Research International (RI) is one of the largest international custom research agencies, with offices in 50 countries and more than 4,000 research professionals worldwide. It provides Internet-based research through its associated company, Kantar Interactive, one of the first online research agencies to specialize in global research activities.
RI’s own customer research has revealed that its international research clients are seeking ways to conduct surveys and receive the results in less time, as well as improve the response rate among groups that are difficult to reach. To deliver these improvements, RI needed to be in a position to offer a broad spectrum of Internet-based research services to complement and, in some cases, combine with its existing research methods.
RI, in association with Kantar Interactive, evaluated a number of Web-based technologies for conducting research. It adopted SPSS Inc.’s Quancept Web as its preferred solution for deploying custom market research surveys over the Internet.
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Research International carried out research into the needs of its own customers and found they were ready for the benefits of Internet-based research. As an agency specializing in custom research projects on a global scale, RI regularly carries out consumer and business-to-business studies for many of the world’s best known brand names, as well as countless national players within the 50 countries in which it operates. Its own customer research showed that clients wanted to be able to contact people faster and find ways to improve the response rate among difficult-to-reach groups. They also wanted to be able to conduct research on the Internet.
RI has a reputation for handling complex and difficult projects, so it needed to find an effective solution that would cope with any kind of project, from the most straightforward to the most intricate. RI demanded the same ease of setup that it experiences with its other telephone or face-to-face studies. It was for these reasons that Quancept Web was adopted as the vehicle for delivering research over the Web at both RI and Kantar Interactive.
Online research is relatively new, and since adopting Quancept Web, RI has been able to experiment with a number of techniques with the aim of providing its clients with new branded research methodologies.
If you know Quancept CATI well, you can do complex
Web interviews without much trouble, as it is identical
to CATI. Nothing else we looked at was comparable
in terms of what you could do with the software
in complex ways. It is very flexible.
RI has had a number of remarkable early successes along the way. A well-known telecommunications provider commissioned a survey of 22,000 of its customers with e-mail addresses. A modest incentive was offered: a free draw to win a $300 personal organizer. By the time the last e-mail had been dispatched, in just 90 minutes, more than 950 completed interviews had been returned. Over the week, the response grew to 22 percent: a healthy return compared to a traditional mailing, at a fraction of the cost. The client was delighted, and has been providing a lot of repeat business.
Sampling is still an issue in Web-based research. The broad support Quancept Web provides for a range of sampling methods was attractive to RI, such as its feature for password protection on questionnaires. This means that named individuals may only complete the survey once, even though they may do it in several stages. David Walker, international director of new media for RI Group, explained: “With businessto- business audiences, we are able to position this as a much less intrusive way of contacting people and getting much better quality responses. We believe it also says something about the client. It is a much more effective communications medium than a postal survey or an interview on the telephone.” On employment research, for instance, completion rates have been driven up from a typical 50 percent to around 80 percent, with one survey achieving an unprecedented 95 percent response rate.
RI has also used Quancept Web with great success on pop-up surveys. Attached to the site of a well-known consumer brand, a pop-up questionnaire surveying one in 30 visitors with a five-minute questionnaire and a very modest incentive has been achieving a 15 percent completion rate. Repeated on a monthly basis, this tracker study has cost the client a mere $150,000. By any other methods, the bill would run to millions of dollars.
Sean Swalwell at RI’s London office is responsible for programming online surveys. “The main benefit of using Quancept Web is we didn’t have to learn anything new. If you know Quancept CATI™ well, you can do complex Web interviews without much trouble, as it is identical to CATI. Nothing else we looked at was comparable in terms of what you could do with the software in complex ways. It is very flexible.”
Swalwell typically expects a 15- to 20-minute interview to require a day’s effort to prepare, with the bulk of the time being devoted to refining the online appearance of the questionnaire: expectations are high among Web users and questionnaires must reflect high design standards. Making stylistic improvements is especially easy in Quancept Web. Swalwell is also vigilant about ways to increase the response rate on surveys. He uses other SPSS Inc. tools to analyze the dropout profile of each Quancept Web survey and identify areas where this is especially high. Initiatives such as these are allowing RI to develop effective strategies to deliver improved response rates and encourage participation from harder-to-reach groups.
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