How we work

No two organisations are the same... neither are any two surveys. This means when you work with us:

You decide the level of assistance you need from us. This can be anything from merely advising on the questions you're asking, to managing your survey from design to analysis.
Any work we do for you is tailored specifically to your organisation's needs.

The process we'll guide you through...

Here are the key steps we go through in the process of designing and conducting a typical survey:

Understand your requirements and objectives. Our first step is always to understand your objectives, requirements (e.g. reporting) and budget. Only then will we suggest the most appropriate solution for your organisation.
Develop appropriate questions. Using our experience, we'll work with you to devise a question-set that will get to the heart of your audience's opinions – and provide insight against your stated objectives.
Develop a ‘branding' for your survey (if appropriate). We can provide either off-the-shelf or bespoke template designs to make your survey stand out and be memorable.
We'll create your questionnaire or plan the data collection approach depending on the survey type and methodology chosen. For questionnaires we'll create and produce either online or paper versions - ensuring they are unambiguous and easy to complete. For Face-to-face, Telephone and Focus Group surveys we'll fully brief the interviewer or facilitator.
Communications and distribution. We'll prime audiences to be aware of your forthcoming survey and arrange for questionnaire-based surveys to be despatched. (Here are some techniques we use to increase your survey response rates).
Response handling and data entry. Whatever your chosen survey methodology, The Survey Centre will handle all responses and ensure information is captured for analysis.
Analysis and report generation. Following collation and analysis, we'll generate a report - broken down by the requirements you originally specified - and Action Plan to address the key findings.
Feedback. We'll meet with you to present our analysis, insight and Action Plan.

Over the years we've benefited from a huge range of customer and employee feedback; both our own and those of our clients.

We've used this experience to develop, what we think is an increasingly strong offering. This offering is built on:

Trust - there are very few of us who haven't worked for, or with someone we didn't trust and we all recognise that this is highly unproductive. We're very aware that trust can only be earned but being aware of it's value is an important part of building a working relationship where we trust the client and the client trusts us.

Openness/Being Ourselves - we're passionate about being ourselves. As soon as we try and be something we're not, we stop enjoying what we're doing. We recognise that in the world of work it's not possible, or in anyone's best interests, to act exactly the same as we do at home BUT you'll find we're pretty easy to get on with. We won't arrive at your offices in a flash motor wearing the latest designer suit. We won't make you feel uncomfortable by banging on about standard deviations, variance and skewness. We won't 'sell' to you. We'll simply have a discussion about your objectives and try to establish how we can best help you achieve them.

Adding Value - a much over-used phrase but one which accurately describes our objective. As a consequence we prefer to avoid surveys that have already been designed and do not require any analysis.

But we do enjoy designing research projects and/or interpreting results that provide us with a real opportunity to make a difference to your organisation and the achievement of your objectives.

Challenging Norms - We get a buzz out of generating new ideas and we're partial to the odd internal debate or three. We like challenging our clients and we like it when clients challenge us.

Keeping it Interesting - we don't sit in meetings trying to work out how we can have more fun but we do encourage each other and customers to make things interesting whenever possible. There are some people in life who make workplaces interesting - we try to employ our fair share of those people.

If you have any feedback for us on what you look for in a research supplier contact us at feedback@surveycentre.net