Every year, product and service companies spend billions on research to support important decisions. Given that companies typically act on market research information only 25 percent of the time, two Milwaukee market researchers have come up with a revolutionary software solution to the problem.

The platform developed by Nicholas Hayes and Marian Singer of Five Twelve Group is called Research and Decide Collaboratively (RADCL), a research method that combines process and technology to create the proper environment for important decisions to be reached.

And it’s working, based on a research implementation rate of 90 percent that Five Twelve clients are currently achieving using the RADCL system.

With the innovation, Hayes and Singer are evolving their business from a traditional research/consulting model to software as a service model. The RADCL process is delivered on a Web 2.0 platform, which is now being used by manufacturers, marketing services firms and academic researchers.

In order to better understand what makes RADCL so effective, it is instructive to revisit how things used to work — or frequently didn’t work — in the field of market research.

Of the 163,000 companies in North America that conduct research on behalf of a client, the traditional approach has been to gather information by writing a survey guide in Microsoft Word, compile the data in an Excel spreadsheet, then create some charts in PowerPoint and share it all with the client.

“The problem with that method is that they are working in a vacuum — they are not working with the client,” Hayes says. “They go off, ask some questions, get the data and come back with the presentation.”

Unfortunately, when learning is isolated from the people who will have to act on the conclusions, the risk of a poor decision is very high.

“About five years ago, we realized that most of the market doesn’t have a very good success rate, and neither did we,” Hayes says. “We realized that the level of real involvement we got from our clients determined whether they had digested the findings to the degree that we had.”

What Singer and Hayes did first was develop a set of steps where they would ask the client to be involved while still honoring their time constraints. Most of the discussion takes place on a secure web site where information is presented to the client as it is coming in

Teams and team members interact in an open forum. As they learn on their own, they can push findings to other members or groups so that learning becomes a shared experience.

“So, they are taking ownership of the process,” Singer says. “And, it’s not us coming back in 12 weeks and having done all of this work, and saying, ‘Here’s the answer.’ They are involved, so that by the time the answer comes around, it’s really obvious.”

As a result, project duration times have dramatically decreased, while Five Twelve’s success rate with its roster of Fortune 500 clients in terms of a reaching a completed decision has dramatically increased, Singer says.

Since they have started licensing RADCL to other market research companies, the software is transforming the process by which market research is done. RADCL is also finding a niche within academia, where professors use it as a tool to collect all of their research data.

RADCL represents more than just a better software mousetrap. Used properly, it’s a way to make critical business decisions at a much lower cost.

For example, one of Five Twelve’s clients in Helsinki has dispatched RADCL to 29 sales offices and is currently gathering information in 11 languages while talking with 900 customers every year. The information will help the company decide how to reduce lead times while having the added benefit of increasing customer retention.

“Now they can get it done at about a third of the cost, and they can have a much more intimate relationship with their customers,” Hayes says “So, this is a godsend to them.”

By John Rondy