Australian Survey Research is an established research agency providing specialised services to a blue chip client list including top 100 companies, key Australian and State government departments and major universities.

ASR is a research company, combining IT skills with expertise in:

• Social and market research
• Employee and customer loyalty
• Human resource consulting, and
• Software development and deployment.

We conduct organisation-to-organisation and organisation-to-consumer research. Our assignments are often technically or logistically difficult.

We use a variety of methods to meet assignment requirements including face-to-face and telephone depth interviews, foyer and exit interviews as well as mini to large scale focus groups. Our consultants are noted for their expertise in working in highly sensitive environments, with people who may be at risk in expressing their views. We are also experienced in working with interpreters and conducting our own recruitment.

We perform routine and specialised statistical analysis and reporting on completed survey and other data for various statutory bodies, government agencies and companies.

We design programs to measure and manage customer satisfaction and loyalty; we conduct hundreds of thousands of surveys; we conduct focus groups; we set up technology systems to gather and distribute customer feedback; we conduct industry studies; we measure financial impact; and we will conduct almost any type of study to help our clients better understand their customers.

But ultimately. . .

. . . we work with our clients to develop key customer strategies to improve the customer experience, encourage customer loyalty, and increase the value of their company.

Walker Loyalty Reports

ASR is an accredited licensee of the customer loyalty research (CLR) instruments and tools from Walker Information Inc.

Companies are constantly asking, "how do we measure up to others in our industry?" The answer often can be hard to determine. The Walker Loyalty Reports provide the information needed to measure your company's success. The reports are specifically designed to provide value for our clients in key industries. Loyalty reports offer critical benchmarking information-providing key comparisons and perspectives for companies in many industries-as well as loyalty-related issues. By helping your company understand how you compare to industry norms, these reports assist in developing mission-critical customer loyalty management programs to improve customer and employee loyalty, retention, and profitability.

Why do we conduct Walker Loyalty Reports?

As with any research program, it's important to continually update and monitor which directions your vendor- customer relationships are heading. Our research helps identify key challenges and trends facing various industries and specific leading companies. We conduct Walker Loyalty Reports to provide compelling benchmark information for our clients to share important business insights with industry leaders and to demonstrate the financial impact of customer loyalty.

Our approach to developing and implementing a customer strategy is custom to each organization because we believe that no two organizations are exactly alike and therefore, no two customer strategies can be exactly alike for our clients. So, we work with our clients to develop and implement a customer strategy that best fits the needs and structure of their organization. However, all of the customer strategies we develop for clients have three key components:

• Customer loyalty
• Customer experience
• Customer value

The Walker-ASR diagnostic surveys

1. Customer Relationship Assessment - focuses on customer commitment and loyalty to your organization
2. Customer Transaction Assessment - designed to measure customer perceptions of your performance on specific transactions. Interactions with customers can be measured and analyzed to improve customer experience and increase their loyalty to you and your products and services.
3. Lost Customers Assessment - addresses the costly effects on value creation and long-term profitability of customer turnover and discontinued customer relationships. It identifies the root causes of customer attrition and develops profiles of the current customers at risk and former customers who may be recoverable.
4. Employee Relationship Report - provides a fast, affordable way to measure the level of employee commitment and identify factors affecting commitment. The ERR is not only an "employee satisfaction" survey, it also provides you with information on how to reduce turnover, implement programs that have the greatest impact on employee commitment and satisfaction.
5. Reputation & Stakeholder Assessment - comprehensive tool available for measuring and managing corporate reputation. What makes the RSA unique is that it tells you:
   • How important stakeholders feel about your company
   • How your company is performing in these areas
   • What matters most to respective constituent groups
   • What your priorities should be to maximize impact and resources
6. Supplier Relationship Report - measures supplier relationships, showing:
   • What percentage of your suppliers are truly loyal
   • How committed are individual suppliers
   • Which factors have the greatest influence on supplier commitment
   • How your supplier relationship compare to their other customers
   • What your strategic improvement priorities should be

You depend on your suppliers to provide you goods and services so you can concentrate on your business; however, you cannot serve your customers if your supply chain breaks. The SRR helps you strengthen your supplier relationships by managing them more effectively.

With its broad experience in human resource management, combined with survey expertise, ASR is an ideal provider of employee surveys. We can assist in questionnaire development, deployment and analysis, as well as working with you to ensure representative samples.

Our years of organizational and psychology experience gives us immediate insight into workforce issues, and which assists us to identify action items which will have the most impact.

Employee surveys can focus on a range of topics, from current terms and conditions of employment, internal service reviews (such as purchasing or IT service), multi-rater, peer or upward feedback to engagement and retention studies.

