It is the role of today's market research companies to provide companies across every business sector and in every country around the globe with the high-quality data they need create and modify products to suit the specific need of their customers. As customers lives and needs have become more complex, so too has the task of gathering and expertly analyzing consumer data, demanding a technology solution as sophisticated as 21st-century consumers.
Greenfield Online has responded to the need for sophisticated technology by embarking on a multi-year, multi-million-dollar project to build out an enterprise-level technology infrastructure that is already helping the organization—across the board and around the globe—achieve a number of key goals including: creating efficiencies, optimizing supply and improving the quality of service provided to customers, as well as, data quality.
The comprehensive infrastructure brings together a number of enabling technologies, with the underlying, enterprise-level platform, United Panel System (UPS), serving as the glue that brings the technologies together in a cohesive whole. The system now processes millions of transactions and terabytes of data on a daily basis. In effect, UPS represents a consolidation of a set of disparate technology applications and software into one seamlessly operating platform. By bringing these enabling technologies into one, unified platform, Greenfield Online has created a single business process for end-to end project delivery—from order taking to delivery.
Delivering on quality through UPS
Over the last three-plus years, Greenfield Online has been building out its all-encompassing UPS system, with an eye toward ”technologies aimed at improving the process and scalability of our business” comments David St Pierre, Greenfield Online’s CTO.
He goes on to note that the market research industry been transformed “seemingly overnight” into a technology-driven, Internet-based sector.
“Just a few years ago, the Internet-based, technology-driven market research industry didn't exist; now it virtually defines market research,” St Pierre says. “We saw an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this transformation, making an enterprise-level infrastructure an integral part of our business model.”
UPS is highly scalable and redundant, allowing the company to grow and add functionality, while virtually eliminating downtime (uptime across the UPS platform stands at 99.8 percent), a key factor in today's global, 24/7 Internet economy.
“The build-out of this system is a dynamic process; we'll be continuing to add to and refine the system over the next few years,” comments Hugh Davis, Co-founder and EVP at Greenfield Online. “So it's critical that we have the ability to scale up to meet changing needs.”
Components of technology platform meet key business needs
The technologies that reside under the overarching umbrella of UPS, work together and communicate seamlessly in order to create Greenfield's overarching technology platform. But they also perform critical, specific tasks under three general business headings:
- Creating efficiencies
- Optimizing respondent supply
- Improving quality data quality
- Improving quality of service
Through its Process Automation System (PAS), a workflow and resource management system, Greenfield Online is creating an ultra-efficient workflow pattern within the company, thereby decreasing cycle-time and increasing efficiency and enabling uniformity of end-to-end project delivery.
“One of the great things about this system is that it means less people have to be involved in transactions, which dramatically improves uniformity,” St. Pierre says. “The fewer hands on a transaction, the less chance there is for something to go wrong.”
The PAS system is comprised of a single series of technologies that communicate flawlessly and operate across the company's global enterprise. The system is scalable and user-friendly, facilitating training, decreasing labor costs and further ensuring data quality.
Another component technology that helps GFOL increase efficiency is the Alert Management System (AMS), which constantly monitors conditions across the enterprise, generating alerts when certain established thresholds have been reached. This is a key element in ensuring constant availability, both internally and for respondents across the company's network of thousands of sites.
Respondent management
A number of important technologies work together to help the company fully optimize the flow of survey respondents, and respondent experience. This has become increasingly important as the online market research industry continues to mature, and respondents have become more and more difficult to not only attract, but engage in the survey process. Our goal as a company is to get the right respondent, to the right survey at the right time. The following technologies enable us to do just that.
Panel Acquisition and Management (PAM) is one important technology Greemfield Online uses to bolster panelist recruitment and optimize supply, while localizing content and personalizing and optimizing the recruitment process. In its role as a CRM tool, PAM allows seamless integration with members’ recruitment sources and interests, creating a positive, fully integrated experience. And PAM enables involvement with members in targeted panelist recruitment campaigns, with sign-up pages and custom communications that include information about the studies participants have joined and their outcomes.
While PAM helps the company create positive member experiences, it also increases operational efficiencies by enabling management of all survey panels of respondents from a single location. Additionally, it facilitates efficient recruitment and management of panels by dynamically profiling members, and providing targeted and creative recruitment campaigns that continue throughout the member experience.
