Solid Marketing Research GmbH (SMR) is an independently-run market research agency based in Frankfurt, Germany, specializing in telephone research.
As a small, independent market research agency, SMR needs to differentiate itself from its competitors by providing highly specialized research services where expertise, high quality, and attention to detail can offer a competitive advantage. SMR aims to offer premium value, while optimizing productivity in order to keep costs down.
SMR implemented the QTS (Quancept Telephony System) to integrate advanced telephony services, such as automated predictive dialing with its Quancept CATI system, and to support audio recording and playback during interviews.
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It is exceptional to find a piece of technology that improves both productivity and morale at the same time, with benefits flowing to a happy workforce and a healthy bottom line. QTS has delivered both of these advantages to SMR. The company gained:
QTS sits between a Quancept CATI system and the telephone switch, so interviewers find both the CATI screen and the telephone handset or headset at their workstations under the control of the same system. By anticipating when interviewers are likely to conclude one interview and start the next, QTS initiates a controlled number of calls automatically and then routes them through to a waiting interviewer. Interviewers typically have to wait just a few seconds to start the next call and do not waste time dialing or listening to busy tones, service messages, or unanswered phones ringing.
Before QTS, it was really a chore dealing with open-ends. This improves our productivity, as keying in the answers during the interview always takes longer—and it improves the quality of the output enormously.
“We have been using QTS for over two years,” said Walter Lulay, managing director at SMR. “We use it for all our studies. For some surveys there is not so much benefit, but for others you can double the productivity.” Lulay sees particular benefit among low-incidence groups—for example, individuals who have purchased a particular make of car in the past two years, where less than one percent of the population might qualify. As a result, he has built a specialist business in contacting low-incidence groups. “If you take this to an extreme, each interviewer could make 40 contacts in an hour. We deliberately limit this to 35; otherwise, we would be torturing our interviewers. But this is still very productive.”
Lulay’s own estimates received external confirmation with a recent project. The purpose was to interview women aged 18–45 who were more than a certain percentage overweight. Pilot studies suggested that the household incidence would be 5–10 percent, and the interview would last some 10 minutes. With a tight deadline, SMR asked two other research agencies to help out with some of the fieldwork: both used Quancept, but only one had QTS. One estimate was precisely double the price of the other. Further investigation revealed that the higher price was simply a reflection of fact that the agency without QTS required twice the time to complete the task.
QTS’ ability to record verbatim comments to open-ended questions and play these back provides SMR with two further benefits. First, interviews are shorter, as interviewers do not have to pause to type and transcribe what the respondent is telling them. This adds to the savings already brought by automated predictive dialing. Second, the process of classifying and coding the open-ended answers is simpler, as it is electronic rather than on paper. It is also more accurate, as the coder can listen to the complete answer rather than a selective transcription of it.
Rather than simply record the answer given by the respondent, SMR organizes Quancept to record the whole question put to the respondent. This provides a number of useful quality checks during the coding process. In addition, SMR has given coding specialists additional responsibilities to ensure quality by checking both the answers and the interviewer’s performance by using a series of measures and “deficiency codes.” The audio snippets have also been found to be a very effective training aid either individually, for interviewers to learn from their own past performance, or in a group situation, when training new interviewers in what to do and what not to do.
As Lulay said, “Before QTS, it was really a chore dealing with open-ends. This improves our productivity, as keying in the answers during the interview always takes longer—and it improves the quality of the output enormously.”
The benefit to the workforce is that they now receive a tenminute break in every hour of interviewing. Though QTS makes it possible to fill every minute of the interviewer’s time, SMR deliberately chose to set a limit, so that interviewers remain focused, productive, and well motivated. And although less tangible than the other savings, SMR is convinced that this, too, has improved the quality of their work.
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