CEO Monthly Reflection | October 2024 | Giving Researchers the Keys to Quality
Blog | October 14, 2024
By Terence McCarron
Our industry loves debating fraud prevention techniques. Commonly, these debates happen with little data, but lots of opinions. Because of vendor frustration, researchers have grown more vocal in sounding the alarm bells. Meanwhile, those vendors push back on common data cleaning techniques by leveraging “tech-talk” to sow confusion.
These opposing forces have built a “fear factor” around the quality topic. It’s become counterproductive.
Who’s Right?
Since OpinionRoute’s inception, I have been called to referee quality disputes between MR firms and their sample vendors. Almost always, I found the researcher had successfully identified unseen fraud.
Since I’m a root cause guy, I explore the fraud tech scene to answer a simple question- why was this missed? One discovery years ago surprised me.
Since the 2010s, fraud prevention has been seen as a responsibility of the sample company. They pretty much all used the same technology. But there was a problem that went unknown for years.
This ubiquitous tech had a control lever known as a “threshold score.” This feature arguably put the rules of what’s good and bad into the hands of the user. As I canvased the market, I discovered a wild disparity of how this was working across companies. With so little grounding around what was a good or bad score, the biggest fraud tech was effectively useless in the industry. It was a simple security blanket, and marketing cover for sample firms in practice.
For years I saw this play out. I quickly concluded that clients should be able to verify the quality on their terms. They had a right to develop their own data quality strategy.
Why Do Buyer and Seller View Quality so Differently?
There is a big difference in motivation between buyers and sellers of sample when it comes to fraud prevention. Researchers focus on quality of the data, while sample firms manage a complex balance of finance and quality. Vendors have significant volume and cost control considerations.
In 2018, OpinionRoute began a series of major investments in a Data Quality system that would make sense to the researcher. We fit solutions into the usual research project flow. Achieving a nice balance of researcher expertise, transparency, and technical prowess.
Last week, we announced the launch of our latest jewel in this system- the QC Flow. This gives Researchers an AI copilot for data cleaning in a way not previously seen in MRX.
Here are some highlights:
- Survey Tool agnostic
- Transparent evaluation summary on the screen
- Smart Tools for rapid decision making
- Researchers keep control
- Consistency across team member reviews.
We believe a research firm shouldn’t need to form a committee to audit new data quality tech. They shouldn’t have to play detective to get clean data because vendors hide what’s happening behind the scenes.
We are in a new world where the issue of Data Quality demands transparency and empowerment of the user. Researchers deserved a way to not drain profits by spending major hours on every project agonizing over quality decisions.
Let’s debate less and sell more Insights.
With our holistic data quality suite available through the Navigator, OpinionRoute has delivered what was not previously “allowed” for researchers in a major way. We can’t wait to show you!