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Happy New Year everyone! As we enter 2024, we hope you are looking forward to a positive year ahead. That’s certainly the case for us here at NIPO, where we never stop looking for ways to make Nfield even better aligned with users’ needs.
While we’re hard at work improving our products and developing new features, we thought this would be a good moment to reflect on the changes Nfield underwent during 2023. The 24 releases made over the course of the past year included the following major developments:
Keeping your Nfield domain clean – by deleting outdated surveys to avoid unnecessary data storage – is vital for your GDPR compliance, security, and efficient operation. Helping you achieve this is all part of our responsibility within Nfield’s ISO 27001:2013 certification.
To make it as simple as possible, we introduced an automatic survey clean-up feature. You can learn all about it in our 30-minute webinar Academy #39 Automatic clean-up feature session recording.
Maintaining a clean, clutter-free domain promotes internal collaboration and enhances teamwork. Doing this will also help you keep in line with Nfield’s acceptable use policy, making it less likely that you’ll incur additional charges from exceeding storage limits.
When you’re creating a new survey with the same configuration as one you’ve done before, starting again from scratch is a real waste of time, right? That’s why we introduced blueprints, which let you quickly set up new surveys based on identical channels and quota frames, without having to manually enter the details all over again. Pretty much like a template.
Thanks to blueprints, you no longer need to hold on to old surveys as setup references. Find out how to benefit from the efficiency of blueprints in our 22-minute webinar Academy #40 – Survey blueprints.
You wanted a more integrated and streamlined data management experience. We responded by developing a way to transmit CAPI data directly into the Nfield data delivery pipeline, enabling instant availability of comprehensive fieldwork progress reports.
This is still a work in progress, but Beta access is now open for integrating CAPI survey data into fieldwork progress reports and repositories.
Scripting continues to evolve, and so do our tools for checking your scripts are free from logic errors. The NIPO ODIN Developer now incorporates both the legacy (NFS) parser and the new (Nfield) parser for ODIN questionnaire scripts. At the time of writing, both parsers are currently available, but the legacy parser will be phased out during 2024.
While developing the new Nfield parser, we discovered several commands and constructs that are no longer functional in Nfield. To help you transition to updated practices, these commands and constructs are now proactively reported as warnings.
To make your CAPI survey experience even better, we enhanced Nfield Manager capabilities to enable truly seamless management, including for surveys with Sampling Points, Addresses, and Quotas. Day-to-day survey management is now even more streamlined via a more intuitive interface, and includes added support for Excel upload. As a result, the Nfield Manager lets you do more in one place, without having to use separate tools. So you get to enjoy even more convenience, efficiency and user-friendliness. This latest evolution of the Nfield Manager has led to retirement of the Classic Manager.
We know how frustrating it can be when you’re experiencing performance or availability issues and you don’t know if anything is being done to address them. That’s why we introduced our Nfield Status Page to provide real-time information about availability of our main services across different regions. Through this page, you can easily check whether the issue you’re encountering is already known to our team before deciding to raise a support ticket. It’s all part of our commitment to giving you the smoothest and most efficient service possible.
In 2023, we gave our users a gleaming new toolbox for streamlining the process of Nfield domain configuration. Nfield API Endpoints v2 is a set of meticulously crafted tools, such as DomainEmailSettings, DomainLanguageTranslations, and DomainPasswordSettings, designed to make your work faster, smoother, and better overall.
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) act as a bridge connecting two completely different programs (e.g. Nfield and CRM / Nfield and Membership database / Nfield and your reporting system. See API – What researchers need to know for further explanation.
With the release of this updated toolbox, the older v1 endpoints have been deprecated, as indicated in the Nfield API help page.
Our improvement journey is continual, and Nfield customers can look ahead to yet more innovations aimed at further enhancing the user experience and data collection efficiency.
For every visible change, a significant amount of hardening, performance improvement, security enhancements, and maintenance work also goes on behind the scenes. It all adds up to fulfilling our commitment to delivering a robust and reliable platform for every single one of our valued customers.
Here’s to an exciting, inquisitive, and productive year ahead in market research!
We have extended the property filter for *USELIST to manage OR as well as AND statements. In this NIPO Academy session we will go over how this can improve your scripts.
NIPO recently introduced a new subset of NIPO Academy sessions, called “Scripting problem of the month”. This session is about the use of randomizations.
