Background
We’ve been working with The Customer Closeness Company for over a decade, and over that time we’ve built a strong, collaborative relationship. The Customer Closeness Company is all about bringing brands closer to their customers. They regularly organise face-to-face customer events and online sessions where real customers give live, unfiltered feedback to senior stakeholders from major brands like M&S, Wickes, NatWest, British Gas, and BT.
They regularly run high-impact, face-to-face events and online sessions, and that’s where we support them. As their trusted recruitment partner, we help find the right customers for these conversations – often working to very detailed specs and tight timelines to make sure the voices they hear are exactly the ones they need.
The project
This specific project with Wickes aimed to bring to life who Wickes Trade customers were, so that they could cater to their needs and increase share of project spend and loyalty in key categories. The specific objectives were as follows:
To understand who TradePro customers are, the type of jobs they do and what their work pipeline looks like
To understand what supplies they buy and the drivers and barriers to retailer choice
To understand what Wickes does well and where we could improve
To identify opportunities and actions required for Wickes to win a greater share of wallet
They wanted to speak specifically to ‘General Tradesmen’ i.e. Handyman or general/jobbing builder, for a face-to-face session at Wickes Head offices in Watford
The challenges
Recruitment challenges
It was a very specific audience; Wickes weren’t just looking for tradesmen but general handymen. They also are a hard-to-reach audience, and particularly hard to get hold of and pin down due to the nature of their work. Moreover, they’re typically not as engaged with market research as other audiences (i.e., not signed up to databases and can’t be easily targeted).
The sessions were face-to-face which narrowed down the pool of potentials and meant we could only recruit those in close proximity to Watford, which added further difficulty to the recruit.
Importance of the project
This was a high-profile session with the CEO and other senior stakeholders in the room, directly engaging with participants. It was essential that every recruit was not only spot-on but also reliable and articulate. Their feedback would directly inform Wickes’ future decisions, so getting this right was absolutely critical.
Our Approach
Recruitment Strategy
Client lists from Wickes were unavailable for this project which meant we had to get down into the nitty gritty and use alternate means to recruit participants:
Participant quality and reliability
All of the participants were thoroughly screened, using our trusty verification system, Acumonitor, including further checks made by the team, such as asking for examples of work to confirm generalist trade status. They were also pre-checked for engagement and confirmed attendance.
Client communication
Clear communication is vital for projects to be a success. We provided regular updates, flags on any challenges, and progress reports to the team. We maintained transparency on recruitment efforts including in-store engagement and social outreach.
Problems arise can arise in any project, but when they did, we always offered solution-oriented responses.
Risk mitigation
Participants were offered a higher-than-usual incentive to increase engagement and attendance and to maintain participant interest, they were only assigned a light, simple pre-task. We also over-recruited for the project to guard against no-shows or last-minute dropouts. To suit trade professionals’ working hours, we only scheduled sessions early in the morning or late in the day.
Client feedback
“On behalf of the team, I just wanted to say a BIG THANK YOU for a great job on the recruitment for the Wickes sessions yesterday. We had a full house and all of the Trade customers were spot on in terms of spec. The CEO attended both sessions and our internal client was really pleased. We finished this year’s Wickes Closeness programme on a high! Now to start planning for the next year’s programme!”
The Study
In addition to conducting qualititative market research on consumer goods and shopper behaviour we also frequently work on a range of projects which seek to understand complex social issues or sensitive subjects. As a fieldwork supplier we often relish the opportunity to work on these projects as they require a slightly different approach to the work we do.
We were recently asked by a research agency to assist them with one such project. The research was exploring the issues of relationship breakdown, the various factors involved when families separate and what, if any, support services had been accessed either during or after such a life-changing incident. The client wanted to speak to wide range of people, including low social grades and ethnic minorities, whose relationships had broken down for a variety of reasons. Some of these included relationships ending due to infidelity, a lack of intimacy, or for financial reasons.
Our Approach
When working on this project our team were acutely aware of how important it was to consider how best to approach such a sensitive topic with potential participants. We worked closely with our client and liaised with our team to ensure that all parties were fully briefed on the finer details of the project before commencing recruitment.
We’re also fortunate in that we are able to work with our in-house recruitment team, who have an active database of over 100,000 participants that have all opted in for research and are engaged and enthusiastic. They were able to tailor their approach to the project, emphasising the importance of the research in shaping the way future support services could be delivered or accessed. This meant that the participants who applied to take part were enthusiastic about sharing their experiences, knowing that it would help others in their situation.
The Outcome
We were overwhelmed by the response to this project with many people throughout the UK coming forward to share their experiences of personal trauma and relationship breakdown. We were able to recruit participants from a variety of backgrounds ensuring that the client was able to get detailed picture on the varying experiences of a variety of people. It was gratifying, for all those involved, that we were able to contribute to something as important as this.
The Study
Acumen were contacted by the Greater London Authority to help find participants for a quantitative research project on how people from marginalised groups and communities accessed support services for issues relating to employment. The GLA specifically wanted to speak to low-paid workers and migrant workers – people who are usually underrepresented in research. The purpose of the research was to understand the levels of awareness of employment rights amongst those groups and also to gain an understanding of what barriers they faced when trying to access relevant services.
Our Approach
We were aware that the lack of engagement with institutions amongst these demographics would be a significant barrier to our usual research recruitment methods. We overcame this by working with local community groups, snowballing recruitment and explaining the research process in detail to try to allay any suspicions about the nature of the research. Through this we were able to recruit a full range of backgrounds, including Vietnamese nail salon workers who were being covered in the news at the time about the issue of modern day slavery in their profession.
The dynamic and flexible approach to the recruitment in addition to finding venues which would seem neutral to the participants enabled us to succeed in providing the GLA with participants who met the specific criteria but also had a willingness to share their personal stories and experiences which went to the heart of the initial brief.
The Outcome
As we were working directly with the GLA on this project, it was thrilling to learn that the insights we provided were being used to identify new ways to tackle economic fairness amongst some of London’s most vulnerable workers.
Myles Wilson, who commissioned the research for the GLA said, “Low-paid migrant workers are a particularly challenging and hard-to-reach group so recruitment was a key concern for us when planning this research but Acumen were very proactive and updated us throughout.”
For our work on this Acumen were named as finalists and eventually won the award for Best Data Collection (Face to Face) at the 2018 MRS Operations Awards.
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