Interview Survey

In my last post, I wondered about device market share and it's affect on our ability to reach the right people for survey conducting.

I focused on the manufacturer / operating system, but another element also has a significant affect on reach. I guess you could call it Mode. We normally talk about mode in terms of whether we're collecting data over the web, over the phone, face-to-face, etc. Mobile is it's own mode, but there are choices within that mode.  

Specifically, the primary mobile mode possibilities for a mobile survey system are text message, mobile web, and applications.

Check out this interview/podcast from a recent interview at a CASRO event. Heidi Dickert has some good points about how a different type of technology is required when looking at mobile surveys. The message? You can't just replicate the same old approach when it comes to mobile research.





Text messages give you ubiquitous reach, but the commonly held experience among those I speak with is that SMS surveys are good only for very, very quick polls. The burden on the respondent is high, and you can only squeeze in 3-4 questions before participation drops off - and if you haven't seen it yourself, believe me, it doesn't just stumble off the curb, it careens off the grand canyon.

Mobile web feels like it should be familiar since CAWI has taken over as the primary mode of choice in so many countries. However, the problem is that the mobile web isn't great yet for the vast majority of users. You still need a lot of patience. Think about a news page that requires 10 seconds to load, but then you spend 5 minutes reading. That's much more palatable when compared to refreshing screen after screen after screen of a mobile web survey. To reinforce this, check out Mobile Marketer's recent article about slow load time is the #1 performance issue on the mobile web.

Off course we believe in Applications (particularly Java where possible, native where needed). With iPhone App store just reaching it's 2 Billionth download in September, and Facebook's install base leaping from 2 million to 10.5 million in two months with the release of targeted Java versions, the path seems pretty clear to us...

If you're a real cheapskate like me, and you've been biding your time before making a new hardware investment, then look no longer. The next release of inexpensive smartphone technology for MCAPI interviews and diary studies has arrived.


Check out the unlocked Palm Treo 500 for $119.  Incredible.


Just make sure you're willing to live with a QWERTZ keyboard - (in Germany, they switch the Z with the Y.. go figure).

Some shameless promotion here, but with Techneos' new SaaS pay-per-complete options, there's never been a more affordable time to equip your field force or diary respondents with a world-class mobile interview system.

For many outside of our industry, Market Research has always been a fuzzy concept, and let's face it, a weird choice of career.

But no longer! A major Hollywood movie (Last Chance Harvey) features a market researcher as a main character.



But what is she doing with pen and paper? What an antiquated approach! We would expect her to be using a computer assisted personal interviewing system or some kind of PDA survey software, of course. Where are these movie script writers doing their research?

Legal Note: This post in no way confirms that my wife convinced me to watch a movie which could be described as a Romance Drama.

As it gets harder for businesses (and researchers!) to reach people, the buzz about the affect of social networking applications is starting to get louder in our ears...

Apparently some people are wondering if the rise of direct forms of customer interaction like voice of the customer programs will make the use of Mystery Shoppers for mobile data collection a thing of the past.

Judi Hess, president of MSPA calls mystery shopping "a means to measure customer service, product knowledge, and sales ability." More important, she says, it offers subjective, targeted feedback that companies just can't get from less structured kinds of feedback, like social networking tools or surveys.

Ok, I can buy that. Read more here (you'll need to sign up for a free account).


Tom Anderson in particular is pushing us to think about the role of Social Networks and what he's calling "next gen marketing research". He recently interviewed representatives from Facebook and LinkedIn. It's just a start, but you can see that the social networks are starting to think about the convergence of these worlds, too.

Click here for the Podcast


All three of them will be a highlight of an upcoming ESOMAR panel session. This will be one you don't want to miss...



These are great articles to get us thinking about engagement, the future of survey conducting and the way we deliver insight from the market... But one of my favourite approaches comes from a seasoned researcher right here in Canada.

More on that next week...

I've found myself pondering the effect of mobile technology on the future of research, and figured it warranted a blog post.  I've been involved with both handheld surveys and wireless technology for most of my career, and throughout that time I've been amazed at both how quickly and how slowly things change.