NIPO is introducing a new subset of NIPO Academy sessions, called “Scripting problem of the month”. In this new series one of our scripting experts will take half an hour to discuss a scripting issue that we often see in NIPO ODIN scripts. The first topic we will discuss is: Optimizing loops; how to minimize the loops and the iterations.
NIPO is proud to announce the opening of our new Mumbai office. In recent years we have seen a strong growth of our business in the Asia Pacific region, something that also was the result of our Nfield China deployment we launched 2 years ago. This major step is now followed by the opening of our new office in Mumbai, that has been in business as of 1 November 2021.
The NIPO Mumbai office will be dedicated to supporting our customers in the Asia Pacific region, with backup from the NIPO Helpdesk in Amsterdam.
NIPO offers remote support to all Nfield users by email (no telephone at the moment, due to all staff working at home for reasons related to Covid), hosts Nfield introduction sessions and on-site training sessions on topics ranging from survey creation to fieldwork management.
Office contact details:
3rd Floor,The ORB
IA Project Road, Andheri
Mumbai 400099, India
We are delighted to announce the opening of this new office and look forward to supporting you from Mumbai!
The market research industry’s three main channels – Online, CATI and CAPI – each have distinct advantages in different situations. Online is fast, cheap and far-reaching. But better quality responses can sometimes be assured via CATI and CAPI channels, which can be backed up with visual, audio and GPS location evidence.
Circumstantial, cultural, demographic and geographic factors also come into play when it comes to which channel is most effective for delivering response. But these can vary within an individual survey and even within an individual sample.
To offer a comprehensive service that keeps all the options open, market research companies ideally need the ability to deploy all three channels, switching between them as necessary in a mixed-mode project.
While a particular survey type is often a preferred choice for a specific market research project, there are often circumstances when the ability to switch modes is beneficial.
Because Online, CAPI and CATI channels are driven by different technical systems, switching between them is often not as simple as it needs to be. Making a survey available by all three systems typically requires duplication of set-up work and additional effort to consolidate the results. For some market research companies, this is a burden to far. For the sake of efficiency, they dedicate themselves to a single channel. Thereby cutting off the many opportunities which come with multi-channel capability.
Here at NIPO, we are all about empowering market research companies to perform better. So we decided to get a grip on the situation by developing Online, CATI and CAPI systems which are fully compatible with each other.
Using our Nfield Online, CATI and CAPI survey solutions, you only have to set up a survey once for it to automatically translate across all three channels. Each respondent’s answers can be accepted via any channel and results are automatically consolidated.
If you’re currently burdened with incompatible systems for multi-mode surveys, switching to Nfield will noticeably boost your productivity.
And if you’ve been limiting yourself to just one or two channels, Nfield provides an easy way to explore the opportunities multi-mode survey capability could bring to your business.
What’s more, because Nfield survey solutions are specifically designed to meet the needs of market research professionals, they’re sully equipped with everything from stunning survey design and advanced scripting options to elaborate sampling, quota handling and much more.
Feel free to contact us to discuss your requirements and ask anything you need to know about Nfield Online, CAPI and CATI.
In our documentation there is information about the NIPO CATI Client configuration, but in this news item you will find a quick overview on how to set up your CATI system in such a way that you can have your interviewers connecting from any location. Very useful if you want to give your interviewers the flexibility to work from home, or to give a partnering firm access to your CATI system so you can do projects together while working on the same server.
So, what are the steps to set up CATI@Home? To start with the obvious, your CATI@Home interviewers need an internet connection to be able to connect to the NIPO CATI Master. Since they will connect through the internet, the connection protocol for the NIPO CATI Client needs to be set to PureTcpIp. We advice you to place your CATI Master behind a firewall in which you open the specific port of the NIPO CATI Master. In a default configuration this port is 8001. The port the NIPO CATI Master is listening to can be changed from the CATI Manager › File › Configure › Master.
Settings on the CATI Master machine
Remote CATI Clients cannot simply connect to the CATI Master, but require additional verification in the CATI Master. The CATI Master will keep a list of so called StationKeys for which it will allow incoming remote connections. Connections are recognized as remote connections based on the IP addresses of NIPO CATI Master and NIPO CATI Client. The StationKey of the incoming connection needs to match a known StationKey value on the CATI Master.
In order to arrange this additional verification you will need to add some registry settings to the CATI Master. These registry settings are all stringvalues to be added under \HKLM\SOFTWARE\NIPO\CatiMaster
or in case of a 64 bit operating system under \HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\NIPO\CatiMaster
.
