Marketing Research and Product/Service Promotion

The following factors are critical for the success of your business:

• survey preparation time;
• survey conduction time;
• survey cost;
• survey quality;
• survey regional coverage;
• monitoring of interviewers' activity.

Let us suppose that you need to expand the regional coverage of your survey, improve quality and reduce time consumption, all with a simultaneous decrease in the survey cost. Does it seem to be impossible? Not anymore!

Now DigSee SURE allows you to fulfil these tasks and to make them much easier than you could think!

The cost-effective DigSee SURE solution will change the current technology of your remote staff, change the way you work with respondents and allow you to achieve all the above purposes. Mobile communications will deliver the completed forms and questionnaires to you already fit for analysis.

Let's discuss in more detail how DigSee SURE can assist your company.

Speeding up questionnaire elaboration

First of all, it is noteworthy that the office version of DigSee SURE allows one to create a template of any questionnaire very fast and conveniently. The difference at this stage from other software packages designed for preparing questionnaire templates is that DigSee SURE is oriented on fulfilment of definite tasks, namely question-by-question preparation of a questionnaire, and therefore a questionnaire template is elaborated in the shortest terms. During the template elaboration you can see all the available options and possible types of questions, and thus you do not need any special training to start developing a questionnaire.

Moreover, when preparing the questionnaire template, you can set special rules which would not allow any input errors. For your questions you can set a control of allowed intervals (syntactical control), specify where the answers are mandatory or optional, set "smart" navigation through the questionnaire depending on the answers of the respondent, and logical rules which will allow one to find mismatches in the form input or "lapses of logic" in the respondent's answers directly during the input process.

Read more about how to make your solutions mobile quickly and cost-effectively on the DigSee SURE mobile version page.

Reduction of survey preparation time due to incorporation of the earlier experience

DigSee SURE allows you to store in the system all templates of questionnaires and forms which you have ever created. Thus, you can easily copy any of the earlier used questionnaires and make "cosmetic" modifications in order to satisfy current requirements. Creating a template in the image and likeness of an existing one can now take just a few minutes!

Possibility to conduct a simultaneous survey in several regions with cost reduction

It looks too good to be true, but your prepared questionnaire template will reach your remote field staff in a few seconds irrespective of the distance. Your remote representative can receive the questionnaire template either via common phone landlines or via mobile network using a GSM/GPRS connection. There is no more need to print paper questionnaires or to cover travel costs for your employees to get training on the new questionnaire.

Dramatic cost reduction on training of your network interviewers on the new questionnaire

The prepared questionnaire template already contains all items of information indispensable for survey conduction. The rules which will not allow the operator to enter incorrect information, transitions or "skip patterns" which minimise the time of the interview, logical rules which allow to verify the respondent's answers or their logical consistency during the interview, both the question and the comments for the interviewer — all this is immediately accessible to your field staff. They would need practically no training to start working with the new questionnaire and the new software.

Minimisation of losses in data input quality practically to zero

Significant improvement of interviewing quality. Exclusion of the secondary stage of data entry and the respective expenses.

The way it works in the field is the following. Your field representative holds a small and light Palm organiser and enters the respondent's answers into it as they are given. Before asking a question, the interviewer can see the question, the comments to it, as well as all available options of the respective answer. The interview is conducted quite informally, and it is practically impossible to make an input error, because the handheld automatically controls the quality of the input information. Depending on the answers obtained, the handheld provides navigation ("skip") to the following question, and therefore it is impossible to ask irrelevant questions. Moreover, when the interview is over, the questionnaire is automatically checked for logical consistency and, if logical mismatches are detected, the interviewer can immediately, while the respondent is still present, repeat the respective question and correct the questionnaire!

Your clients will receive better results in a shorter time, and you sharply reduce costs. You would not need to organise secondary-stage questionnaire input anymore — questionnaires are entered into the computer when it is necessary: during survey conduction or interviewing.

After filling in the questionnaire or form, your remote representative can transmit the survey or interview results to the central office in a few seconds, in a form ready for processing or for delivery to the client. This provides the following: critical reduction of survey conduction time.

Are there any other advantages? The answer is positive!

• Firstly, you get a possibility to conduct on-the-fly analysis of the questionnaire.
• Secondly, the system provides improvement of the survey/interviewing technique quality.

As has already been mentioned, each questionnaire or form is automatically checked for logical integrity when it is entered during the survey interview. But what happens if there are no input errors, but there is a lapse of logic in the questionnaire itself? Our solution takes account of this possibility, too. The questionnaire can be saved with a special checkmark which means that the given questionnaire has logic errors or discrepancies. Later at the office, a manager or analyst will be able to conduct and print out the questionnaire analysis by the logical rules which "have worked" at the moment of the questionnaire input, for subsequent analysis or delivery to the customer.

Moreover, there is a special mode of separate editing/viewing of "incorrect" and "correct" questionnaires. A convenient system has been designed for navigating through each questionnaire and the array of questionnaires.

The above combination of functions provides you with an opportunity for effective management of your field staff

An authorised manager decides which questionnaire should be transferred into the handheld of which particular mobile representative. Moreover, questionnaires received from different representatives can be stored in different arrays of questionnaires, which gives you a possibility to evaluate the survey quality and the scope of work of each particular representative separately.

Moreover, why not prepare your internal reports as forms and have your field staff enter their daily reports in such a form? In this case, you will have effective monitoring of the daily activities, whereabouts, results and expenses of your field staff!

If your company has numerous subdivisions, DigSee SURE is easily adaptable to any particular business structure

Due to the subsystems of import/export of templates and questionnaire arrays, it is possible to organise distributed input of questionnaires and forms in remote departments using standalone desktops and notebooks with no network capabilities. The data can then be exchanged by transferring files on floppy disks, CDs, by e-mail, etc.

You acquire an opportunity of practically error-free input of a large number of paper questionnaires at your office

If you need to enter plenty of forms or questionnaires without errors at your office (for example, those received by mail from "home users"), the Network SURE solution can help you reduce the input time and expenses with a simultaneous reduction of the number of errors made by operators. All the above advantages, combined with two data input options ("keyboard only" and "keyboard + mouse") and with a possibility of simultaneous entry of questionnaires from several workplaces and placement of the results on the central server — all these features make DigSee SURE quite indispensable for the input of questionnaires.