Resources for the Research Community
Vivek Bhaskaran is the President and CEO of Survey Analytics.
Today, in about 30 mins BadgeFarm will be conducting a webinar to introduce BadgeFarm. I am really excited to oversee the launch of BadgeFarm – which has been under the wraps for quite a while.
If you are interested in Gamification and how is pertains to engagement, marketing and our everyday lives – you should check out the webinar.
[Editor's Note: The webinar has concluded, but you can view a screencast video of the webinar by following this link.]
Presentation Link:
Survey Analytics is pleased to report that our recent poll of King County, Washington voters called the outcome of the State of Washington’s liquor privatization initiative with a high degree of precision.
Our political poll marks an exciting and innovative, new approach whereby public opinion researchers, public affairs firms, political consultants and political campaigns themselves can cost-effectively and efficiently take the pulse of the electorate.
Back in late October through early November, we invited likely voters residing in King County and Seattle to weigh in on various ballot measures, candidates and other matters. One of the most prominent issues on the November 8 General Election ballot was Initiative 1183, which will privatize the sales and distribution of liquor.
A total of 2,001 likely King County voters took part in our survey. When asked how they would vote “if the election were held today,” 61% said yes and 33% said no, with 6% undecided. In the actual election results, 60% of ballots cast voted for the initiative and 40% against. A match-back analysis of the survey sample suggests that those who participated were closely representative of the King County electorate, in terms of party affiliation, gender and age.
Unlike full-blown telephone surveys typically used by pollsters, our unique approach can be fielded within minutes and produce meaningful results within hours. Complete cross-tabulation data and topline results are available immediately. A complete analysis of our survey and its results is coming soon.
Note: For more information on this survey, check out this post on the SurveyAnalytics Blog: ”Voter Panels – a real-world application in predicting outcomes of voter initiatives.”
[Editor's Note: this post was originally published on the Survey Analytics Blog.]
My friend Scott Liang from Parametric keeps telling me – the quicker you collect feedback from the Point-of-Transaction, the better the recall and quality is. While I have absolutely no way of verifying his assertion, in todays Blackberry and iPhone induced ADHD world, it seems logical – and anything that passes the sniff test, works for me!
If we accept that premise, then what the Washington State Ferries in conjunction with the Washington State Transportation Commission is doing is pretty innovative — collecting feedback directly from commuters while they are in the ferry. As passengers are commuting in the ferry, they have options for using their smartphones via QR Codes to give feedback on the ride.
Few innovative options:
Thumbs UP and Thumbs Down:
Instead of having just one QR code that takes them to a survey, the Thumbs Up/Down model has 2 QR Codes – each representing positive or negative emotion espoused by the passenger overall. This is similar to the the universal facebook “like” button that we are all accustomed to in the web world.
Integrated with MicroPanel:
Users who choose to give feedback are then asked to join a panel for future surveys and feedback. This allows the commission to build a long term relationship with the passengers — the commission can then use this panel for pricing, satisfaction and other kinds of research.
Once the feedback was collected, users are given the option to go to the mobile-optimized page for MicroPanel;
Completely Turnkey:
No custom development. This entire solution is off-the-shelf. This reduces cost and complexity. SurveyAnalytics has as question type that supports creating QR Codes. This enables you to create a survey with multiple QR Codes for each option:
I want to share two anecdotal stories around how I came to understand that tablets, driven by the iPad, are not just consumer devices that let my 3 year old play Angry Birds, but rather are finding their way into the enterprise and the small business eco-system.
Montessori School
My 3 year old daughter goes to a local Montessori school here in Issaquah, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, where I live. The school is pretty well funded and is run by a very progressive individual. This summer, instead of having a paper and pen to check in and check out kids, they had a Dell Tablet – with an app – to check in and check out the kids. I figured – “Huh. Cool!” So now they can digitally track who is in school and who is out. A few things jumped out to me:
a) The school can now give me the exact date/time when kids are checking in and checking out.
b) The tablet itself is portable – so as parents are picking up the kids, the teachers hand over the tablets to the parents right in their cars.
c) Multiple tablets can be used in parallel.
All this was achieved with 3 or 4 simple Android-powered Dell Tablets. No custom hardware or software. Well ok – someone had to write a custom app for Montessori checkin/checkout with a 4 digit pin et al. Being a geek myself, I can see writing an app like that not being a particularly daunting task.
Here is the punch-line: they can now (and they did) automatically bill me for late pickups! It’s all recorded!
iPads in Hotels
I was in Florida for a business meeting and was staying in a mid-market hotel in Tallahassee. They used an iPad for self-service check-in and checkout. No need to stand in line. They outfitted 3 iPads kiosk-style and had a custom app to focus the user experience. Being the geek, I played around with it. It did it’s job. Now compare that to the cost/structure involved with putting in dedicated consumer-facing devices – for example, the airline self-checkin systems. These are not cheap – but the mid-market hotel chain using low cost/commodity hardware and software was able to deliver the same user experience and efficiency that airlines deliver after spending millions on their Diebold systems.
Both these experiences have had me thinking about the tablet as something much more than just a entertainment device for the consumer.
How have you seen tablet devices used in the enterprise space? We’d love to hear more examples. Post your comments here, or send them out on Twitter (@researchaccess).
