Since going with your gut isn’t a sustainable option, that leaves you with hiring a research firm or doing it yourself.  

Research firms, besides taking a long time to complete projects, are very expensive so there’s only a certain number of initiatives you can afford to do. 

A survey tool, on the other hand, requires you to have someone internally who understands cutting-edge engagement and research methodologies, and then has to time to scope the projects/programs, craft the survey questions, build all the messages, analyze the results, producing presentations/studies, etc. 

These are the exact reasons we created our Research as a Service platform. It’s a powerful, easy-to-use research solution with everything you need – team collaboration, survey builder, bulk messaging, imbedded best practices, analytical tools, dashboards, triggers, notifications, 3rd-party integration, sentiment analysis, etc. – yet is so intuitive even a CEO (or physician) can use it with no training.