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Kantar Media Switzerland acquired NIPO’s data collection platform for telephone, online and personal interviewing in early 2013. The Kantar team was facing an interesting challenge: to approach and regularly interview respondents for a television audience research project.

Once the survey started running, the team soon realized that too much time was being lost on the execution of the project. Together with NIPO they identified the cause to be the way the survey was originally set up, and not the software itself.

Problem: samples are rarely perfect

Switzerland is a country with three native languages: German, French and Italian. The Kantar team initially began to divide their sample into smaller subsets, separating the different language speakers and those households with either a single or multiple television sets. Thanks to the smaller subsets of sample, the team then didn’t have to spend a lot of time on quotas, targets or stratification.

The downside was that things weren’t that simple when executing the fieldwork as samples are rarely perfect. For example, a household might be listed as owning a single television set but in reality it may now own more than one set. Just as a respondent might be listed as ‘German speaking’ but prefers to take the survey in Italian. These exceptions subsequently led to extensive additional data processing work.

Solution: training matters

The Kantar team and NIPO evaluated the situation and agreed on a tailored training plan to address these challenges. The training took two days and focused on:

Scripting review and tricks
Language groups management
Quota management
Data reporting

The training proved to be extremely impactful as it helped to resolve the issues through a better understanding of what was causing these pain points.

As a result, both parties 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”,

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

The team’s results after the training

The Kantar team gained both confidence and momentum in using the software to better effect, applying changes to their workflow to make further improvements:

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 the changes in fieldwork and also engaging the whole sample.
Procedures: the changes in some procedures led to more completed surveys than before.
General scripting review: increased confidence in scripting motivated the team to try out unexplored system features themselves.
Data reporting: a week-long data preparation process was reduced to two hours.

As Miguel Calvino relates: “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 %.”

The real success also comes from collaboration. The team in Switzerland now instinctively knows that there are likely to be solutions in place to situations that they themselves haven’t yet come across. Therefore, they are confident that when a new challenge presents itself, they can tackle it with ease with the help of NIPO.