The ReadSoft effect on: Burke USA
Process: Survey processing
Segment: Market research
Country: US
“We had looked at several other systems before choosing ReadSoft’s, and even tried out a competitor. But the competitor’s price was far too high, and we also had a problem with the form design. We could not sell questionnaires that looked like the ones you fill out in high school.”
Those are the words of Ellen Giver, Production Manager at Burke Marketing Research in Cincinnati. Burke processes marketing surveys with ReadSoft’s form processing software, and the system has seen everything from single-page documents up to 23-page surveys.
When the program was installed, the training session was geared towards Burke’s specific needs: “ReadSoft configured the training to suit the customer. It gave us a good start and we got the feeling that ReadSoft really listened to us,” says Ms. Giver.
Time an important factor
The time factor was a major reason why Burke chose the ReadSoft solution. First of all, peaks can be handled better, which makes it easier to bid on more studies. Once, the company scanned twenty-four hours per day for three weeks!
In addition, studies often have to be ready in an extremely short time: “We may, for example, sell a mall study on a Thursday afternoon, do it over the weekend, and give it to the client the next Tuesday,” Ellen Giver explains.
The second major reason for turning to ReadSoft was that it allowed Burke to implement their own ideas about the form design. Burke wanted readability and design to go hand in hand. With approximately 1.1 million pages scanned per year, the appearance of the forms vary drastically in size and design. A recent hotel survey involved 60 hotels across the USA and Mexico, with a unique form for each hotel. This type of situation puts great demands on a system for automatic data capture.
Savings of 40-50%
Ellen Giver calculates that ReadSoft’s product saves Burke 40-50% of their data entry costs. Burke has decreased its data entry staff, and those who remain find their job more interesting.
The company experienced 40% growth last year, which means that it can be hard to keep up in terms of employees. With the ReadSoft software, work volumes are very flexible and can be adjusted to the workload. Burke plans on focusing more on qualitative research in the future, and international projects are also becoming frequent; field studies have been done in Europe, Mexico, Japan and elsewhere. ReadSoft will play an important role in all these projects.