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Marketing Research Specialty Areas

 

Staff Satisfaction Survey and Much More

Polaris has been providing full service marketing research services for over 15 years - everything from comprehensive customer satisfaction measurements to staff satisfaction survey programs. Most recently, Polaris has provided full service market research services for clients within the following industries:

• National Professional & Industrial Non-Profit Associations
• Broadcasting & Production Studios
• Consumer Products
• Financial -- Brokerage, Mortgages, Transaction Processing, etc.
• Healthcare & Insurance -- Health Insurance, Claims Processing, Hospitals, Software
• Homebuilding
• Hospitality
• Logistics Providers
• Manufacturing -- Appliance, Automotive, Carpet
• Meat Processing
• Pharmaceuticals
• Supermarkets
• Technology -- Computers, Networking
• Telecom -- ISP, Hardware, Services
• Training/Education
• Utility -- Gas, Gas & Electric
• Yellow Pages -- Traditional Publishing, Internet

Financial

Polaris offers customized research that enables banks, investment and insurance companies, and other financial services companies to understand their customer base and provide useful products for their customers' future needs. Polaris' customer value and loyalty analyses provide you with ways to map how current and potential customers view your organization's offerings as compared with other key industry players. We do advanced "data mining" and modeling to uncover hidden satisfaction and loyalty drivers.

Our program for measuring individual employee performance, T·I·E·R·S, is ideal for determining satisfaction with customer service representatives, agents, brokers, branch tellers and platform bankers. We can provide weekly, monthly or quarterly reports showing customers' perceptions of those employees responsible for your company's first, and unfortunately sometimes last, impression. Polaris specializes in creating actionable and easily interpreted results.

Health Care

Polaris Marketing Research has created innovative research techniques specifically dedicated to the research needs of health care providers and facilities. Our health care project team is experienced in conducting customer satisfaction monitoring required of health care providers seeking accreditation.

Our T·I·E·R·S program measures individual employee performance, perfect for determining satisfaction with physicians' clinics or office visits, as well as with provider staff and customer service representatives. In addition to phone, mail, IVR and internet surveys, we conduct focus groups to test new service concepts and identify issues necessary for high quality service.

Polaris also offers the health care industry:

• patient, physician, employee and member satisfaction research,
• community perception/awareness research,
• feasibility studies,
• competitive analysis, and
• employee needs gap and staff satisfaction survey research.

Telecom/Technology

Throughout its history, Polaris Marketing Research has studied issues related to telecommunications, cellular and paging services and products. Polaris has conducted hundreds of research projects for the telecommunications industry, including:

• Residence and business customer satisfaction tracking surveys
• Employee skills and needs gap analysis
• Residence and Business Service Center performance studies
• Lost customer studies (cellular and paging)
• Price/demand elasticity studies
• Advertising effectiveness research
• TELSAM redesign research and satisfaction driver analysis
• Bill redesign/Bill insert studies
• New product testing (calling features, voice messaging, paging and faxing services, ISDN, DSL, Internet Access, etc.)
• Directory redesign studies (human factors research to concept testing)
• Extended Area Service (EAS) studies
• Retail store location research
• Repair and installation technician support needs studies
• Staff satisfaction survey research
• Small business equipment and telecommunication service profiling
• Systems support internal customer satisfaction research
• Community involvement and public image research

Polaris' experience with the telecommunications industry predates the founding of the company in 1989 by Jan Carlson. Polaris' president had worked the previous 10 years in various research and strategic marketing positions at BellSouth Corp., where he was responsible for designing and implementing the quality and customer satisfaction programs for all of the BellSouth unregulated subsidiaries, including the Yellow Pages, cellular, customer premise equipment, and paging companies. Polaris' T·I·E·R·S program was designed for this industry and has proven an invaluable tool for telecommunications, cellular and paging companies wanting feedback on the performance of their individual sales, customer service representatives and repair and installation technicians.

Natural Gas & Electric Utilities

Polaris Marketing Research offers the natural gas and electric utilities utility industry a specialized ability to help you identify your most profitable customers and determine the best ways to keep them. We have developed several reliable measurements to collect the information your organization needs:

• Polaris can determine the level of brand awareness found among your business and residential customers, and can assist with new product development by testing concepts and ideas among your target markets.
• To improve the efficiency of your marketing plan, Polaris identifies unique customer segments by categorizing differences in drivers (price, convenience, reliability, etc.) among groups of customers as well as by type of account (residential, industrial and commercial).
• By effectively measuring those attributes that result in increased expenditures or multiple recommendations among customers, Polaris can help determine key predictors of loyalty.
• To help you secure a leadership position within your market, Polaris can supply competitive analysis, which includes mapping your competitors' strategic position as well as your own to eliminate surprises and create a strong market position. We also make pricing information actionable by incorporating trade-off analysis.

Yellow Pages

Polaris Marketing Research has a unique and extensive background in Yellow Pages research because of President Jan Carlson's personal experience. Prior to founding Polaris in 1989, Carlson created the research department at BellSouth Corp.'s Yellow Page subsidiary, BellSouth Advertising & Publishing Corp. (BAPCO). Polaris has conducted BAPCO's advertiser satisfaction survey program since 1990, shepherding its growth to over 45,000 surveys annually.

Among Polaris' other Yellow Page advertising research projects are:

• Advertiser satisfaction tracking surveys
• User (residential and business) satisfaction surveys
• Area of coverage ("scoping") studies
• Competitive directory and media studies (possession and usage)
• Shopping patterns studies
• Split-Directory testing research
• RCF and Caller ID keyed ad call capture and follow-up survey research
• New product testing (Internet advertising, fax on demand, etc.)
• Directory redesign studies (human factors research to concept testing)
• Extended Area Service (EAS) studies
• Lost advertiser tracking studies and exit surveys
• Customer Service follow-up surveys
• Heading usage and product information surveys
• Specialty directory research (neighborhood, industrial, import/export, senior citizens, associations, Spanish, etc.)
• New "N11" live operator assisted classified and Yellow Page advertising

Polaris' T·I·E·R·S program has become an invaluable tool for Yellow Page companies seeking a staff satisfaction survey and feedback on the performance of sales and customer service representatives.

Contact us to learn more about staff satisfaction surveys.