OTX Sample

Dear partners,

The entire OTX team is joining me to wish you a very Happy New Year.

2007 has been quite a year.  With your support, we have managed to reach our ambitious goals for growth, and I am confident that next year’s Honomichl ranking will show how we continue to climb the ladder to the top.

Our growth in 2007 required us to increase the amount of sample we needed.  As you know, increasing traffic is not the only way to get more respondents – being able to convert traffic into completes is also key, so we spent a lot of time last year working on two priorities:  to help you send more qualified sample (what, when, how) and to improve user experience in our surveys (to decrease the number of break-offs and encourage future participation).

We are proud of the following achievements:

• We successfully reorganized our department to give more autonomy to our sample coordinators, now in charge of their own vertical from start to finish.
• We transitioned from Windows Media Player to Flash for the majority of our video surveys, while still providing a secure environment to our more copyright-sensitive clients
• We transitioned to Firefox compatibility for almost all surveys.  A few of our trackers are still IE-only for data integrity purposes but should be gradually transitioned in the following weeks
• We added the “try again?” prompt to let users decide if they want to try to find another survey in the router or term
• We launched the new FSA variable to let you choose between router or stand-alone sends at any given time
• We added many new features to the Knowledge Center (survey specs, price, helpdesk email address, termination report, etc) to let you manage your sample better
• We included standard survey quality questions at the end of all our surveys to build satisfaction norms and identify problematic surveys - more on this later…

With those accomplishments came also some new challenges.  At the end of the year, it became apparent to our Engineering team that our growth and the addition of new features would not be possible without a new architecture for our systems.  As a consequence, the past two months have included some scheduled server downtime to allow our team to upgrade our main database.  This major enhancement to our servers and database architecture will boost our surveys and reporting tools’ performance to unprecedented levels.  Our apologies if the system cutover affected your team and user experience.  The good news is that most of the work is now done, and you should already have noticed a significant improvement in our systems’ response.

Now, what’s ahead in 2008?  No revolution, but mostly a continuation of what we worked on in the past years, to support continued growth of our business:

• More quality control:  it is well-known that 2007 was also the year of online research’s first teenage crisis.  A number of publications and conferences have highlighted the need for online researchers to be more careful about the quality of data collected online.  While nothing new was learned in 2007, our clients have become increasingly vigilant about the quality of responses given online.  In particular, the industry has become more aware of the need to curb the number of hyperactive or “professional” survey takers and inattentive respondents.  In the short term, it means that you may continue to see a growing number of users which we will have to invalidate during or after they take a survey.  We will also officially start to collect a SHA1 encryption of our users’ address to improve our de-duplication efforts.
• Better user experience: taking surveys should appeal to anyone, not just a few “professional” survey takers, but to get there a few things need to change all along the value chain of market research.  If poor survey experience is a global problem, we are determined to play our role in a cure.  In 2008, we will continue to measure user satisfaction, and set ambitious goals with our clients to provide the best online survey experience possible. 
• Better fielding tools: finally, we will work hard to develop a new generation of tools to let you better manage the sample you send to us, and the time it takes to successfully handle our projects.

In summary, our plan is for 2008 to be the year of “sustainable growth”.  We are very excited to start the year with such an ambitious agenda, and we hope to be able to achieve our goals with your support.  Your feedback is very valuable, so please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any suggestion.

Sincerely,

The OTX Online Community Team:

Annie, Breanna, Chris, Don, Dorothy, Nicole, Nikhil, Olivier, Ted and Van