When people ask me, “What exactly do you do?” I usually say that I try to transform information into knowledge… Nothing much.
The reality is that companies are exposed every day to managing an indecent amount of information with which to formulate the strategy that must somehow lead them to success, that is, maximize their profit.
As Manuel Castells states “we have to get used to the idea that this “new economy” is based on information and knowledge. It is characterized because it adds value, generates productivity and achieves competitiveness on the basis of information and knowledge, through a new information processing capacity in terms of speed and complexity. We are capable of using any information process in real time.
From market research we try to help in this task by analyzing information that can come from different sources (personal interviews, telephone, online, in-depth, group meetings, ethnographic, internal interviews with people from the organization, information from blogs, etc., etc.).
Information is our raw material and if we do not take care of it or pamper it, its subsequent analysis has no meaning.
Field work, whether qualitative or quantitative, is a complicated task and not always free from criticism since it is part of the last link in the value chain of our sector.
It is complicated and arduous to find field providers who can undertake, with certain guarantees of success, investigations that have a strategic component or, on a qualitative level, certain difficulty in recruiting.
It must also be said that there are two components that do not help the field quality excessively and that feed off each other like a vicious circle.
The first component is that the prices for obtaining information have remained almost unchanged over the last 5-10 years. Let's do a simple exercise: what was our budget 5 years ago for a 15-minute telephone interview with the general population in 2004 and now in 2009? We would be surprised by the answer.
The second component corresponds to the qualification of the personnel who carry out the field work. If prices remain unchanged, we cannot hope to obtain extremely qualified personnel who do their work with a motivation specific to the quality of a service.
These two mutually reinforcing problems make it essential to carry out exhaustive quality control in addition to what the field company itself should carry out. This quality process should be based on the following parameters:
1. Telephone supervision of at least 25% of the fieldwork of each interviewer. The phrase “of each interviewer” is important because, in order to be clear about the quality of the field, we must supervise each of the interviewers involved. The idea that “20% of the fieldwork has been supervised” is not useful to me if this idea is global and not specific to each interviewer.
2. Once we have the data file, we must make a thorough consistency of it, not only from the logical or numerical point of view but from the point of view of quality. With a simple sum of some variables we can determine if there are repeated interviews or not. By analyzing the Ns/Nr or blank questions we can determine if there is the same interviewer who systematically “passes” on filling out some questions. By reviewing the coding of open responses we can determine the quality of their emptying, etc., etc.
The raw material is what determines the strategy since without it we could not analyze and we could not design strategies, therefore, let us pay the maximum attention to it and move on from beach bars that can offer us "hard at four pesetas", not There is such a thing as “cheap” field work and if it is too cheap, let us doubt it since we are going to lead our clients to strategic ruin.
