Calling all SMEs that are based in London – let your voice be heard!

Business Link in London’s quarterly Business Confidence Index has been providing an in-depth analysis of the recession’s impact on London’s small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) since July 2009.

The findings from previous surveys have been greatly received and widely published, delivering a useful tool for tracking and forecasting the optimism of London based businesses. For a synopsis of the previous surveys findings visit: http://online.businesslink.gov.uk/London_files/BCIMarch2010.pdf

In the latest Index, over 3,000 small businesses are going to be interviewed about business confidence during the final quarter of 2010. The Index will also explore strategies that SMEs have adopted to reduce the recession’s impact, their levels of optimism and growth prospects for the year ahead.

Please keep the momentum going by taking part in this survey, the only one of its kind to speak with such a wide ranging collection of business decision makers in London.

For a few minutes of your time we are offering anyone that takes part the opportunity to receive a FREE synopsis of the findings which is invaluable market information. The survey is being carried out by B2B International. Therefore, please be assured that all answers will be entirely confidential and not passed back individually to Business Link in London.

If you are interested in taking part please send an e-mail to bci@b2binternational.com before 1st November 2010

As improved technology and increased pressure enable and push us to speed up our work, David Ward this week ponders whether these faster turnaround times are always a good thing.

When I used to work at a well known bank, bouncing cheques and cancelling payments for those unlucky people frequently going beyond their credit allowance, a colleague and line manager of the team I worked in used to have what I suppose you could call a catchphrase. He would walk up behind an unsuspecting member of the team and utter the following words…

Faster, faster, faster… must go faster!

I never really understood whether or not this was his bizarre motivational technique gleaned from reading a book on people management or whether he really was just irritating. Who knows? Maybe it was both. His catchphrase sums up well a trend that I have noticed in my 10+ years in data processing and market research

Market research has always, as far as I can tell, been a fast-paced business. And this is very true for those working in data processing, especially as computing power and techniques in processing data improve. The time between questionnaire sign-off to CATI or e-survey setup seems to shrink, as does the time between fieldwork ending and the delivery of cross tabs. Everything has to be as thoroughly checked and accurate as before. It just needs to be delivered that little bit quicker. Over 10 years I think this is an undeniable trend.

Ever since I joined B2B International, I’ve looked at ways to improve the turnaround times in data processing that allow us to keep meeting our clients’ expectations. There are many ways of doing this. For example, we can invest in new software, as we have recently with Confirmit for our e-surveys and QPS Insight to allow us to carry out data entry more efficiently. We can also use the software we currently have more wisely, such as writing VBA scripts in Excel to automate certain tasks. Whatever the method we use to meet this challenge, it is a challenge I enjoy.

Having said that, I often ask myself whether there will come a point when people working in our industry will start to have to say no more often. Will the time come when the speed of delivery will start to have some detrimental effect on all-round quality of research carried out, and at what point does the trade-off between quality and speed become acceptable? At B2B International we’re well placed to deal with the challenges that market research throws at us. A combination of a strong team, smart thinking, and a constant drive to improve the way we work means we haven’t yet reached the point where “no” is something we have to say very often – and long may that continue!

David Ward this week uses his data processing expertise to show us how we can spot and weed out ‘rogue respondents’ to get the most reliable and valuable data from our online surveys.

The internet is a very useful tool in market research. We can reach a much wider and larger audience than using traditional pen and paper or CATI interviewing (spam filters allowing). We can make the interviewing experience more visual, route respondents to the questions relevant to them, view results in real time before the tabulation processes have begun, program logic checks in to the survey to catch errors before the analysis stage…the list of positives goes on. Of course there are, as with any interview method, pros and cons to choosing a particular method of interviewing.

