Improving Fieldwork Practices Through Tailored Training

Kantar Media Switzerland, a NIPO customer since early 2013, were tasked with a television audience research project which involved approaching respondents and conducing regular interviews. However, they became aware that the project was taking too much time to execute. Discussion with NIPO revealed that this was due to how the survey had been set up.

The challenge: imperfect samples

Switzerland is a country with three native languages: German, French and Italian. The number of television sets in a household varies, and can change over time. Both of these factors add complexity and instability to sampling.

The Kantar team had set their survey up by dividing their sample into smaller subsets, separating the speakers of different languages and those households with either a single or multiple television sets. The intention was that these smaller subsets of the sample would mean the team didn’t have to spend a lot of time on quotas, targets or stratification.

This set up hit difficulties because the respondents were not necessarilycategorized correctly. For example, a household listed as owning a single television set might have acquired another since their original categorization. And a respondent listed as ‘German speaking’ might actually prefer communicating in Italian. These inaccuracies were the cause of a lot of additional data processing work.

The solution: tailored training

The Kantar team and NIPO worked together to evaluate the situation, identify how to fix it and agree on a tailored training plan. Over a two day period, NIPO shared expertise with Kantar fieldwork managers and scripters about:

• Language groups management
• Quota management
• Data reporting
• Scripting review and tricks

The training proved to be extremely impactful, as it enabled the Kantar team to properly understand their specific challenges and know how to overcome them.

As a result, both Kantar and their client were pleased to see the productivity of the project increase enormously.

“It was a good experience. NIPO worked with us, analyzing the study and its challenges. We collaborated on streamlining the way the survey was set up.”

– Miguel Calvino, Senior Panel Administrator for Audience Intelligence at Kantar Media.

The outcome: improved practices

With a much better grip on their specific fieldwork challenges and how to tailor NIPO software for purpose, the Kantar team gained both confidence and momentum in using NIPO software more effectively. This went hand in hand with implementing changes in their workflow which resulted in better efficiency and improved results:

Language groups: the fieldwork was originally managed by several people, but after the training just one person was able to handle it.

Quota management: the team started responding fast to changes in fieldwork and were better able to engage the whole sample.

Procedures: the changes in some procedures resulted in a higher number of survey completions than before.

General scripting review: increased confidence in scripting motivated the team to try out system features they had previously not explored.

Data reporting: a week-long data preparation process was reduced to two hours.

“We worked with NIPO on making the study more efficient, lessening both our workload and manual tasks. Following the training, our workload reduced by more than 80%.” – Miguel Calvino, Senior Panel Administrator for Audience Intelligence at Kantar Media.

Succeeding together

Our work at NIPO is all about shared knowledge and understanding. Sharing of both technical expertise and industry know-how to bring end-to-end market research success. Our software survey solutions are only made possible through proper understanding of every aspect of our market research customers’ work. Which is why we are as happy to provide education on industry best practices as we are to empower our clients’ scripters with the knowledge to seize control of our system’s opportunities.  

In the case of Kantar, this has resulted in the team in Switzerland instinctively knowing that the solutions to their challenges are already in place. And having the confidence to find them. So whenever new challenges present themselves, they know how to tackle them with ease.