Meet your ESOMAR Reps: Dan Fleetwood of QuestionPro
In our new installment for our "Meet the Reps" series, we sat down with Dan Fleetwood, who is serving as the chair for our North American Representative team this year. Read on to get to know more about him, and why he's excited to be involved with ESOMR this year.
Can you tell us more about your experience in the industry and your current role?
I’m President of the Research Suite at QuestionPro, one of the industry's leading providers of web-based research software. In my current position, I manage six different product lines all of which play a key role in helping our customers conduct and gain insights from their research. I play a key role in defining the research technology and innovation that QuestionPro develops in order to continue to be a leader in the insights technology industry.
I have nearly 20 years of market research experience and I’m passionate about the role that software plays in helping businesses. I believe that software can help companies get better feedback, uncover actionable insights, and ultimately develop better products and services.
What do you love about market research and what draws you to this kind of work?
I’ve always been a curious person and love to ask lots of questions. As a result, working in the marketing research industry was a perfect fit. I love that market research can help companies make data-driven decisions and, in turn, improve the experience their customers have with the product or service. I’m also passionate about the role that research plays in helping arrive at these decisions. The more innovative that research software can be while having the core functionality that all researchers need, the better the industry will be as a whole.
What trends are you seeing in the industry right now that you are tracking? Anything you are particularly excited about?
Right now, it’s all about ChatGPT and GenerativeAI. This is something that I’m not only tracking but it gets me excited as well. To that point, there are five main areas that I’m keeping a close eye on surrounding Generative AI, many of which QuestionPro either has or is working to incorporate in our offering.
Survey and questionnaire creation: By integrating AI tools into survey platforms, users can now develop surveys and questionnaires on various topics to reach broad audiences within seconds.
Data quality in market research: One can argue that users can game the system into completing surveys and scripting open-ended responses using ChatGPT. However, with intelligent development, research facilitators like QuestionPro have already solved the problem of eliminating bad responses that are created with AI.
Synthesizing & NLP in research: With the help of ChatGPT, researchers can now eliminate time spent synthesizing data, coding responses, and transcribing qualitative research data into nuggets of information that matter.
Intelligent dashboards: Data can be construed in many ways. With generative AI, researchers can coerce data to find trends and patterns and build intelligent dashboards that are easy to configure, manage and distribute.
Smarter insights repositories: By leaning on past data, generative AI can make managing insights repositories a breeze while enabling automated insights.
Why did you decide to become an ESOMAR Rep?
I wanted to give back to the industry and help contribute to it in a meaningful way. While at the same time, I wanted to become an ESOMAR rep to help with networking as well. The global perspective that ESOMAR brings to North America is something that I think is really important in today’s business world. I’m looking forward to continuing to spread that message and influence as Chair of the ESOMAR North American rep team this year. The standards and ethics that ESOMAR brings and sets forth in the industry are extremely important. This is crucial as every industry needs a set of codes to operate under and ESOMAR is leading the charge globally.