Streamlining Market Research Recruiting at J&R Coordinating Services
J&R Coordinating Services manages test panels and focus groups for a number of prominent market research clients. Part of the job consists of developing and maintaining a large demographically-detailed list of respondents from which to draw. While the creation and editing of such a table is not beyond the capacity of a simple database or even a spreadsheet, the challenge begins when those records need to be reliably filtered to produce a phone list of individuals that have a strong potential for being a good fit for a given test.
In the early days, the phone lists, printed on paper, were distributed to the recruiters so that they could place calls and read through printed questionnaires. Respondents were then scheduled into open slots for a particular test session, at a particular time and location, again on paper. Since specific scheduling quotas needed to be met, it was important that the recruiters in the phone bank could all be informed of progress being made. The tools for conveying the updated information consisted of flipcharts, whiteboards, and, of course, verbal communication. It is easy to see how, with many recruiters working the phones at the same time, often scheduling for different tests, the pace could get hectic, the quality of work could suffer, and the management of the process could become extremely frustrating.
Unlock, Capture, Connect
While the recruiting and scheduling process was well-defined, the tools in use were almost entirely paper-based, with no means to effectively manage or report on progress in real time, and no easy way to enforce the important policies and procedures governing respondent contact and test scheduling. J&R had a good system in place that served its clients well, but, with the process and information locked into paper documents, it was clearly self-limiting.
To transform and automate the J&R Coordinating Services model, KB3 Technical Systems interviewed management and users, examining the various aspects of their entire process, unlocking the procedures held in the minds of key personnel, the information held in the single-user database, the paper forms, the whiteboard reporting system, and any other inefficient mechanisms to which the process was tied, and captured it all in a multi-user, server-based application, the Recruiting and Scheduling Database.
What was once a paper-bound system has now become essentially paperless, precisely tailored to the process, with all critical functions fully integrated.