Romi Mahajan recently opined aloud, as he usually does, about the need for context when it comes to feedback. His two main points of contention were temporal (when) and situational (where). While I agree, both these pieces of metadata are extremely relevant while embarking on a feedback initiative, I think he is missing the elephant in the room: operational context.
Consider this: An airline decides to collect feedback across the board. Flyers, QR codes, email invitations, iPad based physical surveys. The full court press. All data is collected and tagged with both timestamps and location identifiers. The piece that will complete this picture is customer identifiers. Business or Casual customer? Route information. Plane size. All these attributes provide operational context.
Let’s consider another example: A software company, collecting feedback over the web. Cross-linking data from surveys to customer tiers. What about length of the customers overall experience with the company? The company has deep website behavioral data with Omniture or Google Analytics. So what about combining the two and running regression analysis or developing customer persona’s using CHAID analysis?
While there are no “turnkey” solutions other than paying Medallia, Attensity or Satmetrix $125k (and yes – they can do it all for that price point) – simple things like appending custom variables to surveys can get you 80% of what you need at 1/10 the price. (OK, maybe 1/5.)
Point being, when collecting feedback, think about the customer’s context.
On a related note – my company is working through a project for the Washington State Ferries, here in Seattle, where we are planning to put QR codes (with routing information encoded) on all the ferries that the Department of Transportation operates here. This will give us the operational context, beyond than time and location, for users to give feedback. The location component becomes intrinsic to the data collection process because we plan on using smart phones to collect the feedback.
If you have a project, like the WSDOT and would like for to collaborate, please feel free to email me – vivek[dot]bhaskaran
[at] surveyanalytics [dot] com.
Feedback begets accomplishment. Feedback is one of the core principles of gaming, and by natural extension engagement. My close friend, client and business associate, Romi Mahajan has written quite a bit on rethinking gaming and how it applies to our lives – gaming for marketing, research and even management. I believe one of the fundamental reasons why gaming is so emotionally satisfying is that it has an unprecendented feedback loop. You shoot someone - you see blood splattering. You catapult birds onto wooden structures - you see things break and fall apart and blow up.
I want to share a personal story on how I got sold on the gamification model.
[Read more...]
There is a lot of debate over the future of market research as it pertains to agencies. I spoke about it with Sanja Licina of CareerBuilder in the AMA conferences last year and have been in a couple of panels – AMA Atlanta MR SIG along with Phillip Garland from SurveyMonkey.
Let me lay out my thoughts on the subject by beginning with an example: I travel a lot for business and I recently found out about paperless self-service check in. Yes. Paperless. Using your smartphone – Blackberry, iPhone, Droid etc. It’s a unified system that the TSA has put together. Both United and Delta are a part of that program. When you check in online, you get a link to a mobile boarding pass. At the TSA security checkpoint, you simply open up the link in a browser window on your smartphone and scan. No more printing boarding passes.
At the gate, again you scan in your boarding pass by showing the phone screen and hop onto the plane.
Look at the travel industry and how self-service has it become. It started off with airline booking — when Expedia, Orbitz etc. came online and directly disrupted the full-service travel agency business, then web check-in significantly lowered the cost for airlines and now end to end electronic and self service flying. No wonder Virgin America has flights from Seattle to San Francisco for $49! It costs me more money to take a cab from my house to the SEATAC airport than to fly from Seattle to San Francisco! Virgin has scale — my cabbie does not!
The same can be said for many other industries: Banking – When is the last time we went to a teller? Investements: eTrade, Ameritrade. Even real-estate with Redfin and Zillow.
Market research is also heading that way. We see it everyday with our clients – obviously from a tool standpoint, we get called in when companies bring their research in-house. It’s not even a question of cost – it’s a question of power and effeciency. Most folks we talk with need to get data and make decisions FAST. This means having the tools and resources to execute quickly and effeciently. For the most part, that is the reason why many of our clients turn to us.
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I got introduced to Stu Shulman – a Political Science Professor out of UMASS-Amherst through a common friend in DC – as I was making the rounds in DC for our IdeaScale Federal Government business. I got hooked to what he was doing with Text Analytics and the sheer volume of research he has done within the academic community and how he’s going about bringing all that research (funded by your and my tax dollars) to the commercial space. Stu is also the CEO of DiscoverText and is taking the plunge into entrepreneurship. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics.
DiscoverText was just launched on November 1st, and I think it has the power to make a dent in the text analytics marketplace. I’ve been in the feedback space for quite some time, and I can tell you from first hand experience, open-ended text analytics and sentiment analysis is not an easy problem to solve. In fact many tools claim to do it, and very few are good at it. More importantly text analytics has to be effective. With the sheer volume of text data on the internet today (tweets, facebook updates, blog comments) – this is a treasure trove of data that is waiting to be mined.
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This is a bold prediction, but I think I can make it safely: the iPad will change the Field Survey business forever by killing the paper survey once and for all. I recently penned my thoughts on this topic in Research Magazine.
Here is my synopsis:
So throw away the paper-clip – get an iPad and run a survey on that!
Here is a link to the full article:
http://www.research-live.com/comment/will-the-ipad-kill-the-paper-survey?/4003283.article
