Firing Up Your Laptop with Our New CAPI (Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing) Solution

Email Article |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

Right before I went on vacation (and stopped blogging for a bit), Vovici announced Mobile Survey - PC Edition, a new computer-assisted personal interviewing solution for EFM Community.  With this product, "sales teams can now gather feedback in person as they meet with clients, military personnel in the field can conduct assessments in areas where wireless Internet connections are not possible, and companies can use Mobile Survey - PC Edition in kiosk-type formats where respondents may take a survey at their leisure (in malls, at tradeshows, etc)."

I'm pleased with this new offering for a number of reasons.  First, it is a much easier-to-deploy system than our prior solution, speeding up the fielding of offline surveys.  Second, I know the development team had been itching to come out with this improvement for a while, but had other priorities to get to first; it was a labor of love for them.  Third, our first-ever product was actually a CAPI solution for conducting face-to-face interviews; Mobile Survey - PC Edition represents the latest in a 15-year pedigree of interviewing solutions that stretches from IntelliWriter to SurveySolutions to Mobile Survey for the Palm to EFM Community. 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I traveled the U.S. and U.K. doing personal interviews on ISDN, virtual private networks, image management, color copying and other topics that seem rather quaint today.  Our first product, IntelliWriter, grew out of my direct experience as a professional interviewer, incorporating the functionality I most wanted to see.  The power of our latest release almost makes me want to take a road trip and conduct a bunch of interviews again.  Almost.

I have a lot of great stories from my time doing face-to-face interviews, but one stands out, and helps illustrate one scenario where a face-to-face survey is warranted over a web or telephone survey.  We were hired by a steel manufacturer to survey their largest customers - each of whom represented over a half-million dollars in business.  Given the size of each relationship, it made sense to conducted in-person surveys.  At some sites, I would interview up to four respondents, each representing different aspects of the relationship (engineering, service, purchasing, etc.).  I would use my laptop to ask the appropriate questions, with our software automatically handling skip patterns and fill-ins.  On the last interview of a week-long trip, near the end of the questionnaire, as I typed in a respondent's answer, he said, "Is that your laptop on fire?"  Indeed, it was.  The power adapter was shooting out sparks and flames, and suddenly the laptop shorted out.  I unplugged the laptop, and the smoke stopped.  I completed the interview from memory, having neglected to print out a copy of the survey instrument.   Fortunately, by then I had done the same survey close to 50 times, and had done it about a dozen times that week, so I really did have the remaining questions memorized.  But ever since, I have always carried a paper copy of the survey with me, and I advise you to do the same if you use Mobile Survey - PC Edition.  And remember, only you can prevent laptop fires.