A national research firm delivers strategic insights that help clients grow their businesses. They create custom market research that helps organizations make sense of complex issues. They work individually with each client to determine the best research approach — there are no “standard” solutions.

To help compile research results, TDEC creates custom data entry templates and processes surveys, delivering the results to the client in a spreadsheet. We perform data entry of the actual surveys compiled by the client and QC of the data. If personally identifiable information (PII) is included in the research, the work is completed in-house. For research without PII, we can help control costs by outsourcing to in-home staffing or international data entry vendors.

Projects for this client were initially planned and priced based on sample surveys. After creating one data entry template based on a client-supplied sample, we noted that the live survey was different, requiring additional data entry and the use of optical character recognition (OCR) for the QC process. While OCR was beneficial, it could not read surveys compiled in pencil, so QC required using the physical surveys for comparison.

Another project was projected to have 29 questions but ended up with 33, including six with multiple-answer options, increasing the number of data entry fields by more than 50. These early projects taught us not to plan too far ahead of production.

TDEC has become an integral part of the research firm’s business, currently processing an anticipated group of 25,000 surveys, including preparing and scanning all surveys prior to assignment to data entry. Data and images are transferred to the client through a secure file transfer system.