low completion rates. Mail surveys also suffer from respondents not following routing and leaving answers blank meaning more quality checks are required. Furthermore mail surveys suffer from sample bias as they are self-selecting meaning that results are often more extreme with those pro or anti more likely to participate than the general population.

Focus groups are consultant-led sessions with a number of individuals from your target audience brought together to discuss their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards specific issues related to the research project. They are interactive in that participants are asked to discuss as a group and give their opinion. They are ideal to look at design concepts or advertising as they encourage discussion. Focus groups explore attitudes, behaviour and experiences. They are about understanding attitudes and perceptions rather than measuring them.

Focus groups tend to be more expensive as individual participants are usually give an incentive to attend and there are usual venue costs and recruitment costs.

Depth interviews are one-to-one meetings in which the consultant makes use of a semi-structured set of issues/topics to guide the discussion. The object of the exercises is to explore and uncover deep-seated emotions, motivations and attitudes. Depth interviews are most often employed when the respondent is busy, for example a senior manager or when dealing with sensitive matters and respondents are likely to give evasive or even misleading answers when directly questioned.

Depth interviews involve a heavy time commitment, especially on the part of the consultant as each respondent is interviewed individually at length and possibly at the respondent's workplace or home.

Mystery visit research provides you with a structured approach to measuring, managing and developing your customer service. A programme of mystery visits can help you ensure that customer service is consistently delivered to meet the service standards you expect.

See our page about mystery visits for more information.

Reporting data involves more than just presenting it as a series of numbers or charts. To be of most value market research should be reported in a way that interprets and analyses the data, that is, say what it means in context providing easy to understand, actionable findings that really help you understand an issue and know what needs to be done to address it.

CJM Research is really good at providing insightful, actionable research that is clear and easy to interpret and use.