Azure Quality Assurance

Azure’s ‘closed loop’ dynamic learning system combines the following steps to build on the positives and correct any inherent negatives with interviewers. The dynamic nature of this process enables higher quality interaction with respondents and better results.

• Live Monitoring of interviewers is conducted either with or without clients present.  We tie clients in by phone or in person for joint monitoring of interviews.
• 100% of interviews are recorded.
• An Azure auditor typically reviews between 15 and 20% of interviews for all studies.  For high level audiences or sensitive topics such as healthcare,  we review 100% of these interviews.
• Interviewers receive continual feedback as part of our onboarding and ongoing training and QC process.  This coaching yields higher quality phone interviewers, and longer tenured interviewers on studies we field.
• Prior to going live with studies, we conduct mock sessions for Azure interviewers to role-play via phone, so they become comfortable with the flow and content of interviews. We also monitor and coach pronunciation and voice inflexion.

• Azure’s dedicated online team carefully examines our selected panel partners’ respondent profiles, looking for duplication and completeness of information to ensure the highest quality online respondents. This is especially critical for B2B and healthcare studies we conduct
• ‘Cheater questions’ are incorporated into our online questionnaires that are designed to remove Bots and other unqualified respondents

• Supervisors perform random spot checks of interviewers and review their previously completed interviews
• Callbacks are incorporated in 15 to 20% of intercepts literally, recontacting respondents to ensure that they participated in the study

• For central location, we sometimes recruit our own respondents and other times we use an outside agency. In both cases, Azure QC professionals reach out to recruited respondents to verify their information and willingness to participate

• Azure’s clients benefit from Panelogy, our unique recruitment service to find and bring on qualified panelists for future studies. We use social media and other creative sourcing of participants for surveys, applying the same QC process to these sources and validating their information annually

• The Azure quality process continues throughout the life of the study such as measures to ensure that qualified respondents completed the entire survey and timing guidelines to determine if a ‘speeder’ finished the survey too fast
• We also marry the front end, (such as recruitment data) with the back end data (survey results etc.) in order to ‘back check’ recruited respondents’ information. Unusual disconnects may indicate that an interview should be excluded