Quadrant Strategies

BACKGROUND

Providing strategic, data-driven advice for clients facing critical decisions is at the heart of Quadrant Strategies, a research-driven consultancy. With its roots in public policy, brand research, and crisis management, the company has expanded over the last few years, providing consumer and technology companies — including most of the Fortune 50 — with research services and trusted advice. The insights that the company provides helps clients improve their reputations, reposition their brands, develop marketing campaigns, construct winning messages, and navigate through crises. The Quadrant Strategies team knows that to do this well, they need a strong foundation of quality data.

CHALLENGE

After outsourcing its data collection and fieldwork for many years, Quadrant Strategies made the decision to bring these operations in-house in order to have more control over the process, with a main objective of increasing the quality and speed of their research. Fast forward two and a half years, and the company now has a full team on both the quantitative and qualitative sides, featuring experts in programming, data processing, fieldwork and project management.

Part of the quantitative team’s responsibility lies in sample acquisition, so it was important that they could trust the quality of respondents coming into their research projects. With a background in online panels, the team members have an interesting lens into the panel world, and are well aware of the challenges they must proactively tackle. They needed a way to verify that respondents are who they say they are, bring clean data into the survey, and avoid time-consuming data cleaning on the back-end. They began searching for a partner that could help them ensure quality from the outset of every project.

SOLUTION

Soon after they began their search, the Quadrant Strategies team discovered Research Defender, which quickly rose to the top of the list of possible partners. With an automated suite of quality control solutions, Research Defender’s offering was exactly what the team needed to ensure that the insights they deliver to clients are always based on data from responsive, verified, high-quality respondents. Research Defender provides them with:

• Digital fingerprinting and fraud identification that automatically identifies each incoming respondent using a number of attributes and profiling points - no matter where they come from within the market research ecosystem. If they don’t check out, they are blocked from entering any Quadrant Strategies projects.
• Elimination of professional survey takers and fraudsters by identifying people who have tried to complete a high number of surveys within 24 hours and blocking them from entering any new client survey. This allows the removal of undesirable respondents, and those who may potentially be intending to commit fraud. This feature can be tailored to each client’s needs and requirements.
• The flagging of risky open-end responses through advanced analysis of the language used, length of response, profanity, and other machine-driven checks that could not be accomplished manually. This not only identifies undesirable sample, but also saves the company time by avoiding manual reviews for large datasets. Quadrant Strategies complements this tool with human intervention based on client preferences.

THE RESULTS

The automated, plug-and-play nature of Research Defender’s tools created efficiencies and time savings for Quadrant Strategies’ busy quantitative team members, who didn’t have to spend time manually checking and cleaning the data. Upon the completion of each project, they can now confidently vouch for the data's quality, reassuring clients that the insights provided are dependable and accurate for crucial decision-making. In fact, the company even developed a client-facing best practices document to illustrate the direct benefits of Research Defender solutions when it comes to data quality.

"Data quality is a concern for everyone across the research landscape, and our clients are no different. Working with Research Defender makes it easy for us to confidently talk with them about how seriously we take our data, and show them exactly how we ensure quality. Because everything is automated it was easy to implement, plus their solutions have saved our small and mighty team countless manual hours doing data checks and post data cleaning — we already know the data coming out of every project is solid."

Kristen Kendall, MA, Director, Quant Research Ops, Quadrant Strategies