“We found that our investment paid off right away. We were able to see the savings from using Q immediately.”
+ Speedy turn arounds
+ Fully self-sufficient
+ Instant ROI
Dig Insights is a market research firm based in Toronto, Canada. The company was founded in 2010, and provides valuable insights to leading companies across Canada and worldwide.
As the Associate Vice President for the Toronto-based market research firm Dig Insights, Michael Capstick is used to working with tight turnaround times. His clients come to him for efficient analysis that can help them make quick decisions for their businesses.
“Our clients often need to know right away what their customers are thinking, and how they can help address their needs,” he says.
But Michael’s team relied on support from a third-party supplier for parts of their data analysis and tabulations, which sometimes made it hard to move quickly.
“We do have an internal analytics team that’s working on a lot of the more complex analyses,” he says. “But simple requests like pulling tables and doing any sort of text analytics was done through our third-party supplier.”
Outsourcing parts of the analysis added several days to each project’s timeline—not to mention adding thousands of dollars to the cost of each project.
Michael needed a way to bring the entire analysis process in-house, so he could turn projects around faster and save on the cost of outsourcing—and pass those savings on to his clients.
When Michael started using Q, he was surprised by how intuitive the tool was, and how easy it made even complex analysis.
“In my previous role at a different company, we were using SPSS, which a lot of companies use,” he says. “With Q, there are a lot more advanced analytic processes that you can do. The user interface is much easier to use, and it allows us to do some of those more complex things that we wouldn’t have been able to do using a basic interface like SPSS.”
He brought the tasks that Dig Insights had previously outsourced in-house and trained his team to use Q to automate their analysis, including tables and text analysis.
“For my team, pulling in crosstabs has been very, very helpful,” he says. “Q has been a really great tool for doing those tasks.”
Now, Michael’s analysis process is much faster. And if his clients have follow-up questions, his team can dive right into the data and look for the answers themselves.
“Before, when we would send our data out to be processed externally, it would sometimes take a few days for us to get it back,” he says.
Being able to do additional analysis on the spot instead of sending it out again and waiting for a few more days has been very convenient for us.
Michael Capstick, Associate Vice President, Dig Insights
Q also makes it much easier for his team to collaborate.
“We can share data back and forth between our team members,” Michael says. “It makes it really easy to work collaboratively within our team when we can share resources and all have access to the same database.”
And once the data is processed, it’s ready for the client right away, without requiring hours of formatting.
“In previous software we’ve used, sometimes you export for a client and there’s a lot of work that’s needed afterwards to get it client-ready,” Michael says. “We love that you can export it straight from Q and it’s ready to send to the client. That has also been a really big time-saver for us.”
Using Q even allowed Michael to save time by streamlining his quality assurance process.
“With Q, we can do our own quality assurance checks as we go,” he says. “When we sent our data to an external partner and had them pull in tables for us, there was an additional step of doing quality assurance to ensure that they had pulled the tables properly.”
From a financial perspective, Michael says adopting Q made a difference right from the first project.
“We found that our investment paid off right away,” he says. “We were able to see the savings from using Q immediately.”
Michael could then pass those savings on to his clients.
By using Q, we have had a lot of cost savings that we can then pass on to our clients.
Michael Capstick, Associate Vice President, Dig Insights
“It allows us to make our pricing more streamlined,” he says.
Plus, Michael estimates that he’s been able to cut each project’s timeline down, with most projects finishing well ahead of deadline—and in some cases, as much as two weeks early.
“We’ve been able to cut it down significantly from what we were able to do in the past,” he says. “For some reports, it’s just shaving off a few days. But we’ve had instances where we were able to cut a week or two off of our reporting timelines, just by keeping it in-house and being able to pull that data in ourselves.”
As an added bonus, Q has allowed his team to learn more in-depth analysis and grow their own expertise.
“We’ve been able to bring more learning and data analytics in-house that we weren’t able to before,” he says. “Having our analysts and managers learn these methodologies and doing the data analysis ourselves has brought some of that knowledge in-house as well, which has been very beneficial.”