We collect data using a variety of methods and the combination is dependent on the topic or the nature of the assignment. We regularly conduct interviews and focus groups to assist in preparing self-completion questionnaires, and we collect data using paper, web, or telephone questionnaires.

ASR is experienced in deploying both anonymous and known respondent employee surveys. The latter allows us to track longitudinally, particularly for retention studies, and to incorporate other payroll-associated data, such as amount invested in training, competency sets or performance ratings.

We can assist in developing communication programs which will significantly increase response rates, using innovative messages and media.

We have experience in surveying very small (less than 100) and very large (more than 20,000) workforces, in both white collar and blue collar environments. Where it is important, we work closely with employee groups such as unions.

As part of its employee survey expertise, ASR conducts skill audits of whole workforces or specific segments and has extensive experience in collecting skill profiles by paper or electronically and then using this information for workforce planning and training needs analysis.

ASR develops organisation-specific indices or benchmarks which can be used to track progress and to identify trouble-spots. They can also be used to identify high risk retention or engagement areas within an organisation.

Types of employee surveys include:

• team or post feedback – peer reviews
• single division internal customer satisfaction studies, eg, property, purchasing, IT or shared service delivery
• climate and culture surveys
• skills audits
• engagement and retention studies
• program evaluation such as how well a new initiative has been adopted or accepted
• communication audits
• corporate values
• work/life balance studies
• employee census (who’s where, got what and knows what).
  

Survey Services is our full-service survey, research and analytics bureau. The bureau assists clients manage their total information collection, analysis and reporting requirements.

The participants in our projects range from a few hundred to more than one million. We combine a variety of quantitative and qualitative techniques in a single project, eg, conducting personal interviews and focus groups before moving onto a web survey.

We collect and report on of all forms of information required by business and government enterprises. This includes information from employees, customers, suppliers and stakeholders. As well as data from field studies, manufacturing, sales and automated equipment.

We also create custom reporting suites for small and large datasets. These reports can be produced for individuals (eg, 360° feedback) and organisations (eg, employee or customer surveys) as well as for long-term purposes (eg, industry-wide benchmarking).

ASR has developed the Survey Manager software technology suite to do this. We also offer the technical services to create interfaces from Survey Manager to your HRIS, CRM, financial and other systems.

Survey Manager is the information platform which underpins survey-research bureau, run on our database and web servers housed in a secure 24x7 Data Centre in Melbourne. From here, we can reach most people online anywhere in the world.

ASR uses the powerful SuperWEB reporting engine from Space-Time Research to provide clients reports over the web where each report can be password-protected.

Were appropriate, we use a range of statistical and other reporting tools. Also, we specialise in those difficult 'one-off' data collection & reporting assignments, often requiring sophisticated statistical analysis.

We offer a range of services, including:

• Research design
• Sample construction
• Data collection
• Project management
• Analysis
• Interpreting results and identifying action points
• High performance statistical processing
• Specialised business intelligence
• Web access & dissemination.

Examples include:

• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Employee attitude surveys
• Performance appraisals & skills audits
• 360°and other multi-rater surveys
• Training evaluation
• Remuneration surveys
• Psychometric testing and recruitment screening
• Quantitative market research
• Timesheets, expenses or inventory tracking
• Capturing field data from experiments
• Capturing production volumes, work processes or decision steps.

We can run any combination of:

• Web surveys
• Paper forms and questionnaires
• Scannable paper forms
• Telephone interviewing (CATI)
• Focus groups, and
• In-depth interviewing.

We support four types of survey project:

• Anonymous
• Anonymous with return
• Invitational, and
• Multi-rater, including upward feedback and 360°.

For multi-rater surveys such as upward feedback and 360°:

• Our software allows for user-selected respondents
• Questionnaires are bundled together for multiple recipients
• Pre-survey messages and reminders are sent automatically
• Progress is tracked
• Individual feedback reports can be returned by paper, e-mail and the web.

For those important jobs where you need security, proven expertise and a proven track record in handling sensitive information.

We work for:

• Government departments
• Enforcement agencies
• Market researchers
• Human resource firms
• Not-for-profit organisations
• Companies
• Regulatory authorities
• Management consultants
• Organisation development specialists
• Associations

We assist you to collect and report on of all forms of information required by business and government enterprises.

We specialise in those difficult 'one-off' data collection & reporting assignments, often requiring sophisticated statistical analysis.

Will it take time to organise a dedicated server?

Is your IT Department unable to help immediately?

Do you have limited time and a limited budget?

 

Then the ASR analytics bureau is a safe alternative because:

• We run your project on our equipment
• We take out the hassle (no need to involve your IT Department)
• You benefit from our experience.
  

