Monthly Reflection July 2023: How It All Came Together
Blog | July 13, 2023
With all of our team success over the years, I have officially reached the point where I often am asked about the origin story. Why did I start OpinionRoute?
The original inspiration was kind of a vague notion. I LOVED all the new tech that my past employers built. But it became clear to me that Researchers weren’t always well served by the new tech plays. Sure they may have enjoyed some short-term savings. But, overall, their processes were disrupted and they were left cleaning up so many new issues caused by rapid change.
I couldn’t help but wonder- who was building to help the research agency?
This was deeply important to me as my career has grown since 1999 thanks to long-standing relationships with great people in research agencies. I felt an obligation to have their backs. Once OpinionRoute kicked off in the fall of 2013, I started by simply offering something of value to MRX companies- trainings, consulting and connections.
Over time, I found a wave of companies asking me for bigger things: take over our sample management, teach us how to incorporate new tech into our processes, help us diagnose a data quality problem, work with us to better program our surveys, explain the impact of a recent merger, etc. We kept delivering value and solutions and the company grew as a result.
After a few years, I kept reflecting on how all of these diverse services could come together easily for all of our clients. The answer was right under my nose. I decided to give Survey Researchers their own wave of a tech boom. Our internal platform, The NavigatOR was a key secret to our success. We should expand it and share the entire platform with researchers to benefit their own operations.
Was it a straight line to success? Nope. We made mistakes. I took a while to get my act together. We conducted countless process interviews with industry experts. But ultimately, we built something I truly believe is unique for the research company. It’s a platform that proved to be an invaluable growth and efficiency driver for OpinionRoute.
Starting today, we are now able to dynamically support survey researchers with a tech-enabled services model that we’ve offered for 10 years OR with a services-backed Tech model.
Let the MRX agency tech boom begin!