SPSS users: Here's how Harmoni can help you add value

Over the past few months, you’ve likely had to change the way you do daily tasks. Whether it’s moving in-person meetings to Zoom or ordering groceries online rather than going to the store, you’ve probably found pros and cons to both ways of doing things. Research has shown that some of us like the changes and will continue to alter the way we behave in the future.

What about changing your approach to consumer insights? For many market researchers, SPSS has long been a “way of life.” It has historically had a place in the research workflow, specifically around certain statistical functions, factor analysis, cluster analysis based on segmentation, and similar processes. But what does it really take to get to the heart of the data and then share beautiful, easy-to-understand visualizations that will drive better decisions? This is where the real value of market research lies.

A broken process

Let’s take a look at a traditional process traveling from data to reporting with SPSS. Several departments and many manual steps are required. The data is touched at many different stages, multiple times, from the data processing team to the data analyst. Once an analyst sees a data point that warrants expansion, the process starts all over again. Then, of course, you must present the insights in a sharable, aesthetically pleasing, and understandable format.

In today’s ecosystem, this time-consuming process is simply no longer tenable. It cannot deliver the fast, agile insights needed to keep up with today’s consumer. Also, each time the data is touched, there is room for error. From basic version control of multiple documents, all the way to the fact that the data is collected in one system, fed into another system, processed in SPSS, populated in Excel, and then placed in PowerPoint…data integrity starts to fail.

Time for a better way

Just like some of the new, preferred “systems” we have discovered to stay connected during current events, there is a solution for better data analysis and reporting. We specifically designed Harmoni to process and investigate data inside a single location so that researchers can get key results out to stakeholders more quickly. Everything happens in a single, cloud-based location so that insights can be easily updated with new data, and data integrity is retained at every stage.

Harmoni eliminates the manual steps associated with old processes and allows users to examine source data, analyze that data, clearly see relationships among data points, explore those points in depth and raise more pertinent business questions. Because significant data is displayed clearly, the researcher can easily combine the data with their own business knowledge for a deeper understanding.  And all this without ever having to send the data back through the painstaking process of data processing, crosstab development and other steps that are rife with possible errors. It is so much faster.

Ray Poynter recently wrote about using Harmoni’s Discover feature on his blog, saying “Why is this quicker? With SPSS, I tended to look at all of the areas of possible interest, most of which did not contain useful differences. By using Discover, I went from maybe 10% of my dives into the data delivering something useful to about 50% – and that resulted in more speed.”

Harmoni’s user-friendly interface also follows the data all the way through to the most important step: sharable insights. Everyone will agree that SPSS outputs are not appropriate to share with clients or stakeholders; they must first be translated into a consumable format. This is not an issue in Harmoni, as the data you’ve been working with all along is easily visualized in beautiful, shareable, instantly updated dashboards.

There’s a happy medium

We know how hard change can be. Many of us might say at this point in 2020, we are “change weary.” But it is hard to argue the fact that several of our new ways of doing things are easier and more efficient than ever before. It boils down to getting a better end-result. 

For researchers, there are things at which SPSS excels, and there is a level of comfort in using a familiar system. Harmoni plays well in the sandbox with SPSS data, and is not exclusive. However, for those who really want to understand their audiences and are curious about what the data is truly telling them, Harmoni provides the focus, speed, and efficiency necessary to meet today’s intense demands for fast, quality insights head-on. The technology allows you to add value to every project by helping you get more from the data, creating greater value, so that you can add even more value to every project.