When conducting surveys on trade fairs and during events like concerts or sales promotions, two key challenges for the executing market research agency are: being mobile, i.e. being independent from technical infrastructure, and transforming the data of a large number of interviews quickly and efficiently into meaningful charts. Both goals can be reached by data collection via mobile telecommunication devices like mobile phones or PDA’s. Also when conducting mystery shopping projects or consumer studies in real usage occasions (e.g. in bars or at the beach) this way of collecting data has proven its worth.

Thinking about surveys on trade fairs, market researchers might be challenged to make first results accessible while fieldwork is still being continued (e.g. after the end of the second day of the fair). These insights might be used to further optimize the client’s presentation on the fair.

To face challenges like this, isi has developed a process and a technical infrastructure, in which the collected interview data will be transformed into meaningful charts in real-time, i.e. right after having completed an interview. These charts are accessible for the client anytime and anywhere via an online reporting tool.

With software that is optimized for mobile devices, an online questionnaire is developed. The data is collected by means of mobile phones or PDA’s using the 3G technology. Each dataset is stored in a database on a secure web server. An online reporting tool uses these datasets to visualize the results in charts which can be accessed by the client anywhere and everywhere.

The visualization of results is not even limited to the “total perspective”: The online tool allows making use of selection criteria to get deep insights into opinions and preferences of certain target segments (e.g. only females between 30 and 40 years).

In an isi case study, this approach will be depicted and the advantages of its high degree of automation will be pointed out.