The ReadSoft effect on the British Market Research Bureau
Process: Survey processes
Segment: Market research
Country: UK
Leading global market research company BMRB found that, when it came to automating complex questionnaire creation and processing, an integrated solution from ReadSoft and SPSS ticked all the right boxes.
Want to know the percentage of Internet users that have broadband, or what people think of their politicians, or if consumers think a new brand of washing powder really does wash whiter? If so, then you need to do your research – and that’s exactly what BMRB does.
BMRB (British Market Research Bureau) is one of Europe’s largest full-service market research agencies, conducting media and marketing and social policy and public interest research, as well as stakeholder relationship measurement and management, in over 50 countries.
BMRB uses a wide range of data collection methods, with much of its research still done in the traditional way – on paper, via interviews on the telephone or in the home or using posted self-completion questionnaires. Data from millions of pages of these paper-based surveys used to be entered manually into computer systems, however today it is captured electronically through scanning of the questionnaires, then verification, analysis and collation of the data for output to reports to clients.
Flexibility and accuracy are crucial to this process. Scanning can be error-prone and inflexible - no two surveys look the same or feature the same questions, and BMRB had to reset scanning set-ups each time a client changed a question or the layout of a questionnaire. This involved additional costs and caused delays in getting the surveys out and the results back – with the inevitable impact on clients’ businesses.
BMRB’s solution was to automate and make more flexible the creation and processing of questionnaires - and they did it using a seamless, integrated solution incorporating software from ReadSoft and SPSS.
2.5 million pages a year
Alan Hunt, BMRB’s Operations Project Manager, explained: “Although we have 15 years’ electronic data capture experience using laptops and telephones, paper questionnaires remain a large part of what we do, with over 2.5 million pages processed each year. We were one of the first research agencies to adopt scanning as a data capture mechanism, about eight years ago. Back then we couldn’t use scanning technology for anything except large projects because of the overheads for testing, setting up and quality control. We wanted to harmonise the way we create paper questionnaires, basically link up the captured data with the way we authored, designed, scanned and processed the questionnaires. The arrival of more cost-effective scanning technology helped, but it was data capture software from ReadSoft and questionnaire authoring and analysis tools from SPSS that completely revolutionised our approach.”
Paul Wilkins, Senior Operations Development Executive at BMRB takes up the story: “Every survey begins with our researcher receiving a brief from a client, then deciding the methodology and formulating a questionnaire. Initially we had a graphic design department that would design each questionnaire, and the researcher would be running between the designer and the client to get it right – so there were three separate entities involved in producing each survey form. From there it would be checked by our scanning team for ‘scanability’ - once all parties were happy it would be printed and dispatched.”
The BMRB scanning team would then create a data map on the questionnaire that would come out of the scanning system, enabling them to position content such as tick boxes in exactly the right place for scanning.
“A large 100-page survey would take 10 days to set-up and test and it was inflexible - if there was a mistake found on the survey, or any changes made, the scanning set-up would have to be done again. The whole thing was a minefield,” added Paul Wilkins.
An integrated solution
BMRB wanted an end-to-end solution whereby a questionnaire could be authored, designed, scanned, printed and analysed in one smooth operation, involving less time and fewer people. ReadSoft and SPSS therefore undertook individual and joint development effort to make this happen.
Key to the success of the project was the design of several questionnaire "templates" that could not only pass all of the design, authoring, scanning, printing and analysis criteria, but also be presented by researchers, without design help, to clients in the early stages of survey discussion.
Alan Hunt explained: “Using the ReadSoft and SPSS solutions a researcher can work directly with a client on the content and design of a questionnaire. Once this is complete we can take the template and within the press of a button have a very basic questionnaire in Microsoft Word format which can be sent to the client for approval. That process happens direct between researcher and client, without the need to involve the graphic design unit or the scanning department, because all of the rules for processing the document have already been imposed. If a client wants to change a template this can be done while the questionnaire script is being decided with a member of the scanning set-up team, so we have much more flexibility.”
Once the client has signed off the survey, the scanning team pick up the questionnaire, run through the quality checking process and, once satisfied, send the questionnaire to print and set up for scanning in a couple of key depressions. “That’s the key integration that has been done between ReadSoft and SPSS - it’s a process of minutes rather than days,” added Alan Hunt. “Scanning set up time and effort has been reduced dramatically, because the same team that does the data analysis also does the scanning set-up as well. That represents a 50 per cent saving in time, plus we increase efficiency and there is less opportunity for error.”
These efficiencies have benefited customer service. “It is far easier for researchers to deal with customers – we can just do things faster and better, and provide added value in terms of the questionnaire process,” said Alan Hunt. “Before we had many researchers all potentially creating paper questionnaires in the styles that they wanted. Now it’s a consistent and more seamless process, which means we can move our survey production deadlines closer to the actual field work. Having this integrated solution just adds a different dimension to what we’re doing. We can also use this to streamline our surveys globally, providing agencies who we syndicate research to with an off-the-shelf solution for conducting paper-based surveys.”
Alan Hunt concluded: “We saw the potential of ReadSoft in terms of flexibility and control when we were assessing this process. We constantly look at competitors but we still can’t come up with anything that is as good as ReadSoft's solution. And, more importantly, we have not had to make compromises or incur additional costs in terms of our scanning processes. ReadSoft and SPSS have worked together to come up with a totally integrated solution that is open, flexible and customizable for our current and future business needs.”
About the technology
ReadSoft's electronic data capture software automatically scans and extracts information, then interprets it and transfers it to other systems. The software reads handwritten text, machine-print, barcodes, check boxes, circles, tables, matrixes, and so on. Automatic forms processing is much faster than the tedious manual keying of information - it requires far less time and resource to be allocated to forms processing, provides very accurate interpretation of data and requests verification where there is any uncertainty, thereby reducing errors to a minimum.
SPSS’ Quanquest can be used to author questionnaires and at the same time specify how you want to analyse the results, eliminating delays further downstream. You don’t need technical expertise, even to tackle the most complex of surveys.
SPSS’ mrPaper can quickly create and format many types of paper questionnaires to reflect corporate design standards, whether one individual or many are involved in creating them. It runs as an extra menu in Microsoft Word, giving users the best of both worlds - a familiar business tool interface that's tailored for survey research.