Mobile technology itself moves incredibly quickly, but adoption of technology can range from lightning fast to incredibly slow. Market research professionals are analytical and pragmatic by nature, so it is understandable that researchers have been slower to embrace new technology than many other industries. Ironically, market research is often a key driver for decisions which drive technological advances, yet it can take years for those advances to be reflected back into the research process itself.  

Methodology is central to any decision relating to survey research methods.  When new techniques are introduced to "improve" tried-and-true processes, it is important for researchers to understand all of the implications of the potential change before implementing it en masse.  So research about research, or more specifically about new techniques for conducting research, is very important. But this is easier said than done, as most researchers are so busy generating revenue through existing methods that they lack time to explore new ones.  The academic community breaks a lot of ground in this regard, but it takes time for academic research to reach--and to be embraced by--the commercial market research sector.

Recently I have seen mobile research being embraced as a reasonably mainstream approach for survey data collection.  It is still "leading edge", but it is no longer "bleeding edge" -- at least for face-to-face interviews and diary studies.  While the application of mobile survey software is still a niche play today, we are about to see it extend beyond its traditional application to touch every other aspect of survey research -- including web surveys, phone surveys, mystery shopping and other methods.

What intrigues me more than anything is where this bottom-up thinking will really lead the research industry. While we are busy planning for the evolution of survey research to involve mobile technology, I believe it is equally important to see things from the top-down: i.e. to realize that researchers are losing control of people's attention, and consumers are increasingly recognizing the value of their opinions.  Will the methodologies of today be effective in the future, or do we need to reshape our thinking to embrace emerging realities?

I believe the future of mobile survey research looks a lot different than the past.  We will not simply see old methods enhanced by new technology; entirely new methods will emerge around the cultural phenomena that shape our societies around the globe. There is no limit to the opportunities that will be enabled by social networking and location-aware technology, which will be bundled into mobile technology that will make today's most impressive devices seem as archaic as early PCs appear today.

Those of us who wrap our arms around the cultural changes that emerge as a result of new technology, rather than just trying to shape new technology to meet old and tired methods, will realize amazing new opportunities for mining insight from consumer opinions. There will be many false starts and a lot of experimentation, but in a few years we will look back at the way we did things in 2009 and be amazed by how dramatically human communication -- and in turn market research -- have changed within a very short time.

I'll share some of my predictions on this blog over the coming months. Today I just wanted to get the thread started with some background thoughts...

It seems as though reseach online has recently reinvented themselves. They were always a great source for information, but they seem to be exploding with news and original content lately.

A recent article titled "Survey Geek vs. The Cord-Cutters" offers an audio interview with self-confessed 'survey geek' and blogger, Reg Baker.  There are also great links to relevant articles on the cell-only population and the affects on research. You can listen to it here:



This interview is great in my opinion, particularly in that he begins by describing the "cell-only" problem in terms of the sampling frame. He also eloquently yet concisely descsribes the issue of bias due to undercoverage, and how the target group of the research and the topic may affect results. Not to mention cost and data implications of doing a survey on mobile phone. Reg also identifies the "wireless mostly" problem. I won't replicate every point here in text, but here's a researcher who knows his stuff.

Brilliantly, he surmises (and hopes) that researchers will adapt to the problem by matching the method to the problem - execute "fit-for-purpose methodology decision", to paraphrase slightly.

But one thing stuck out to me... there's no mention of three significant and growing ways to conduct a mobile device survey, cellphone survey, mobile marketing survey (mobile research by whatever name you choose): WAP, SMS and Survey Applications.

Check out the latest numbers from CASRO. You might find it's worth getting ahead of the curve by adding other mobile techniques to your methodological tool box.

Today marks the release of our latest mobile survey system, Entryware 6.4. While it carries the numbering of an "incremental" upgrade, it is a significant milestone in terms of the new capabilities that it provides.  We chose to release it as v6.4 to focus on increasing capabilities rather than going through the onerous task of re-labelling this as a "major" release, but the impact is indeed major!

Entryware 6.4 brings diary research, including the rich photo diary capabilities enjoyed by some of our key customers on Palm devices today, to Windows Mobile users.  It also provides some significant improvements to the look-and-feel of Entryware on both Palm and Windows Mobile devices, which improves usability for both face-to-face interviewing and self-completed surveys.

