Nielsen: Research without Borders

"Our customers experience a range of benefits from conducting market research on the Internet but most importantly customers value Online Research for its ability to gather and analyze data in real time to help them make business critical decisions faster."
- Ben Willson, Executive Director of Online Research Services, The Nielsen Company

Executive Summary

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The Nielsen Company is the world's leading provider of marketing information, audience measurement, and business media products and services.

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Confirmit's open architecture allows it to interact with otherbusiness systems seamlessly and the software's XML web services enable the seamless exchange of data.

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Using Confirmit, Nielsen conducts customized online surveys, both complex and basic, on behalf of its clients who have customers across the world.

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Nielsen's online research revenue/business has grown by around 400% over the last 2 years.

An increasing number of companies now use the Internet to gather valuable insight. As a result, online surveys have grown in popularity as companies discover that using the web to seek market and customer feedback is both cost and time efficient.

Having faced an increasing demand for web based surveys, Nielsen, the world's leading marketing information company turned to Confirmit for a solution to help meet Nielsen's increasing online business requirements.

The use of the Internet is growing rapidly and figures show that over half a billion people worldwide now have access to the Internet. Needless to say, businesses too have embraced e-business to sell products online to an ever-increasing customer base. Further, as the number of people using the net increases, it also offers companies the opportunity of obtaining valuable insight from customers to increase consumer satisfaction and loyalty.

With market presence in over 100 countries, Nielsen identified an increasing demand for clients seeking to use the Internet to conduct market research, a medium which offered clients increasing cost and time efficiencies. Ben Willson, Director of Online Research Services, Asia Pacific at Nielsen explains, "As people's perceptions of the Internet changes and the uptake of broadband grows, in the future an increasing number of surveys will be conducted online. The Internet provides a powerful and cost effective new medium for companies to collect customer data and feedback."

Nielsen's global presence created a need for an online survey tool that could effectively gather, analyze and report key internal and external business data across a number of countries quickly and efficiently. A number of Nielsens' critical requirements included a user friendly interface for survey respondents, advanced survey questionnaire functionality and crucially flexible and open architecture to enable integration with in-house (or third party) applications. In April 2001, following an intensive selection process involving a number of suppliers, Nielsen selected Confirmit to form the foundation for conducting its online surveys internationally.

Confirmit's open architecture allows it to interact with other business systems seamlessly and the software's XML web services enable the seamless exchange of data. The online survey solution can be hosted either as an ASP (Application Service Provider) solution, within a secure environment managed by Confirmit or installed at a client site. To help integrate the Confirmit software with its existing infrastructure and customize the software, Confirmit has trained key Nielsen employees to a highly technical standard and offered extensive assistance from its offices in Europe and North America, and via its partner in Australia.

Due to the large number of surveys being generated and the high number of survey participants, Nielsen opted to install in-house servers. The internet research division of Nielsen based in Sydney maintains its servers hosted in Adelaide. This enables the company to serve Asia Pacific, Europe and the U.S. Using Confirmit, Nielsen now conducts customized online surveys, both complex and basic, on behalf of its clients who have customers across the world. Market research can deliver information and insight into consumer attitudes and purchasing behavior and measure customer satisfaction, brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. A basic survey can take the form of a simple questionnaire that takes a few minutes to complete, while a complex survey can involve advanced routing, randomization of answer lists and looping of questions, and can take up to 30 minutes to complete.

Kjell Oksendal, Vice President of Marketing at Confirmit explains "We see Nielsen more as a partner than a customer. In 2003 we launched the new version of Confirmit (v 8.0) to increase the power of the survey tool off the back of customers like Nielsen needing to conduct multilingual surveys in languages with Arabic and Asian character sets. In response to client feedback we developed the Confirmit Translator to enable businesses to create, translate and deploy multiple language surveys from a single application.

"Another feature included in the new version is the online reporting portal, Confirmit Reportal. The key benefit of this is that it enables businesses such as Nielsen to provide their clients with personalized portals where all their research findings are in one place. It also enables historical data collected from a variety of sources to be imported alongside the latest insight. This empowers our corporate users to compare real-time market information and identify trends."

Nielsen's customers come from varying industries, such as manufacturing and retailing to fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), non-FMCG industries such as athletic footwear, computers, toys and videos and in the entertainment industry, motion-picture studios, distributors and exhibitors. For customers who have brands across different regions, online surveys can be an invaluable and cost effective tool to measure brand equity across different territories.

Ben Willson adds "Consumers can also respond to internet questionnaires when it is convenient for them and online surveying has proven to increase response rates and break through to low incidence groups. To stimulate the respondent's survey experience, companies can also add audio and video to the online survey to illustrate TV adverts, 3-D rotations of products and offer virtual tours."

"Organizations have also noticed that online surveys help respondents to answer sensitive questions due to the anonymity that self completion questionnaires provide. Online surveys also negate the possibility of interviewer bias. Our customers experience a range of benefits from conducting market research on the Internet but most importantly customers value Online Research for its ability to gather and analyze data in real time to help them make business critical decisions faster."

The ability to react and respond swiftly to changes in the market is crucial to any organization's success. With global reach provided through the internet, businesses can gather insight from diverse groups and suitably position themselves to respond to ongoing changes in the market, regardless of where they are located.

In addition to market reaction speed, a further key requirement for companies in the global economy is the ability to adequately manage costs and maximize the efficiency of business operations. Internet surveying presents companies with massive cost savings opportunity compared with offline surveying methods. Confirmit's customers experience a cost reduction of around 70-90% on web survey projects when compared to offline data collection methods. Confirmit has enabled Nielsen to conduct research very effectively when compared to traditional desk/telephone based research. Nielsen's online research revenue/business has grown by around 400% over the last 2 years.

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