Add the following registry settings:
StationKeyDatabase=NipoFieldworkSystem
StationKeyTable=Interviewer
StationKeyTableKey=AuthenticationKey
StationKeyTableStation=AuthenticationStation
StationKeyTableStatus=AuthenticationStatus
StationKeyTableRemoteTelnr =RemoteTelnr
Restart the NIPO CATI/Web Master
After adding the registry settings and checking the port number of the NIPO CATI Master, you will need to restart the NIPO CATI/Web Master service to activate the new settings.
Prepare a remote CATI connection in NIPO FMS Client
Open the NIPO FMS Client and go the interviewer you want to enable to connect remotely. In the ‘Details’ view you may need to change the view to actually show the Authentication fields. Right-click on the page and from the popup dialog select ‘Fields…’ This brings up a dialog in which all fields of the interviewer table are shown, but only the ones ticked are shown on the interviewer’s ‘Details’ page. Make sure to tick the fields for AuthenticationKey (or the fieldname of the field you added to the Interviewer table), AuthenticationStation and AuthenticationStatus. And when a dialer is used tick RemoteTelnr as well. Then click ‘OK’ and the fields are shown on the interviewer’s Detail page.
Configure the remote CATI Client application
The remote CATI Client machine uses the normal CATI Client software with in addition the value of the StationKey. You have to define yourself what is the best way to get the software on the interviewer’s home computer; you could for instance prepare a client installation including the shortcut and make a self-extracting zip file and email/ftp that to your interviewers.
There are 2 ways you can specify the key on the NIPO CATI Client; either by adding a parameter to the shortcut: -KEY xxxxxx
, or by adding an entry Settings=xxxxxx
to the [OdQes] section of the niposys.ini file (where xxxxxx represents the actual AuthenticationKey as specified for the interviewer). Since this Key value can be a long string, it is preferred to add the settings=xxxxxx
to the niposys.ini file. Note when the key is used on the command line it should be present as the first argument.
The shortcut to the CATI Client then looks like this:"C:\your path here\OdQesu.exe" /N 100.100.100.100:8001 /P PureTcpIp
Of course, 100.100.100.100 should be the IP address of your NIPO CATI Master, and 8001 is the port number as defined above. And you may also use the other normal parameters like ? /SIZE
depending on your preference.
Test the connection
By itself, the above should enable access for the remote interviewer, so go ahead and try to connect. After successful contact to the CATI Master, check the interviewer details in the NIPO FMS Client, and you will see the computer name in the AuthenticationStation field. The workstation is now successfully configured for CATI@Home use!
Remark: Even though we use the interviewer table to store the StationKey values, there is no specific link between the interviewer number and the StationKey itself. Using the StationKey is only a control mechanism to determine if a certain remote NIPO CATI Client is allowed to connect or not. Once the connection is established, the interviewer could theoretically still logon with any interviewer number. It is however good practice to use StationKeys as described above, because each StationKey will then only be used by 1 interviewer which makes management of the StationKeys much easier.
Computer-assisted-telephone interviewing (CATI) guides the interviewer step-by-step through the questionnaire, dials telephone numbers according to a certain criteria set and analyzes processes in the background to enhance your cost and operations efficiency. Did you know that…
Until the 1970s telephone data collection relied on the use of paper questionnaires, which were administered by interviewers over the telephone. The data from the paper questionnaires then had to be manually edited, keyed, and processed before results could be distributed.
As computers advanced, becoming smaller and more powerful, the concept of utilizing them to conduct surveys was pursued. From simple solutions with basic options, CATI soon evolved into complex engines, and NIPO is proud to own one of the most proven and renowned CATI solutions on the market today.
When selecting a software solution, there are two options for conducting your telephone research: on premise or cloud CATI solutions. NIPO offers both options so you can choose the one that suits you best.
Our CATI solutions power the largest telephone surveys in the world. Amongst market researchers, it’s wildly accepted as a reliable and robust telephone data collection platform. Our Sales Team are keen to work with you to understand your needs and assess what solution would work best for you.
The key features of our CATI are:
Even more, our CATI solutions offer advanced capabilities such as auto, progressive and predictive dialing to help you drive productivity.
A webinar about working with the NIPO DSC for IBM SPSS. With the NIPO DSC you can open NIPO Software data directly in SPSS. There is no need to convert the data. With the NIPO DSC you can run your data processing and analytical processes completely in IBM SPSS, even though the data is collected using NIPO Software’s technology.
Request a demo to see how NIPO can help you meet your requirements with our smart survey solutions.