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Follow UsAfter establishing itself as a leading provider of research and analytics services, AbsolutData Research & Analytics through its India-based delivery center, is now geared up to deliver high end research and analytics services in India by ramping up the size of its India team
Suhale Kapoor, EVP, AbsolutData Research & Analytics spoke to R Jai Krishna of CyberMedia News, on the current research and analytics outsourcing market, the company’s ambitious plans of offering analytics service to Indian clients and launching an online research panel.
What is the current estimate of the research and analytics outsourcing market?
The Research and Analytics outsourcing market is estimated to be around $ 17 billion. However, it is difficult to estimate the market size, considering the fact that there are a lot of in-house analytics teams in client organizations. There is a huge potential for outsourcing from this market, which has not been fully tapped till now.
What is the focus area for AbsolutData in this market?
AbsolutData Research & Analytics specializes in providing consulting oriented advanced Analytics and Market Research services to clients in the US, Europe and Asia. We help companies reap superior business benefits by delivering research and analytics based solutions with significant cost savings, through a blend of top-notch talent pool, process excellence and constant innovation.
As a company we have evolved quite a bit since our inception five years ago. We started out doing outsourced work for global research companies. Over a time we have developed two main business streams. Firstly, we have evolved from being a vendor to other research companies, into a full service Market Research firm offering services to global end-clients. Secondly, we have developed strong capabilities in the field of Marketing Analytics. For example we do a lot of work in the fields of Customer Relationship Management Analytics, Marketing Effectiveness, Segmentation etc. Going forward, we see ourselves as a global leader in providing such services, and we are building our teams both in the US and in India, to this end.
How is AbsolutData going to implement the strategy and what are your goals?
It is our goal to be a global provider of market research and analytical services. We prefer to develop a close partnership with our clients rather than being just a vendor to them. In terms of team, we hire the best – we recruit people with strong domain expertise with prior experience - we go to the best engineering and business schools both in the US and India. In terms of processes, we build and follow robust processes to analyze data and deliver world standard quality. We will continue our focus on serving leading companies across industries – top consulting firms, large US retailers, financial services companies etc. We are also focusing on building internal domain expertise in these verticals as well as technology and CPG (consumer packaged goods) verticals. Our goal is to be a $ 100 million company, over the next 4- 5 years.
For this purpose, we have recently recruited a marketing team in India, who will help us in client acquisition in the US. We are also hiring sales people in the US office. We plan to double our headcount every year from being 160 at present.
What are your future plans for the Indian market?
We want to launch an online research panel, whereby online users can subscribe and participate in the surveys. By taking part in surveys, they will earn incentive “points” which can be redeemed for gifts. This has big potential as world over the trend in data collection for market research is moving online from traditional methods of pen and paper model. In the US, 70 per cent of the user surveys are conducted online, and in Europe almost 40 to 50 per cent is online. There is a huge potential in India also. From a research company perspective, survey results are available in just a day or two, compared to the average of four weeks, which is the industry norm in India today.
We also want to leverage our extensive experience of the US market to offer analytics and research services to Indian companies. Currently the sectors of retail, media and telecom are booming with investment coming in from Indian and foreign companies alike. Use of sophisticated analytical techniques will give an edge to companies and enable them to significantly improve their performance.
We strongly believe that the experience and knowledge we have acquired over a time in our consulting and research services, is something which we can monetize in India also.
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