Tailored Research

Acritas believes that referrers/partners are a very powerful source of revenue in professional and financial services firms, often cited as delivering as much as 40% of revenue. Acritas believes that referrers/partners a powerful source of relatively untapped knowledge and their needs and feedback can be very helpful in shaping strategies and communications.

We work with organizations and design research programmes to extract knowledge from these sophisticated buyers. Often working with many peer group competitors, insight can be extracted and harnessed to gain competitive advantage.

Referrers have a unique set of communications needs and need to be kept up to date with how your organization’s market offering has developed.

To find out more please contact us.

Before firms invest significant sums in running an advertising campaign or refreshing a brand, it is essential to take direction from the stakeholders who will interact with it. Acritas works with firms to design innovative research to test reactions to advertising campaigns including colour, placement, imagery and messaging before a campaign goes live. We also recommend post campaign research to evaluate the ROI of an advertising campaign through increased brand awareness. With many of our clients this becomes an ongoing tracking study to assess market position and that of competitors.

We work with organizations to research how individuals feel about new brand imagery both pre and post launch, to review communications and to understand how to get the most out of their marketing materials and grow their brand profile.

To find out more please contact us.

Getting under the skin of your clients and prospects is a very smart way of staying at the forefront of their consideration list and a great way to understand their business and needs.

Acritas designs research programmes to deliver rich insight about the contact’s business, their needs and greatest issues ahead. By using research to stay in touch with how needs are evolving and changing, this positions the organization in a great light and means you can target with relevant and timely communications.

In challenging economic climates relationships are tested and often clients are forced to test the market to understand who is offering the best value and services. Buyer behaviour research is a great way to get close to market needs, assess trends and position your organization for the opportunities presented when suppliers are switched.

To find out more contact us.

Authoritative, objective and thought-provoking campaigns can be achieved through effective thought leadership research. A successful thought leadership research programme and strong campaign will help organizations to build their reputation, supported by solid analysis that gets the right results.

Successful thought leadership research is underpinned by some of the following points; the Acritas team work with clients to guide through these during the project to maximise its success:

- Sufficient desk research on the topic to inform starting point
- Preparing Partners for results they may not want to hear (this can cause many thought leadership projects to unravel in our experience)
- Robust sample sizes of credible respondents (population size allowing)
- Straight questions that produce interesting and relevant statistics balanced with sufficient creative open questions to explore
- Preparing for all results scenarios – to minimise time between results and coverage/publication
- Timing – being the first to market with new insight and avoiding research topics already covered by others
- Payback – turning the results and profile into business

Acritas is experienced in thought leadership research and working with internal client teams to ensure the maximum success in generating thought provoking, unique and authoritative insights to drive successful campaigns.

To find out more please contact us.

As firms struggle to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market, clients continue to choose which professional service firms to use based on the quality of their people. That quality is in part based around technical capability but increasingly selection is based on how commercial the staff are, how well they understand the client’s business and whether the people share the same values and ethics, such as, “going the extra mile” to meet their needs.

Understanding how engaged employees are at all levels of seniority and across roles enables the adaption of structures, appraisals, training and reward to ensure growth for the firm and alignment to client needs.

Acritas has developed an approach to employee engagement and satisfaction research specifically for professional services firms. Our approach focuses on understanding what motivates people and drives behaviours. The model has been developed on the back of extensive qualitative research with a wide variety of roles in professional services firms, and is based on the five key principles of engagement: commitment, alignment, advocacy, pride and motivation.

Acritas provide both a bespoke approach to employee research needs and a tried and tested syndicated approach providing access to an industry benchmark.

Organizations that run successful client feedback programmes find that they deliver real competitive advantage and truly strengthen relationships. Whether the feedback is good or bad, if action is taken in response, there is inevitably a positive outcome for both clients and their providers.

Each programme is approached in a highly bespoke manner to meet the client’s individual needs, whilst drawing on tried-and-tested questioning techniques and experience of conducting and analysing over 15,000 interviews with senior business decision makers to deliver high impact, commercially actionable outcomes. Acritas provides extensive benchmarking data to set results in context.

Whether a large, global programme of continuous feedback via telephone or a small, focused key client exercise of in person interviews, the Acritas team has a long track record of delivering insightful programmes which even the most reluctant internal clients buy into.

We partner with organizations to extract core objectives, recommend the best methodology to meet needs and budget and to design programmes that deliver data that can be relied on to direct decision making. The following are very popular in our client research programmes:

• Face to face/in person interviews
• Telephone interview
• Web surveys

Post transaction research is becoming more and more popular as organizations set Key Performance Indicators and need to track progress against these. Acritas is working with organizations to track performance and satisfaction of clients at the critical stage when a piece of work has been delivered and feedback is very fresh and insightful.

Respondent care is at the core of what we do ensuring a positive experience means both repeat participation in our research programmes and organizations working with us regularly to track their progress in raising client satisfaction.

To find out more please contact us.

Assessing opportunities and prioritising resulting investments through focused research are a great way to ensure ROI from a new initiative. Examples of this might be opening a new office, launching a new service or simply helping to develop a new business pipeline through targeted research.

Accessing insight about a new market in terms of how it works, how to price and package a service, or position a service against competitors is vital to make a quick return on investment and prioritise the right aspects to enter a new market successfully.

Acritas works with organizations to understand their knowledge gaps and design research programmes that deliver insight to evaluate opportunities, direct strategies and ensure clients feel equipped to make good, commercial decisions.

To find out more please contact us.

Primary research with target product or service users at the concept development stage can validate and refine your proposition prior to significant investment being committed and direct work throughout the early stages of getting a new offering off the ground.

Acritas has worked with a number of clients on concept testing work.  Each project is highly bespoke and specific concepts researched have varied widely, including new service lines and client service models for professional service firms and complex online data mapping concepts in financial services.  The research element of such projects needs to fit seamlessly into the wider development plan and deliver timely insight at key stages.  Early stages may include user needs analysis and initial reactions to the high level concept whilst later stages can cover uptake projections, usability testing and feedback on soft launches.

To find out more please contact us.