The bureau features:

• Servers housed in secure Tier 1 Data Centre
• Use our database and web servers (or house yours with us)
• Defence security clearance
• SSL encryption available
• Suitable for internal and public use
• 24x7 up time
• Monthly subscription
• Short term and long term projects
• All types of data and analysis accommodated
• Certified by Defence for handling Commonwealth data.

Here are some examples of the major types of surveys we have done. They range from people to things and it is not an exhaustive summary. If you would like to organise a survey that is not on the list, we would be pleased to discuss it with you. Refer to our case studies for more details about individual assignments.

Do-it-yourself (DIY)

Using our question library, or your own, and our on-line tools, you can create, administer and analyse your own survey on our web site. The main steps are:

• Design the questionnaire, with or without our help, and supply it to us.
• We load your questionnaire into Survey Manager, which is located on our web server.
• You e-mail an invitation to the people designated to participate in the survey. The email message contains a URL (hyperlink) that automatically takes the respondents to the questionnaire on our web server.
• After the completion period, the survey is analysed and reports produced. This can be done using our tools or we can give you a data extract to analyse in-house using the tools of your choice.
• If you want a permanent web survey that collects ongoing feedback, we can give you continuous access to your responses as they come in.
• Alternatively, we can send you regular updates, eg, last month, last quarter or whenever you want it.

We host your survey on our web site

You design your own survey (instructions, questionnaire and respondent group) and do your own analysis. We will provide the software to display and distribute the questionnaire, as well as collect the answers. This can be a one-off survey or an ongoing survey. Security is ensured.

We can give you the completed data for you to analyse, or we will assist you to do the analysis using our tools. Our reports can be e-mailed back to you, broadcast on your Intranet, or made available to selected people through password access. We can do this for a one-off project, an ongoing survey, or a series of different types of surveys.

Use your Intranet

We will install our powerful software on site and assist you to conduct your own surveys. We can train your staff to use the software, or do it for you on site. This service covers questionnaire design, with your questions or ours. Reports can be customised to your requirements, or we will extract the completed survey data and load it into the database or analytical tools of your choice. Our software is compatible with Lotus Notes e-mail system.

Survey facilitation

We help you only where needed to carry out one or more steps of the survey process, eg, questionnaire design, drawing up sample sets, analysis, or interpreting your results. Also, you may want to repeat a survey you have run previously, but want to use your Intranet or the Internet for the first time. We have the software tools to enable you to do this. We can help you amalgamate the current survey with the data from previous surveys.

Hire us to do it all

We can organise everything for you, including questionnaire design and testing, automatic respondent assignment, questionnaire distribution and follow up, as well as full analysis and report production. We employ statisticians and psychologists who have a wealth of experience in survey design and analysis and you benefit from this in-house expertise.

Customised services

Pre-populated questionnaire: we can build special features into your questionnaires, such as presenting respondents with their previous years' data

Specialised content: by arrangement with a number of major consulting, psychology and market research companies, we can supply validated instruments, depending upon the purpose of your survey.

Custom reports: our programmers can build reports to your specification for hard and soft copy distribution. We have many pre-designed report formats including upward feedback/360® feedback reports. Our standard reports are available in black-white and colour formats, but you might want special effects added to your presentations.

Discover hidden trends: combine the results of consumer and employee surveys with business and financial parameters in our powerful database. This enables you to identify lead and lag factors affecting your bottom line.

Data cleansing: with our data warehousing capability and our statistical expertise, we can cleanse, combine and analyse data to create new information that will provide your decision-makers with insights for improving your organization's effectiveness and performance.

Survey Services uses a generic process flow for its projects and this is customized to fit the nature of the survey. We can provide services in all or any combination of these steps. The generic steps are outlined below. In addition, special issues that need to be considered for different types of surveys are outlined next.

1. Survey project planning
We work with you to develop a comprehensive and customized project plan with timelines, responsibilities and costs. The plan will cover all the steps, where applicable, that are listed below. We will also clarify objectives and uses of the survey and how it links with other initiatives you may have in place.

2. Questionnaire design and development
Using our question bank, your existing questionnaire, or starting with a blank sheet we will help you develop a valid, consistent and reliable questionnaire in line with your project objectives. This will incorporate existing research material and plans and may involve qualitative interviews and focus groups. We will assist in ensuring appropriate language, phrasing and clarity of expression.

3. Sample/population decision
If a sample is to be used, at this point the sample parameters and design are decided. If a population survey is required, we must consider how everyone will be identified.

4. Delivery methods
This is deciding how will the questionnaire by deployed - web (intranet/internet/email hyperlink) or paper (mailed, handed out, facilitated group, etc) - and the resulting activities required as a result of this decision, eg, installing software, organizing print production, data entry, delivery times.

5. Communication program
Communication programs are not designed just to inform respondents that a survey is about to happen. They should also address how to get a high response rate, how to recognize and even reward participation, how to share and debrief results and how to act on the messages that are contained in survey results. We can design an entire communication campaign to support your survey or assist you to engage your employees in the process.