For those who are in the field every day working on a handheld device, using the 5-way navigator to page through long questions or proceed to the next question can significantly improve efficiency. And for those respondents who are just being introduced to mobile survey technology, automation to auto-start projects eliminates unnecessary steps  for the user while providing added security for project managers.

I took a look at our release notes today and realized that since our last "major" upgrade, Entryware 6.0, we have added a number of key features in the various v6.x upgrades we have posted:

• Sliding scale questions
• Photo capture on Palm OS, Windows and Windows Mobile
• Encrypted and compressed data transfer
• SPSS v13+ export
• Improved user-selectable missing
• Ability to launch external Windows Mobile applications
• Improved CSS formatting on Entryware Mobile for Windows
• Improved string handling in scripting
• Additional African language support
• Support for Palm Pre devices
• 5-way navigation
• Improved searching capabilities in Data View Report
• Project automation to auto-start questionnaires
• Improved graphics quality including hi-res Windows Mobile screens
• Diary survey engine for Windows Mobile
• Printing capability for Bluetooth printers
• Ability to convert Multiple Response questions to a series of Single Response questions
• Various other small enhancements

And that doesn't even touch on everything that was new in v6.0... this is just what has happened since then.

I thought is was worth sharing all of the key v6.x enhancements in one combined list, because many people are unaware of everything that can be done using Entryware today.  We find that many of our clients are still happily using older versions of the software, which is great to hear... but in some cases significant efficiency gains could be made by adopting the latest and greatest.

I ran across this article recently that highlights the results of a report that the Center for Disease Control put out on wireless substitution (aka canceling your land line for a cellphone).

There were some very interesting results:

• Over one in five U.S. households (20.2%) are cellphone-only, an increase of 2.7% over six months ago.
• One in every seven homes (14.5%) took all their calls on cellphones despite having a landline.
• More than three in five adults living only with unrelated adult roommates (60.6%) were in households with only wireless telephones. This is the highest prevalence rate among the population subgroups examined.
• Nearly two in five adults renting their home (39.2%) had only wireless telephones. Adults renting their home were more likely than adults owning their home (9.9%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
• Men (20.0%) were more likely than women (17.0%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
• Adults living in poverty (30.9%) and adults living near poverty (23.8%) were more likely than higher income adults (16.0%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.

This information is certainly handy to market researchers as it helps them figure out the best groups of people to use mobile marketing surveys on rather than other survey methods.

But then I began to wonder, why would the CDC need to do such an in-depth study on mobile phone usage? Shouldn't they be focusing on health-related data collection?

Well, it turns out that most major survey research organizations, including the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, do not include wireless telephone numbers when conducting random-digit-dial telephone surveys. Therefore, the inability to reach households with only wireless telephones has potential implications for results from health surveys, political polls, and other research conducted using random-digit-dial telephone surveys.

So, to combat this problem, the CDC conducts in-person surveys to collect information on health-related issues. During this interview they also take the opportunity to collect information on household telephones: is your family wireless-only or landline. This information is released via the report above twice a year.

I think it is great that the CDC is aware of this problem, but why keep conducting random-digit-dial telephone surveys if you've already proven with your own study (not to mention all the other mobile phone vs. landline statistics that are out there) that you will get biased results?

Seems pretty obvious here that the best answer for the CDC, as well as the other major survey research organizations, is to switch to mobile data collection.

I ran across this article in the most recent MRA Alert! magazine, discussing how Smartphones, and the desire for a richer mobile service experience, are changing how we look at the mobile phone.


MOBILE PHONES ARE SO MUCH MORE THAN JUST A PHONE

From text messaging to GPS to online banking to social networking to web browsing to gaming to online coupons to watching videos to, well, almost anything.

A quote from this same article says it really well:

"...the most dynamic and important technology platform today is mobile technology, and that from a marketing research perspective, it is becoming clear that mobile devices will be the next breakthrough research environment."


MOBILE RESEARCH GETS GOOD REVIEWS

Contacting people through their mobile device to conduct your mobile market research will also ensure a good response rate.

