Case study: Beaufort Research
About Beaufort Research
Beaufort Research is a full service market research company based in the city of Cardiff in Wales in the UK. Beaufort’s experience is broad-ranging but with particular specialism in various sectors, including government and social, media, leisure and tourism, business, retail and financial.
Whilst carrying out research across the whole of the UK, the company provides a unique perspective into Wales and Welsh language issues, offering seamless bilingual research in English and Welsh.
Beaufort Research prides itself on the quality of its research and has achieved the global ISO 20252 standard for best practice in market research - the most comprehensive industry standard available.
In detail
Beaufort’s clients value the expertise and creativity of the firm's researchers. And Beaufort’s researchers need the right technology platform to deliver quality and consistency, no matter what is being asked.
For Beaufort, the choice of a technology platform for its data collection was of vital importance. The team at Beaufort needs tools that will allow them to put all their imagination into their research, without the software limiting them. The software has to offer flexibility, it has to cope with the complete spectrum of research, and it must be reliable to deliver the quality of work expected. For Beaufort, this meant choosing software that supported three methods: telephone, face-to-face and online.
Flexibility
Beaufort Research uses NIPO Software tools for all its CAPI, CATI and Web survey activities.
Fiona McAllister, Managing Director of Beaufort Research, comments: “NIPO Software tools are more flexible, especially for online surveys. They give us a range of options in terms of presentation and branding. We can either use our own branding or adapt to the client’s branding.”
The NIPO Fieldwork System offers complete freedom to create any look and feel; you can use any fonts, colours or imagery you wish and set out the question in any way you choose. This allows you to meet even unusual customer requests. For example, one customer asked Beaufort Research to create a Web survey that replicated the look of the paper survey also being offered - an unexpected request that was easily accommodated by the NIPO Fieldwork System.
Languages
Another issue for Beaufort Research, being located in Wales, is to be able to handle multiple languages, and also to allow very easy switching from one language to another during interviews.
As Fiona explains: “The ability to switch between languages is very relevant in Wales because it is a bilingual society. It is an obligation in public sector work to treat the English and Welsh languages equally and it is the norm rather than the exception to offer a choice of language to participants. If somebody doesn’t understand a question in Welsh (sometimes technical terms are not common in Welsh), then we can switch to English for that one question.”
All NIPO Software tools are designed to support any of the world’s languages. You can include as many languages as you need in a survey and switch from one to another at any point in the interview.
Complexity
Above all, though, the software needs to handle complex surveys, often with lots of conditional or dependent questions driven by the logic of the survey and previous answers. “NIPO scripting can handle the more complex routing," notes Fiona. "For example in a set of attitude statements, even if you are not using the full sample to answer the question, you can still randomise the responses.”
Expert support
Beaufort offers each customer a totally individual service; no two projects are ever the same. Inevitably, sometimes this poses challenges for the scriptwriters. Paul Rees-Williams, Computing and Analysis Executive at Beaufort Research, has learned that even if he does not know how to script what the researchers want, there is almost always a way to do it. On these occasions, he has access to a team at NIPO Software that can point him in the right direction.
Paul explains: “The help we get from NIPO Software Support is excellent – I can’t fault it. Our main way of contacting Support is via email. If we are stuck with a script, we email Support and they tell us how to fix our problem – often by giving us an example. Normally we get a response the same day. The longest we have had to wait is about a day.”
Results
By using The NIPO Fieldwork System, Beaufort Research is able to:
- Use a common scripting system for all its research whether CATI, CAPI or Web. This reduces effort and achieves standardisation in its processes
- Offer complete flexibility to its customers in the look-and-feel of its online surveys to reflect any styling and branding wishes
- Support multiple languages, including the need to switch languages during an interview
- Handle surveys of any level of complexity and respond to any unusual demands in research design
Fiona McAllister concludes “NIPO Software products help us deliver the highest quality service to clients because they make it easier for us to ask questions in the right way.”
Back to top