Adding Service Value - Enabling Rapid Solutions

Bailey Lauerman is a full service advertising agency for public relations, social media, branding, and research. Bailey Lauerman’s clients include Disney, Pepsi, Union Pacific, Smithsonian, Honeywell, Girl Scouts of America, and Gulfstream.

Key Survey Meets the Challenge of Capturing, Analyzing, and Reporting Vital Information in the Shortest Possible Timeframe

The advertising firm relies upon fresh consumer insights for guiding its creative campaigns, and it constantly needs to quickly gather that information and then share it with Bailey Lauerman clients. Oftentimes the agency will also conduct internal surveys on behalf of its clients, surveying teams of people within the client’s company to get their valuable input and feedback.

But about five years ago we realized that we needed a much simpler and faster way to do our surveys," explains Mike Kuhl, an account planner for Bailey Lauerman.

Before discovering Key Survey the company was performing its collection and analysis manually and face-to-face. So it wanted to find a more efficient and adaptable online survey solution that would allow it the flexibility to process lots of diverse input rapidly but accurately. After investigating about a half a dozen different survey products Bailey Lauerman selected Key Survey because it was so impressed with its flexible platform and menu of useful features.

We found it simple to log in and interface. But then you can also do all kinds of powerful background work to adapt Key Survey to your particular needs and parameters. You can enter at many different levels, too, so that various people can be granted access to a specific portion of the data - or full access to all of the data - depending upon their role or level of responsibility. The survey results can easily be put into a wide variety of appropriate reporting formats."

Key Survey works intuitively, Kuhl also emphasizes, so that even someone with no survey background or technical expertise can use it with ease and get outstanding results.

Key Survey Application to Boost Ad Agency Performance

Kuhl says that Bailey Lauerman will typically field a survey to three or four different audiences in order to gain their perspective or understand their attitudes about a particular brand, marketing message, or advertising concept.

Kuhl likes to design the questions himself, rather than using off-the-shelf questionnaires, and he will frequently start with a creative idea that comes to mind and then gradually build his questions up from there. Using Key Survey he is able to write his questions, send them to his target audience, and then monitor their responses to find out exactly who is participating in the survey, who is not responding, and what kinds of patterns or opinions are emerging from their answers.

I will typically export the raw data," Kuhl explains, "and then use the menu of reporting functions Key Survey offers to help filter the information by demographics or other categories and characteristics. There are some really robust tools for managing a list, for example -even if the list has thousands of people on it -and then following up with another survey fielded to only those in the group who have not yet responded."

Thanks to Key Survey capability Kuhl can manage the entire process quickly and affordably, plus he can also archive surveys that he has created for easy retrieval at a later date. That way if he wants to deploy a similar survey in the future he can do so without having to redesign a completely new questionnaire. Being able to repurpose a survey in this scalable way is a convenient tool that saves time and money while eliminating redundant work.

Key Survey Application for Projects of Any Size and Scale

Bailey Lauerman is a frequent user of Key Survey, and the company averages about two or three surveys per month.

We send the survey out and it typically takes a week or two to get the results back, then a week to analyze it, so the turnaround on most of our surveys is about three weeks." The bottom line, explains Kuhl, is that since Bailey Lauerman has been using Key Survey the ad agency can achieve in two or three weeks what it used to take six months to accomplish.

We might need to get consensus or input, for example, from a handful of people who are on a board of directors. But it can be really difficult to synchronize everyone’s schedules in order to bring them all together for a meeting at the same time and place. That can create lots of unwanted delays and logistical problems. So instead I can just send out a survey and they can respond to it at their own convenience, day or night, so that we get the answers we need fast without having to convene everyone in person."

The company also sometimes uses surveys involving thousands of respondents, but Kuhl says that the effort required to field a survey to tens of thousands of people is no greater than it is when he sends one to just a small group.

With Key Survey the process is the same, no matter how big the survey happens to be. We do a yearly tracking study involving 16,000 people, for instance, for the National Business Aviation Association. But with Key Survey it is just as easy to survey 15,000 stakeholders as it is to survey just five people. It’s no more complicated and we can use our own style and image to brand it as our own. That makes respondents feel more confident and trusting because they know that they are dealing with someone who is familiar to them, not just some unknown third party survey service provider."

Bailey Lauerman Finds that Key Survey Customer Service and Technical Support is a Major Value-Adding Benefit

When Bailey Lauerman was researching various online survey products and companies to find one that could meet all of our goals," Kuhl recalls, "the customer service at Key Survey was a big selling point for us."

He says that knowledgeable technicians are always there whenever he has a question, and someone has the answers to give him right away - which saves him the hassle of troubleshooting on his own.

Based on my experience I would say that Key Survey has solutions to questions that I don’t even have yet -which means that they anticipate my needs ahead of time. Customer service and technical support doesn’t get any better than that. They also have an active online community forum, which says to me that they have a really strong commitment to understanding and responding to the needs of their users."

A Long Term Relationship with a Valued Key Survey Partner

Bailey Lauerman has been using Key Survey for years, and has no intention of switching to any other survey provider. The award-winning ad agency has realized extraordinary results from using online surveys, and Key Survey has become an integral component of the firm’s long range strategy for continued success and superior service to its valued clients.