Robert Manchin, managing director of Gallup Europe, has found that respondents embrace mobile interviews. In a recent article, Pragmatism Over Ideology?, in the May 2009 Research World magazine, Manchin says:

"'We have quite a bit of evidence now that it's more personal because you are not losing someone at the first stage of sample selection (recruitment).' And people seem more likely to give up time on their mobile because 'dead time' is easier to find, such as while commuting or during breaks."


Survey conducting via mobile phones is certainly coming into its own. Why not look into mobile survey software for your future marketing research needs?

I recently wrote about the Wild West of mobile devices - that was within the context of self-completed surveys and survey software on respondent devices. But what about mobility in terms of more traditional CAPI / MCAPI for a mobile device survey?

Netbooks and their equivalents are some of the only hardware projected for sales growth this year, and when I look at some of these entrants, I can see why. Check out the CTL 2go. Windows and a touch screen for $499? It even has a handle and is semi-rugged (tested for 50cm drop)! It's almost as if they had interview research in mind when they built this thing.





The popular Asus eee will also soon be available in a touchscreen..










Some other cool devices like this super keyboard computer can be found at PC World's "10  Most Anticipated Ultraportables and Netbooks of 2009" (Thanks to Mike for the forward)

As a follow-up to my previous post about the Palm Pre Smartphone, we are increasingly excited about bringing mobile research to this exciting new hardware platform.  More news is emerging about the ability to run Palm OS applications on Pre devices--such as this Youtube video showing some flashy gaming examples, or this FAQ that provides more technical information about exactly what features are supported.

Planned for release in the US later this quarter, Entryware software running on the Palm Pre should be a great solution for mobile surveys.  A beautiful screen, slide-out keyboard and both WiFi and 3G wireless options make the Pre an ideal device for conducting surveys in the field.  And its multi-tasking operating system will enable researchers to get very creative with third-party applications.

The Pre's interface operates like a deck of cards, so you can run a questionnaire on one "card" while running other applications (e.g. videos or location-based services) on different cards. Palm's new Synergy communication infrastructure and built-in GPS system also open up innovative new ways to manage your interviewers, respondents, mystery shoppers, etc.

We plan to turn this amazing new platform into an ideal solution for mobile market research.  Stay tuned for more information as it becomes available.

I recently wrote a post about a client who asked me about Palm, Market share of mobile devices, and what device to choose for their PDA Survey Software. Hopefully that helped spur thoughts on the state of the market today, but what's in store for the devices researchers will choose for tomorrow's Mobile Research?

In September 2008, professor Randall Stross from San Jose State University did an interview with the CBC where he noted that devices are getting ever more capable.

"There's no question that Google sees the biggest opportunity for growth is mobile access to the internet. Phones are becoming ever more capable of performing the same work that we use our desktops for. There's a whole new category of phones now, beyond the smartphone, that is designed from the ground up to interact with web services"

Mobile surveys might be the hottest topic in market research today -- and I've been waiting a long time to say that!

Since I developed my first survey software for Mobile Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (MCAPI) in 1991, I've been waiting for mobile research to hit the mainstream. From bleeding edge to leading edge, mobile surveys have always been viewed as an "opportunity of the future". If PDA surveys generated a bit of a wave back in the late 1990's, then Internet surveys were surely a tsunami... and now it's the marriage of mobility and high-speed wireless Internet access that is opening a whole new word of possibilities.

I had an opportunity to speak at the Mobile Research Conference in London last month. It was billed as the first ever conference dedicated to mobile research, and it was a very promising sign for this niche that Techneos has been working to fill for more than a decade. (In fact, it was at least the second such conference, as I also presented at the Association for Survey Computing conference on Mobile Computing in 2005).

While Techneos has been proving for many years that you CAN do serious research on a handheld computer, a much bigger opportunity for mobile surveys is emerging -- at long last! Ranging from photo diaries to mystery shopping to funky new ways to conduct customer satisfaction questionnaires--and lest we forget the good old face-to-face interview--surveys on mobile phones, Netbooks and other mobile devices will no doubt play a major role in the future of market research.

Hold onto your hats and join us for the ride! We're looking forward to the future that we first envisioned almost 20 years ago. Yikes, how time flies!