Not every industry moves at the same speed. Some sectors build the operational infrastructure they need almost as fast as they grow. Market research is not one of them. Here are six things that every agency does manually today that should have been automated years ago — and what it costs every time they are not.
1. Reading supplier quote emails
A supplier sends a quote. A PM reads it, extracts the CPI, capacity, and timeline, and enters it into a spreadsheet. Forty-five minutes per supplier. Five suppliers per project. Every project, every time. This is data extraction. Software has been doing data extraction since the 1990s.
2. Writing negotiation counter-offers
After reviewing quotes, a PM writes an email to each supplier with a counter-offer. The counter is based on gut feel, experience, and whatever she can remember about what this supplier accepted last time. There is no database of supplier flexibility. No historical acceptance rates. No strategy engine. Just instinct.
3. Generating supplier-specific survey links
Every supplier needs a unique survey entry link with their identifier embedded. PMs create these manually, test them manually, and send them manually. For fifteen suppliers across four surveys, that is sixty links. By hand.
4. Monitoring quota fill in real time
During live fieldwork, quota cells fill at different rates across different suppliers. PMs monitor this by emailing suppliers for updates, or by logging into each survey platform individually and checking completion counts. A live dashboard for this has existed in adjacent industries for decades.
5. Post-fieldwork reconciliation
When fieldwork closes, someone matches the agency's respondent records against the supplier's records to establish how many completions to pay for. This is done in Excel, row by row, with disputes resolved over email. It is pure data matching — exactly the kind of work that is most error-prone when done by humans and most reliable when done by software.
6. Tracking supplier performance over time
Who consistently delivers on time? Which supplier has the highest fraud rate? Which one accepts lower CPIs for B2B studies? Most agencies cannot answer these questions because the data lives in hundreds of individual email threads. No aggregation. No trends. No intelligence.
None of these tasks require human judgment. All of them currently consume human time. The operational infrastructure to automate all six exists. The question is not whether it will happen. It is which agencies will move first.
SoftSight — automates all six. softsight.io