Accent MR Accent

Accent update – recent research projects

It’s been a very long six months for all of us, but we’ve been busy on a number of interesting new assignments, and we thought we should share some of the recent research projects we’ve been involved in to support our clients.

Qualitative Research Projects

We’ve been as busy as ever with our qualitative work adapting our methodologies to suit these Covid times and our different audiences. Whether it’s understanding the impact of a new ticket portfolio for public transport, conducting home ethnographic work to understand how to affect water behavioural change or exploring how the pandemic has changed water usage, attitudes and needs for South East Water, we’ve tailored our approach to deliver the rich insights our clients expect. We continue to be flexible and modify our approaches where necessary – such as replacing all day community assemblies with a seven week engaging digital alternative for Western Power.

Strategic Work in the Water Sector

Our projects for a range of water companies has continued to build over the past few months, and we’ve also been busy with our ongoing C-Mex and D-Mex work for Ofwat. For more detailed information on our recent work in the water sector, click here.

International

A couple of international assignments have involved us conducting research in both Europe and the Antipodes. We worked on an interesting project for Auckland Council, measuring the usage and perceived value of local amenities. Click here to access the case study. And we ran an online study in Germany, Italy, Denmark, Spain and Romania exploring how consumers use social media to discover, access and consume creative content. All questions were cognitively tested before the start of fieldwork with native speakers.

Telephone Unit

Our Telephone Unit has continued to operate through lockdown despite the challenging conditions. There have been a number of interesting assignments including exploring consumers’ perceptions of the energy market for Citizens Advice and Ofgem and business to business assignments such as Customer Satisfaction research for Welsh Water and researching perceptions of the Scottish Deposit Scheme amongst hospitality and retail businesses – a particularly difficult assignment given the current situation.

Webinars

Following on from individual presentations to clients on the research we conducted into consumers’ attitudes to Data Privacy, we held a webinar in July to share our findings with a wider audience.  And we co-hosted a webinar with consultancy L.E.K, sharing insights around the Post Covid Traveller. To access a recording of the webinar click here. You can read more about our Data Privacy project here, but if you’d like to see the full findings, contact Sue Aitken or Debbie Shuttlewood

Mystery Shopping

We’ve recently completed another mystery shopping project – this time for Citizens Advice – investigating how much information is being provided by heat network providers, especially in respect to pricing, support for vulnerable customers and how the current Covid situation is affecting service delivery. The findings will be used by Citizens Advice to influence key stakeholders and to make recommendations about how current levels of service could be improved.

If you’d like to discuss how we might be able to help with any future research projects, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Rob Sheldon or Sue Aitken