Closely aligned to PAM technology is Profile Express, which decreases the time respondents are required to spend answering the questions to build their profile history. Rather than being asked to rewrite history by sorting through and updating a multitude of profile questions, whenever a panelist logs onto the system, he is presented with a short list of questions that can be updated. Using advanced, proprietary technology, the system chooses questions based on demand in the marketplace. Typically, that means questions are asked in a streamlined fashion, and not asked, then to never be utilized. The Profile Express is a manageable 10 targeted questions. And, because the system is dynamic, it presents a new set of questions with each new log-in, all of which are timely and relevant to the respondent.
The Invite Management System (IMS) works in concert with other technologies under the UPS umbrella, to ensure that respondents interact with surveys that are available for response. So respondents are spared the frustration of being directed to closed, lapsed, or mismatched surveys.
“The system invites the right respondent to the right survey at the right time, optimizing the value of the profile data,” comments Keith Price, Greenfield Online Executive Vice President of sales and operations.
The Survey Management System (SMS) is an automated solution for deploying respondents to appropriate surveys, while also enabling monitoring of survey completion. In fact, the system enables management of hundreds of surveys simultaneously and from a single platform. The technology's capabilities include quota management and monitoring for response quality and completion status.
While the above technologies help the company to best utilize respondents that are members of the survey panel, another tool critical in optimizing supply is the company’s Real-Time Sampling® (RTS) respondent technology. RTS reaches out in real time to potential survey takers who may not choose to join an online panel. Respondents are recruited through the Global Survey Network and—if interested—they are screened and provided with relevant survey opportunities assigned by the Greenfield Online Survey Router. This Survey Router intelligently assigns respondents to relevant surveys based on demographic data. Further, the Survey Router synthesizes multiple sample and recruitment sources to ensure high-quality data.
“In the past, we were reaching out to one type of survey respondent—a respondent that is apt to not only participate in an online survey, but also join a marketing research panel,” Price comments. “We then realized we needed to examine alternative respondent sources, and/or broaden our access to consumers willing to participate in online surveys. Real-Time Sampling perfectly addresses the urgent need to take survey opportunities out to the widest possible audience of respondents—rather than expecting them to come to us.”
Improving quality data
Automation helps to drive higher-quality and eliminates the possibility of error. The UPS umbrella of tools helps to ensure high-quality data and service.
Quality of Data
All of the tools and techniques mentioned above help to ensure that the right survey gets to the right respondent at the right time, which inherently helps to improve data quality. Surveys are targeted, relevant and the respondent experience is a positive one, We now switch gears to discuss the issue of “over-participation” and poor quality response. As the industry matures, and respondents become more savvy, many have found ways of gaming the system to participate more than once. To help eliminate the possibility for duplicate respondents Greenfield Online employs proprietary Duplicate Response Protection (DRD) technology, which creates a unique global ID for each respondent. The ID stays with the respondent over time, efficiently grouping all accounts into a single respondent ID, going a long way toward eliminating fraudulent, duplicate responses. We couple this cookie-based fraud detection with a third party technology; Relevant ID, which is algorithm-based, and helps us to ensure that we guarantee with 98% accuracy that our surveys are duplicate-free.
This technology is part of our Data Quality Program, QDP which outlines our approach to preventing duplicate respondents from participating in surveys, as well as our approach to removing poor-quality responders.
Quality of Service
When we talk about our technology, we think not only about the tools we use to improve efficiency, but the tools we use that are customer-facing and provide direct client benefit.
GoReport, enables customers to access survey data and to create customized Power Point presentations with the click of a button. This analytic tool can be used in real-time, and a vehicle for customers to interface directly with end-users, to provide more proactive client updates and service. GoReport can be accessed directly via GoClient, our client portal where clients can access data and pricing/service information and actually initiate their own projects.
Technology designed to meet the future on its own terms
The scalability and flexibility of Greenfield Onilne’s comprehensive, enterprise-level technology platform, UPS, puts the company in the perfect position to meet future challenges with the right technology solutions.
“One of the best things about this platform is that it allows us to scale up and integrate technologies when we need to. That's critical in a constantly changing industry like ours,” St Pierre concludes.