On our travels on the internet we’re never too far away from someone wanting to collect our opinions about this and that. For example, when I was looking online for a new car recently, nearly every website I went to had some sort of pop-up window asking me to take part in a survey and, more often than not, some incentive was provided to entice me to spend my time completing the survey. Personally I’ve never been tempted to complete one of these surveys appearing in pop-up windows, but that’s just me. However, what is to stop someone seeing the incentive, thinking ‘I’d quite like a new iPod’, and just randomly clicking through the survey in double-quick time with no thought to their responses? For the respondent, the incentive is there to get the survey completed and have a chance of winning the prize, but not necessarily to give each question the thought required. There isn’t a lot we can do to stop this happening; however, there are things we can do after the data is collected to spot these rogue respondents.

The scope for logic checks on online surveys would be vast if you took it to the nth degree. We might lose a large number of respondents if we did do this though – through frustration at constantly having their responses questioned – but there is a balance to be found. As Head of Data Processing at B2B International, what steps can I take to ensure the quality of our data? There are no guarantees but we can take steps when setting up online surveys and reviewing the data to highlight suspect records. As I have said, we can program logic checks into our online surveys to make sure the survey is filled in correctly. We can make sure numbers add up to 100% where needed, or that respondents select the correct number of items from a list.

One of the easiest ways to catch potentially bad records in the data is to quickly check the time stamp for each interview. Did someone manage to complete a 20-minute interview in 5 minutes? This would suggest someone has just clicked through the survey with a click happy mouse finger, without giving due consideration to their answers.

Another telltale sign to look out for is something termed as “straightlining”. Has a respondent gone through a grid or battery of questions and given the same response each time?

We can also look for inconsistencies in the logic of the answers and for unlikely values in numeric questions. Part of this can be done during the survey and more checks can be run once the data have been collected.

We could also add in questions purely for verification purposes to allow us to judge whether or not the respondent is reading the question. For example, in a grid of questions we could add one that simply says “for verification purposes please answer strongly agree”. Along the same lines as this we could use data from any panels we have purchased to ask respondents to verify certain details. Comparisons can then be made between the original panel data and our own data collected online. Differences between the two could be viewed as suspect.

Finally, we can look at responses to open questions. We can check that fields do not contain random characters, or single character answers. If we find this, can we be sure we can trust the other answers given?

Failing one of these checks does not necessarily mean the data is not to be trusted but failing two or more may be grounds for removing that respondent. Perhaps the strongest guide to base the decision on is the time taken to complete a survey, but whichever method or combination of methods are used, having the checks in place gives us added confidence in the findings we present to our clients.

I’m not sure we will ever be able to completely stop respondents just clicking through an online survey giving responses that are illogical, poor quality and clearly not much use to market research, but knowing that there are telltale signs we can look out for which can indicate a respondent we may need to exclude is certainly reassuring.

A recent article featured in BtoB magazine – Online market research takes off
– suggests that internet surveys combined with more traditional research methods are becoming the norm.

The article estimates that 43% of all survey research carried out last year was conducted online.  Whilst quantitative consumer research has been leading the online research charge, thanks to a much greater number of potential respondents, b-to-b research is believed to be heading in the same direction.

But it’s not just quantitative research techniques – the most widely used of which is the online survey – that are increasing in popularity.  Qualitative research techniques, such as online focus groups and online panels, are increasing in prevalence too.

B2B International Director, Matthew Harrison, was interviewed for the article.  He acknowledged that around 15% of B2B International’s overall research happens online, with particularly high usage among our Asian markets, especially Japan.

Harrison recognizes that the feasibility of online research is sometimes limited by the availability of qualified contact lists, but if such lists are available, this is a useful data collection method.  As well as faster turnaround times, there are often significant cost-savings associated with online market research.

Yet in spite of its many benefits, online research is almost always a complement to traditional research techniques.  All techniques used in the market research industry have their own distinct advantages and disadvantages.  For example, online research techniques may not allow such detailed open-ended probing as telephone research, and response rates can be lower than with other methods.

When defining the methodology of any market research project, B2B International carefully considers the research objectives, and assesses which technique – or combination of techniques – will yield the best results within a given budget.  These include, more and more frequently, a range of online techniques, but not to the exclusion of tried and tested ‘traditional’ methods.

Why not read our white paper, Using Online Focus Groups As A Business-To-Business Research Technique?