6. Pilot testing and refinement
An important step that helps achieve an outstanding result. Pilot tests not only give you valuable feedback about question wording, questionnaire layout, technology effectiveness but you can use the results to identify redundant questions.

7. Questionnaire loading delivery
This involves loading respondents, preparing delivery messages, physically sending questionnaires, or organizing collection groups.

8. Collecting responses and monitoring progress
We have on-line tools that can give you instant access to amount and type of response, for web surveys. In some cases, this step may involve providing helpdesk or helpline support.

9. Data entry, if required
This is an unnecessary step if you are using respondent data entry or data entry at point of interview, eg, CATI. However, there are always circumstances when data entry is required. We can provide data entry staff for your surveys using your own software, spreadsheets, statistical packages or our own specialized survey software systems. It is your decision whether data validation is required and the amount of free-text coding or content analysis needed.

10. Analyzing results and producing reports
The amount and type of statistical or qualitative analysis required will depend on the survey type and purpose. Also, report detail and sophistication is a consideration in this step. Survey Services can merge data sets and perform longitudinal or time series analysis which may be useful for benchmark or trend analysis.

11. Providing feedback
The amount of emphasis in this step will depend on the nature of the survey. However, it is a critical step and requires careful decision-making.

12. Deciding priorities and implementing ideas
Surveys provide information for decision-making--the don't make decisions in their own right. So this is the hard work part and the reason for initiating most research.

Employee surveys

• It is important that current and potential employee issues are addressed in the survey so that data can be used for tracking progress, ie, longitudinal analysis. This means taking a broader view and not just working with "hot potatoes." Working off existing initiatives, conducting focus groups and working within the framework of your organization's strategic plan all help shape the survey.
• Literacy - both language and computer - are important considerations for data collection. Alternative methods/activities may need to be used to deal with this issue.
• The level of trust within the organization is a critical issue. How willing will employees be to respond and to respond truthfully. This will affect your communication strategy.

Multi-rater surveys

• Decide the purpose of the feedback early in the planning process . This will significantly shape all other decisions in the survey process.
• Engagement (briefing respondents; having others prepared to give feedback and having employees prepared to receive feedback) is a critical success factor in this type of survey.
• Logistics - getting the right details, respondent relationships, distribution and nearly 100% response rate - are all important.

Customer satisfaction

• Distinguish between customers and stakeholders - they are usually not the same and will have quite different issues.
• Decide on the best way to contact your customers - self-completed paper or web questionnaires, face-to-face or telephone interviews, focus groups, etc.
• Focus on where you fit in terms of your customers' delivery frameworks, not where customers fit within your organization's process structure.

Outsourcing evaluation

• How will results be benchmarked and interpreted in light of performance contracts?
• How to reflect performance indicators in a valid, reliable and simple questionnaire.
• Deciding whether to weight responses of critical users.

Remuneration

• What information will you collect out of basic pay, bonuses and benefits, annuities (superannuation/pensions), vehicles, equity plan, performance pay and government taxes?
• Continuous, biannual or annual polling.
• Validation during data collection, eg, 8% annuity to be entered as 8 and not 0.08 or $1,600 (of $20,000), etc
• What calculations do you need to perform before and after data collection?
• Data collection method - interviews or questionnaires (paper, web or spreadsheet)?
• Will company size, location, industry, and turnover influence your results?

Benchmarking

• What are you really benchmarking - financial performance or service delivery?
• For sampling across organizations, ensure you use language and terms familiar to all.
• How much derived data can you ask for, ie, how much calculation is it reasonable to expect respondents to do before answering your questions, eg, cost/area, NPV of investment after 18 months, average rate of return, etc?

Inventory and asset tracking

• Are the items coded consistently, eg, furniture is 6 alphanumerics, car parts are 16 numerics, and consumables are 8 alphas?
• Distinguish between short-term inventory and raw materials.
• Are the assets truly tangible?
• How are assets with no value/fully depreciated handled, ie, where is the cut-off decision made?

Process control

• Is data obtained from people or machines?
• What is being measured - qualitative or quantitative data?
• How will out-of-process range data be handled?
• What type of trend analysis will be used to identify process runs?
• Consider the issues of sampling frequency, accuracy and precision of measurement. Are these issues affected by multiple variables?
  

Here is a checklist that we use to scope each of our assignments. In some instances, very few of the items will apply and in others, they are all important. We charge on a time and materials basis. Our estimates depend on the nature of the survey, and the type of expertise required. In some instances, specialized consultants are required to run focus groups, or perform some types of analysis. And input times will vary for the same reasons - sometimes the same task can take 20 minutes or 2 days.