67 / 116
www. e l e c t r i c a l c o nn e c t i o n . c om . a u
6 7
NECA’s 2015 Market Monitor Study
will utilise SurveyMonkey’s powerful
FluidSurveys tool.
s
SurveyMonkey is the world’s leading online
survey platform.
s
Created in 1999 by Ryan Finley, a college
junior who needed to survey customers for
his part-time job.
s
Now has more than 450 employees
worldwide with customers including
99% of the Fortune 500.
s
SurveyMoneky also provides its services for
brands such as Facebook, Virgin, Samsung
and Kraft Foods.
s
SurveyMonkey opened it’s first APAC office
in Sydney last year with a team of seven
with plans to grow to 20 in 2015.
FluidSurveys is an intuitive online service
that actively reacts to the answers that
users give it. Unlike previous years, the
participants will open up different pathways
as they work through the survey, making
sure that the questions you’re being asked
remain relevant to you and useful to us.
The FluidSurveys tool will also allow
us to begin analysing results long before
all participants have finished filling the
survey out – meaning that the valuable
insights we gain can be released to the
community even sooner.
About SurveyMonkey
NECA 2015 Market Monitor in detail
This year's Market Monitor is the single largest
national survey undertaken by the electrical
contracting industry, with a scope spanning a
contractor’s relationship with their consumers
and wholesalers, to their concerns and
challenges for the years ahead.
This year’s survey will be even easier for
participants to fill out than in previous years, as
it is both online and interactive. The feedback
you provide is invaluable to manufacturers and
wholesalers, as well as giving NECA the help
we need in determining the direction of our
governance and industry representation.
This year, as in previous years, the study
focuses on specific areas relevant to today’s
contractor. There are six sections in this
year’s survey, all designed to give us a better
idea of how you operate and make decisions
– plus, it’s an opportunity for you to identify
areas that you think could do with some
improvement.
Broad Industry Overview
This section of the survey notes the changes
that are occurring in the industry and lets us
know what we might reasonably expect in the
coming months.
It looks at how you source your work, if the
flow of work is constant and your costs and
knowledge of new products. It also asks about
general concerns you might have for the future
of the industry and your feelings about the
direction in which it is headed.
This is your chance to have a direct say
about where the industry is going, notify us of
any upcoming issues you might foresee and
help us plan for the next two years.
Purchase Process and Decision Making
Who makes the decisions in regards to
which brands your business uses and where
they come from? What informs this decision?
What channels do you use when you do
purchase equipment?
This section asks these questions, giving
us an impression of how electrical contractors
typically purchase their goods and what
thinking goes into it. This informs the release
of educational material that helps you avoid
defective products and other potential pitfalls
for contractors, making the industry safer for
everyone involved.
‘The Grey Market’
There is little question as to the existence of
a parallel marketplace for wholesale electrical
goods in Australia, but at the same time there
is little information on what is driving electrical
contractors to import when they buy. This
section of the study looks at how the rise
of this ‘grey market’ will affect businesses
and member impressions on the safety or
legitimacy of these channels.
Your feedback here notifies homegrown
wholesalers of the areas that they’ve fallen short
in and also works to let the industry know of the
risks they may face when choosing to purchase
electrical goods through these routes.
The Role of Digital
There’s no question that the internet has
transformed our industry, with enormous
changes in the way we receive, conduct and
carry out business. This section attempts
to determine if the industry is successfully
meeting the challenge of new technologies and
adopting them at a rate swift enough to capture
the consumer.
We’re also interested in how you, as a
business, have been using these technologies
to make things easier and better for yourself
and your consumer. It’s your chance to
proudly let us know the ways in which you’ve
adopted technology to your advantage
and how it’s changed the way you manage
your business.
The End Consumer
This section is all about arguably the
most important component of our industry:
the consumer.
We’re looking to find out how exactly you
interact with your customers, what questions
they’re asking, how much they know and what
changes this makes to the way you do your
job. We want to know if the consumer in 2015
is more knowledgeable and more empowered
to make decisions than their 2013 counterpart
– and if not, why not?
The results of this section of the survey can
assist contractors in better connecting with
their customers and help make sure that your
business prospers, whatever the climate.
As Businesses Evolve
In order to meet the growing demands of
businesses, we will carefully examine the
purchasing decisions of consumers within
different age brackets. It is essential for us to
understand the changing consumer patterns
and how this could influence the industry as
businesses continuously evolve.