Almuni Diary - Marketing Research
Zak Vassar '02
RA/Consultant
MaPS, Waltham, MA
7:10 am
I leave for work early so I can hit the gym before starting my day.
7:30 am
Arrive at the office - there's not much traffic on the Mass Pike at this hour. When I walk into the fitness center I see Chris, one of the Partners, on a bike. We chat for a couple of minutes and then I head over to a treadmill.
9:10 am
After showering, I head upstairs. I turn on my computer and go to grab a cup of coffee in the kitchen. Rachel, another RA, is also in the kitchen making some breakfast. She mentions that she'll be working with the field vendor I recently used, and I offer to help her install the software she'll need to test her survey - it was a little complicated when I did it.
9:20 am
Back at my desk, I check my email to make sure there isn't anything pressing before starting on my to-do list for the day. I'm working on two projects right now: one is a satisfaction study for a major financial services provider that MaPS has worked with for over 10 years (6 months for me), and we're currently in the data collection phase. My other study, a customer segmentation for a pharmaceutical company, is just beginning. The team is meeting at 10:30 am to discuss questionnaire design. Before that, I need to check the online field update for my financial services project and start preparing the field report for the client. I'm pleased to see that we've gotten another 18 completed surveys overnight, but I also notice that we haven't made as much progress in France as we had hoped. I call Matt, the Project Manager, to share my concern, and we decide to make a quick call to the field vendor. We discuss the situation and he agrees with our assessment that we need to request more phone interviewers in France.
10:00 am
I return to my desk to start working on the field report. I pull the data from the field update into an Excel spreadsheet and calculate the efficiency, refusal, and terminate rates, as well as the average time to complete the survey in each country. It's almost finished, but I'll need to do a final check before sending to the client.
10:30 am
Time for the questionnaire design meeting. I grab my notebook and head to the Rockies (all our conference rooms are named after mountain ranges). Dale and Megan, the Vice President and Associate on the project, are already there, so we get right down to business. We spend about 45 minutes outlining the structure of the questionnaire - identifying the key points we want to cover, and ordering the sections to minimize respondent bias. Next, we begin to identify the types of questions we want to ask in each section. We need to vary the questions to keep the survey from being too repetitive. Dale and Megan mention a few other projects that used similar questions that we may be able to leverage. Megan and I agree to put together a draft of the questionnaire by the end of the day tomorrow.
12:30 pm
I head back to my desk and check my email. Jon and Rachel are going down to the cafeteria for lunch and are wondering if I'd like to join them. Good timing - I'm starved! We agree to meet at the elevators in five minutes. I finish sorting through my emails, grab my wallet, and go to lunch.
1:15 pm
Back at my desk, I check my email and see that it's Krystn's birthday and there will be cake and singing in the kitchen at 4:00 pm. Dale has forwarded a message from the client, indicating some additional points that he may want to include in our questionnaire. Megan already responded, mentioning that she has some ideas on how to incorporate these new items, and suggesting that we meet tomorrow morning to go over them. I also have an email from my college roommate, Jake, asking if I have any restaurant suggestions for our dinner tonight. I spend a few minutes on Citysearch to see if there are any new places we should try, and reply with a few ideas.
1:30 pm
Next I turn my attention back to the field report for my financial services study. I check all the numbers against my online update to be sure everything is accurate. I put together a short email, summarizing our progress thus far and explaining our action plan regarding our low efficiency rates in France. I'm careful to point out all the other countries in which we are ahead of schedule. I print out the field report and the email and swing by Matt's office to review it with him. We discuss it briefly and he makes some minor suggestions. I then return to my desk to incorporate them. Reading the email one last time, I hit spell check and send it to the client. One more item to cross off my to-do list!
1:50 pm
I decide to get started pulling together resources for the pharmaceutical questionnaire. Based on the discussion I had with Dale and Megan, I email a couple of colleagues, explaining what I'm looking for and ask them to send me the questionnaires from their studies. Fortunately, both of them are at their desks and respond immediately. Although both Jen and Kathleen have directed me to the appropriate sections in their surveys, I decide to read both questionnaires all the way through for additional reference. I find several questions that will work for my survey, and make some notes. This will give me a good start for my document.
2:30 pm
Time to switch gears and think about my financial services study for awhile. We have a conference call with the client at 3:00 pm to discuss the report template we sent her yesterday. I'm very familiar with the template, since Matt and I created most of it, but I take a few minutes to review it and think about it from the client's perspective before the call.
2:55 pm
I head to the Alps conference room for the call. Matt is already there and Lucy, the Partner on the project, joins us shortly. Overall, the client is very happy with the template. She shared it with the rest of her team, and there is some additional data they were hoping we could include in the report. We agree to create the additional slides by the end of the week. We also discuss re-ordering the report to place more emphasis on the company's recent online banking initiative. The call ends around 3:40 pm and we spend the next 20 minutes discussing the layout of the new slides we need to add. They're fairly straightforward, but we have some trouble coming up with a cohesive way to represent the data without detracting from the rest of the report. I remember a slide from my recent IT solutions study that may be useful, and sketch out the basic idea for the team. Lucy and Matt think the layout will work well for us, and I offer to make the revisions this afternoon.
4:00 pm
Matt, Lucy, and I leave the meeting and go straight to the kitchen for Krystn's birthday festivities.
4:15 pm
Back at my desk, I begin revising the report template with the changes we discussed. It goes pretty quickly, since I'm able to use some of the other slides in the deck as a starting point. After checking to make sure that I've included all the edits we discussed, I send the deck off to Matt and Lucy for their review.
5:15 pm
Laura, another RA, stops by with a question for David, who sits next to me. Before she leaves, I ask her if I can hitch a ride with her to New York on Friday, and we all end up talking about our weekend plans.
5:30 pm
Back to work. Using my notes from earlier and the questionnaires I received, I begin to copy and paste questions into a new document. I customize the wording for my pharmaceutical study and add placeholders for the new questions that I need to draft from scratch.
6:30 pm
Time to start wrapping up. I send an email to the field vendor, requesting that he update us first thing in the morning on how many additional French phone interviewers he was able to add to our study. I make a to-do list for the next day that includes:
- Keep an eye on French field progress
- Keep working on questionnaire draft and meet with Megan at 11:00 am to discuss
- Meet with Beth, our field director, to discuss which data processor we' ll be using on the financial services study
- Call my parents to wish them a happy anniversary
7:00 pm
Time to head out. Jake and I decided to meet for Mexican food at Border Cafe in Harvard Square.
