PC Magazine's 15th Annual "Service&Reliability" Survey

Earlier this year (April-May) CleverForm fielded the Annual "Service&Reliability Survey" for PC Magazine. It was an 11-section survey with more than 550 questions related to variuos aspects of service and reliability demonstrated by user's computers/accessories and their manufacturers. The survey was completed by over 14,000 people from PC Mag's reader/visitor databases.

SURVEY FACTS
Number of sections (created as separate surveys): 11
Section communication: Multi-function dispatching module, in charge of respondent identification and dynamic response balancing according to re-definable section quotas and current response totals
Total number of questions: ~550
Total number of pages: ~200
Total number of routing points/conditions: 200+
Total number of personalised questions: ~400
Total number of invitees:120,000+
Average completion time:15-45mins (15 mins per section)
Deployment time:
- beta one (section surveys only): 3 days
- beta two (sections plus dispacher): 7 days
- alpha version deployed after 12 days
Total number of respondents: 14,000+
Output data file: filtered and cleaned SPSS / Flat file (50MB total size)

TECHNOLOGIES USED
- standard CleverForm data acquisition technology
- dispatcher/quota module, specifically customised for this survey
- page cacheing/prefetching with automatic server load balance control
- working with crypted respondent identities received from ZiffDavis
- real-time response reporting script functions
- result cleaning script with range validation and weighting

PC Magazine editorial staff had rated this survey as one of the most succesful ones, since the survey had been deployed in paper form prior to 2001, with much lower response rate, i.e. much lower confidence level in results related to 'smaller' computer manufacturers. Also, one of the major problems of previous surveys was that the number of results was much greater in more 'popular' categories (such as dektops, printers etc.), while the others (e.g. network equipment) had much lower response rate, and hadn't provided reliable input. This problem was eliminated using CleverForm's custom developed 'dynamic quotas' facility, which enabled PC Magazine staff to control appearance frequency for specific survey sections, and equalize response throughout all areas of interest.

Another custom developed sub-system was an incentive manager: all participants were entered in PC Mag's sweepstakes with chances which were proportional to the effort invested (number of sections completed).

Preview "2002 PC Magazine Service&Reliability Survey"
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