Quality Assurance & Interviewer Training Protocol

Market Pulse sets high standards for its interviewers for one reason: to deliver the best information to our clients - information that will serve as a solid building block for actionable strategic and tactical relationship insight. The graphic below portrays our standard quality management procedures for quantitative telephone studies.

Taken together, our quality control system and our Virtual Project Manager provide comprehensive service quality monitoring and measurement. This feeds into our service quality improvement program which sets priorities on a continuous basis for improving our services. We have a dedicated continuous improvement program leader whose is responsible for ensuring continuous quality improvement of our services.

Interviewing quality assurance

Our interviewing quality assurance is done in the following ways:

1. Careful selection of applicants. All applicants are scored for personal interview, spelling and grammar test, computer literacy test and survey simulation test
2. We provide an extensive training to each interviewer. Training is done by a team of professional trainers in small groups of interviewers. Training not only provides necessary information to interviewers, but also allows them to practice using survey simulation. Each new interviewer is closely monitored the first week and is provided with the feedback on their performance
3. Our regular monitoring practices include silent monitoring of full length survey, spot monitoring and remote monitoring
4. Finally, our coding team ensures that all verbatim responses are fully recorded and provide meaningful feedback. Coders' reports with comments regarding interviewer performance are forwarded then to the field operations for review

The following is a copy of our current Interview Training Protocol that is employed to ensure the highest quality interviews performed by trained and monitored professional interviewers:

Interviewer Training Protocol

All new interviewers are provided with training. Training consists of written document and several hours of briefing before new interviewers commence interviewing. We have written procedures for evaluating and providing feedback to interviewers.

Training for new interviewers is done according to the outlined interviewers training schedule and it will include the following:

• an overview of market research goals and objectives
• how to approach a respondent including interviewer/respondent roles; identification of the interviewer, company and the survey
• interviewer behaviour and feedback techniques, and their impact on the respondents - in accordance with Market Pulse's posted online interviewing guidelines
• techniques to establish rapport and trust, and to enhance motivation to respond to the survey request; respect for respondent privacy rights - in accordance to the MRIA Charter of Respondent Rights, and Market Pulse's online interviewing guidelines
• techniques on conducting the interview, including how to ask questions in a non directive way ; probing, clarification and elaboration techniques; following questions as written and accurately recording responses
• monitoring, verification, validation, and evaluation procedures

Recording of interviews (quantity and methods)

Market Pulse has the infrastructure in place to record all interviews conducted using the dialers installed at our office. No limits in terms of volume have been identified. On a daily basis we record anywhere from a hundred (100) to three thousand (3000) completed surveys, depending on client requirements and projects being implemented at the time.

Clients specify what question triggers the recording, often done after respondent has been screened.

Some of our clients require recordings to be posted on their reporting web-site using a secure FTP.