The company
Since 1945 TNS Gallup has been describing the Finnish people in diagrams and statistics in various opinion polls and market surveys. Many surveys are now conducted via the Internet. More than half of the one million or so interviews conducted by the company in 2009 took place in a web browser, and the number of online interviews is rising all the time. Another 200,000 interviews took place by e-mail and around 300,000 over the phone.
The challenge
The Internet has made a lot of things easier for research companies, but at the same time the competition is tougher and the market is now very fragmented. Customers want more than just one result – it’s not enough to know what the customer’s buying, we also have to know why and where he or she intends to buy it next time.
TNS Gallup has to go into the company they are working for and really understand what kind of knowledge they require.
“In 1997 we had between five and ten people entering data manually. That’s when we started data scanning. By 2005 the volume of data had grown so much that scanning was outsourced,” says Ilkka Rainio.
The solution
TNS Gallup has been buying printing and mailing services from Stralfors since 2005, but they are relatively new as a scanning customer. The partnership started at the beginning of 2010, and it took six months from start to full-scale production.
When surveys are ordered by TNS Gallup’s customers, Stralfors takes care of the layout, prints them and sends them out. When they come back by return post, Stralfors scans and sends the results to TNS Gallup.
“It’s easier for us to work with only one company all the way from design to data import,” says Ilkka Rainio.
Result
TNS Gallup uses panels, to whom they regularly send out surveys. The response rate is 50 per cent. There is often the chance of a small prize relating to the questions. Colour and layout can also influence the response rate.
“But you can’t say what is best. That’s not the way it works. Different techniques work well in different cases,” says Ilkka Rainio.
The future
The basic problem is that people don’t have time to take part in surveys today. Now you have to buy them or catch them when they feel that they have time. Solutions involving mobile phones are one way of dealing with the problem.
“We’re thinking about mobile platforms for the future. The mobile phone is becoming smarter and more web-based. People often also have more spare time on their mobile, maybe they’re commuting or have it next to them on the sofa in the evening,” says Ilkka Rainio.
Another technique is so-called hybrid interviews, combining different techniques to make contact.
“For example, we ring them up, explain and ask whether we can send an e-mail with a link to an online survey.”