Four key takeaways from our academic customer survey

Insights

23 November 2022

Four key takeaways from our academic customer survey

In June 2022 we conducted a survey to find out more about what our academic customers think of Cambridge Cognition’s products and services. These surveys are a great opportunity for our customers to give us their honest and candid feedback. We had a great response and gained some very interesting insights and feedback. Here we discuss four of the main points that we learned from the survey.

Cambridge Cognition’s products are used and trusted by academics undertaking research in universities and research institutions all around the world to understand more about brain health and cognition. We wanted to understand more about what our academic customers think about Cambridge Cognition, so we recently ran a survey that asked a variety of questions about our products and services. It was important to learn more about our academic customers and how and why they use our products, including understanding more about the experience of the study participants who use our cognitive assessments.

We had an amazing response to our survey, with over 160 responses. We were thrilled with the overwhelmingly positive response we had from our customers, with a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score of 96%, which is classed as “excellent”.

Here we discuss the key takeaways from our 2022 survey. Keep an eye on our blog for more in depth analyses of some of these points.

1) Our customers are very satisfied

The first question that we asked was “Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with our company?”. We were very pleased that 95% of respondents said they were either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with Cambridge Cognition. A further 89% said they would be likely or very likely to recommend us to a friend or colleague.

We are of course very happy that so many of our customers are satisfied with Cambridge Cognition. Much of this is down to the dedicated work of our Sales, Customer Support and Logistics teams who work tirelessly to make sure that our customers have everything that they need to make the cognitive testing in their research go smoothly.

2) Our products are very highly rated by our customers

The survey contained several questions about how our customers would rate our products in certain areas such as reliability, quality, usefulness and cost.

Usefulness and Reliability

One of the questions had a list of words like “Reliable”, “Useful”, “Impractical” and “Poor quality” and we asked respondents to select which of the words they would use to describe our products. They could select multiple options. The highest proportion of respondents (80%) selected “Useful”, followed by “Reliable” (70%).

Quality

Another question asked respondents to rate the quality of our products. The response was overwhelmingly positive – 95% of our customers said that our products were either “high quality” or “very high quality”.

Meeting Customers’ Needs

We also asked how well our products meet our customers’ needs. We were delighted that 82% of customers said our products met their needs “extremely well” or “very well”. We know that there are some functionalities that academic researchers would like to see added into CANTAB^TM Connect Research.

We are using the feedback obtained via the survey in conjunction with other feedback to shape our priorities for the next year.

Cost

Some respondents did highlight the cost of our products, with 25% of people selecting “Overpriced”. We do appreciate that many of our academic customers are on very tight budgets and we work closely with all our customers to find a solution which meets their study budget. We further support our customers through the annual CANTAB^TM Research Grant. Winners are granted a CANTAB^TM Connect Research license with 150 assessments along with a grant of up to £1,000 to conduct a study.

The overwhelmingly positive feedback is a testament to our amazing R&D, Product and Software development teams who are continually working to improve our products to ensure they meet our customers’ often complex study needs while ensuring we maintain our exceptional standard of quality.

3) Participants generally find our products easy to use

Our products are designed with the end-user in mind. This includes people running studies and importantly the participants taking the cognitive assessments. A key challenge that we face is how to balance the need to make the tests as short and easy to use as possible whilst also managing to capture meaningful and clinically relevant data. Therefore an important question on the survey was asking how study participants felt about using our products, particularly regarding how easy they are to use. 68% of our customers thought that their participants found it easy or very easy to engage with CANTAB^TM tasks. Many respondents also clarified that when participants found the tests hard, it was often because sadly they were in an advanced state of cognitive impairment or had other limitations such as problems with motor function.

Comments that we received on the ease of use of our products for participants included that the instructions were clear and easy to follow and that most of the tasks were relatively straightforward. Some of those that worked with children and younger participants mentioned that people in these age groups are familiar with the technology and find our digital assessments fun and engaging.

Some respondents did report that older participants or those with more cognitive difficulties sometimes found it difficult to do some tests because they weren’t familiar with the technology. There are several different variants for each task that are tailored for different population groups and ability levels. Please contact us at support@camcog.com to chat more about task variants if you find your participants are struggling with the available task.

We also asked what improvements our customers would like to see in our products. One of the most frequent requests was the ability to pause between assessments. Good news – this is already possible. Check your user guide to find instructions about how to pause or abort a test.

We are continuing to collate the feedback. Keep an eye out for continual improvements as we focus on making some of the frequently requested enhancements.

4) Our products are used across a huge range of conditions and indications

One area we were most interested in understanding better was what conditions and indications are being studied by our academic customers. We collate the information about what conditions our products are used in through our bibliography but it was exciting to be able to tie this information in with the broader feedback provided in the survey.

There were over 60 different populations or indications cited in the survey. The most frequent populations included healthy adults, children and adolescents, and people with different forms of dementia including Alzheimer’s disease and dementia caused by Parkinson’s disease. However, there are also people working across a range of mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, conditions where cognitive decline is not the main symptom such as pain, diabetes and heart conditions, and conditions related to life events such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), military service or time in prison.

Finding out more about how our products are used help people across such a wide range of conditions and indications makes us very proud to be able to support our academic customers and their amazing work.

Thank you

We’d like to thank everyone who took the time to fill in the survey. Having these insights is incredibly important to help us to know what our customers value about Cambridge Cognition. It also gives us useful information into how and why our products are being used and what motivates people to choose Cambridge Cognition.

We are continuing to analyse the survey in more depth and think about how we can take feedback and suggestions into account. We are in the process of reaching out to those who had specific questions and we are integrating the feedback into our product improvement plans.

Watch this space for further updates from the 2022 survey and if you are an academic user of our products, please do keep an eye out for the 2023 survey.