Right-Size Your Restech

First, let's define restech.

Restech: research technology; software, mostly online tools, designed to help market researchers conduct research faster and cheaper than by using traditional agencies.

Some examples of restech companies: Knit, Upsiide, Zappi, QuestionPro, VoxPopMe, Suzy, Quillit, Toluna, Yabble, Forsta, Pollfish, DisplayR, quantilope, and many, many more.

The Advantages of Restech

In an age where brands are consistently seeing budgets and teams shrink in size, restech is often crucial for achieving the level of output still required of these teams. Ad campaigns haven't slowed, but the teams supporting the testing of the ads have shrunk. Brand health measurement is still desired, but requires even quicker actionable insights as industries change and are disrupted rapidly. Restech is designed to address these issues.

Restech can often help democratize data. As researchers’ time is stretched ever thinner, the ability to create data views that can be shared with stakeholders without worry about the stakeholder messing up the data is a key element to making it easier for everyone to have access to the information needed to support strategy discussions.

Another, oft unspoken advantage of restech, is that it is often designed to address a specific need, and it often does so well. Whether it’s analyzing any set of data to adding an AI-guided prompt to dig deeper into text open-ends, most restech has a specific purpose.

Note: the majority of restech is not designed to fit every market researcher’s use case. Restech that is great at ad testing isn’t necessarily going to also be great at custom quantitative studies, but might be great at all things concept testing. That brand tracking restech solution? It might also be great at measuring other brand metrics (health, equity, etc.), but it might not be great at running quick-turn studies that are just 3-4 questions long. This is why insights teams have created their “restech stacks,” or combinations of research technology tools that, collectively, support the organization’s research goals.

The Drawbacks of Restech

In my experience, unless the person buying the technology is also going to be the direct user of the technology, a gap emerges between buyer and user once the tech is purchased. The buyer has sat through the sales calls, the sales demos, and the case studies. Sometimes, one or two users might be invited, but too often, not all of the people who will be using the tech get to attend enough of the sales meetings or get to test the tools long enough to understand how to use the tools, let alone what the tool is meant to do.

Additionally, the buyer has an idea of what the restech can do for their insights team. They have a vision of how and when it will be used, and what the resulting benefits to the team will be. However, that vision isn’t always shared or understood by the team who is going to use the tools.

So, a brand has bought this great set of research tech, created their fantastic restech stack, and the insights teams for whom all of this was done are wondering, “Right...so which tool am I supposed to use for which study again? Who has the login info? Is there a reference sheet so I know how to use this?”

Ultimately, it ends up looking like the brand overspent on the tech solutions because they go unused. Brands then don’t renew their subscriptions because the users never saw the value. Or users kept trying to find how to use the tech for their studies without finding the right alignment between tech and needs, resulting in frustration on both sides with each project. Or users renew for far less than the original subscription because they only unlocked one thing the tech could do, and aren’t aware of the other ways they could be using the technology.

The Solution

1. Identify your research needs with your teams. For larger insights teams, do this by product line or buying center. Sometimes, teams have ongoing requests such as brand trackers or ad campaign trackers. Other times, teams have nothing but ad-hoc projects, but perhaps your team will see themes of projects emerge as they list out the ad-hoc projects from last year and the projects known for the coming year.
2. List what tools your team has. How many studies can you run using each tool, and what does each tool specialize in? If you don’t know the answer to the latter, seek someone who has used it previously, or ask the buyer for case studies, or ask the sales or customer success team to walk you through it. (Trust me, they won’t be upset you called!)
3. Last, connect your research needs to the tools. If there are gaps between funds leftover or fund shortages, it’s time to bring the buyer back in to ask about their vision for the tools. Perhaps there’s extra funding for experiments to be run. Perhaps some tech was purchased to “play with” to tackle some of the items on the team’s research wish-list.

Put every penny of your investment in research technology to work for you. It really can unlock time and money savings, but to do this, there has to be a direct connection between the tech and the researcher’s needs. As with most things, that takes a bit of time and planning, but the return on the investment will most definitely be worth it.