It is no secret that the results obtained from surveys, play a very crucial role in shaping any organization’s long term objectives. However, survey data entry and processing can be very time consuming and tedious for businesses. Hence, choosing an outsourcing service provider for survey data entry services requirements can help organizations to better focus on their core activities. Survey data processing consists of four important steps.
Step 1 – Survey Designing
Devise suitable surveys/questionnaires to help organizations modify their products/services in order to gain higher profits in future. It involves working closely with client to understand and analyze their business needs as well as the target audience. Survey designing includes establishing objective, determining sample, deciding upon the survey mode and finally creating questionnaire. A thoughtfully designed survey questionnaire can provide better insights on the research topic and prove very useful in improving business.
Step2 – Data Entry and Data Capture
Survey forms data entry basically means capturing data from paper/ web based questionnaires or survey forms and storing it in electronic format. This process requires a combination of professional skills and latest cutting edge technology to collate relevant information from all types of surveys. These days, OCR and other scanning techniques are being used for survey form scanning, which has been incremental in reducing data entry errors to a great extent. The data so collected is then stored in suitable digital formats including MS Excel, SAS, SPSS, MSWord, MySQL, etc.
Step3 – Data Quality Assurance and Analysis
One of the fundamental goals of survey data processing is to make quality data available to organizations for the purpose of analysis. Survey form data is always prone to errors, omissions and other inconsistencies. This data inconsistency and incompleteness, if not edited and corrected on time, can complicate the analysis and may even result in wrong analysis. Hence, to avoid this problem, survey data entry service providers must have an effective quality assurance framework in place. Quality of data can be assured by following a proven methodology, such as:
- Survey forms are first categorized based on certain defined criteria. Forms are scrutinized for their code structure, and those with open ended responses are standardized and recoded at this stage.
- Check all questionnaires after data entry to make sure that all the data fields have been accurately filled in.
- Use double keying process to avoid any discrepancies in data.
- Check data for inconsistencies and resolve issues relating to missing, duplicate, incomplete data, etc.
Step4 – Reporting and Data Tabulation
Survey data in its raw form is not likely to make much sense to organizations, unless it is presented in a way that is easy to understand. Extensive reporting and statistics is required to help businesses analyze situations and take actions accordingly. Reports can be of various types depending upon the needs of an organization such as presentation – quality reports, cross tabulations, frequency analysis, etc. Survey reports are a great way to have a bird’s eye view of survey responses.
All this being said, survey data processing is a very comprehensive and time consuming process, requiring lots of efforts and accuracy. These days, organizations have the option of outsourcing survey data processing services to professionals, who provide quality services and adhere to stringent quality norms, ensuring confidentiality of your business-critical information. So, what are you waiting for? Outsource your survey data processing requirement to SunTec India professionals and save yourself/all the processing related hassles.
Experts at SunTec help clients draw specific information from survey forms, online survey forms, telephonic interviews related to market research, behavioral research and lot more.
