If yes, a career in market research is waiting for you.

All you need is a phone and four to five hours of your time to get started.

What Is Market Research?

Market research entails scanning the minds of current and potential customers to gauge what kind of products or services they need, at what prices, in what quantities and packaging and how often.

This assessment involves developing a research questionnaire, interviewing target audience, colleting the data, interpreting it and arriving at consumer insights. These consumer insights become the basis on which new products are launched and existing ones improved.

Work from Home

The data gathering exercise can be broken into many parts - generating target audience lists for interviews, fixing appointments, conducting interviews, collating and analysing the data and submitting the report to the client.

Some jobs in this chain can be outsourced and this is the work from home opportunity for you. You can work as a freelance market research agent for agencies just like Mumbai based homemaker NC Jayshree.

This 39 year old, mother of two, has been in the market research field as a freelancer for 10 years. "I start work from 11 am and work till 6 pm. In case I need to go out, I adjust my time accordingly," informs Jayshree.

She is quick to add that every research project has its own demands. For example, if you are interviewing IT heads, you need to call in the evening and if the target audience is finance heads, the best time is in the morning around 9.30 am before they hit their files.

Now a veteran, Jayshree has made her own data bank of the 'who's who' of the corporate world and gets projects regularly. "People I work for move from one agency to another and they continue to call me for work," she reveals.

Before staring the interview process, she shares the market research norms with the respondent, which states the information shared will not be disclosed to anyone unless the respondent does not mind.

Most questionnaires comprise 10 questions with three responses - yes, no and can't say. Some ask for a soft copy, which can be emailed. Certain interviews, called in-depth or face-to-face interviews need to be conducted by field executives from the research agency. In such cases, Jayshree fixes appointments.