Cimigo interviewers use CAPI to survey 250,000 multilingual Hong Kong tourists

Cimigo is an organization of 200 market research specialists working in offices all across Asia - including China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. They form lasting partnerships with the regions’ leading brands, using market research to deliver actionable brand insights.

One of Cimigo’s clients recently contracted them to plan and execute one of Hong Kong’s largest tourism studies. They would need to interview thousands of tourists at Hong Kong borders per year, and measure differences in experiences and satisfaction levels over time.

In 2014, when Cimigo won this research in a competitive pitch, there was a real opportunity to improve the process of data collection and data delivery, with a required sample size of N=250,000 annually. That’s when Voxco entered the picture.

The Cimigo integration of Voxco CAPI software was almost immediate. Using survey software that’s intuitively designed for face-to-face interviewing, Cimigo was able to plan and execute a robust data collection program. Since September 2014, a team of 40 interviewers has been working with handheld tablets using an industry-standard OS. Voxco CAPI seamlessly serves the on-site interviewers with questionnaires in seven languages, and the interviewers walk international respondents through the surveys. About 10% of the interviews are automatically audio-recorded for quality control reasons, and importantly for all concerned, these are linked to data records for easy retrieval.

Interviewers are stationed at various departure points in Hong Kong – popular overground borders and the Hong Kong airport. Some of these locations have WiFi connections, in which case the survey data syncs to Cimigo’s central database every five minutes. Tablets being used in locations without WiFi are synched all at once at the end of each day’s interviews. Once synched, data is cleared from the tablets for privacy and security reasons.

Once the data arrives in the central database, it can be instantly analyzed by the Cimigo team, and regular reports can be sent out to key stakeholders. If changes need to be made to the questionnaires, they are made centrally and pushed out to interviewers’ tablets every time they sync data, even during fieldwork.

Compared to the client’s previous solution, Cimigo’s improvements to project efficiency have been impressive:

• Higher response rates: Interviews are completed faster and more effectively.
• Broader reach: Multi-lingual surveys help interviewers complete surveys with a broader audience of respondents.
• Offline capability: Despite the upgraded survey technology, interviewers aren’t limited to working in WiFi-only locales.
• Improved data recovery: 100% accuracy between the data collection point and the data analysis tool. No manual data transfers means no room for error.
• Interviewer quality control: Using audio recordings helps track respondent experiences and control interviewer quality.