Market Facts/Harris Interactive/NFO Research Adopt Verbastat

Leading market research firms including Market Facts, Harris Interactive and NFO Research have selected Verbastat from SPSS to handle the coding of open-ended survey questions. Verbastat offers a new way to manipulate verbatim answers, allowing researchers to import, classify and export responses to open-ended questions quickly, efficiently and reliably. Agencies that have traditionally coded open-ended responses manually, question by question--an expensive and time-consuming process--now perform the same job in less time and for less money with Verbastat.

"The selection of Verbastat by these companies demonstrates the success SPSS MR is having in offering solutions that our clients really need," said Dean Wilson, customer service executive. "With our survey design, data collection, coding and analysis tools, market researchers can deliver accurate, relevant consumer information to their customers more efficiently and, as a result, increase their profitability."

Laresha Wideman, data services coding manager for Market Facts, said she was impressed with the results of an implementation test of Verbastat she ran in April. "We used Verbastat to code a survey that included very lengthy and complicated open-ended responses and which had already been coded using our own in-house software. This test showed significant cost and time savings over the system we are using now. Based on these results, we will have 10 pilot Verbastat stations in place this month and ultimately plan on using Verbastat throughout the company."

Harris Interactive's Service Bureau, which provides Internet-based market research services to meet the needs of other market research firms, has been using Verbastat company-wide for one year. "Clients want to see results from Web-based surveys very quickly," said Julie Isbit, vice president of Harris Interactive's Service Bureau. "and Verbastat helps us to meet this demand for speed. Its ability to save coding instructions and automatically apply them as additional data feeds come in speeds up the entire coding process. Verbastat is more efficient at handling short text responses than any other product I've seen."

Verbastat addresses an issue many market researchers don't know there is a solution for. "All our other production areas use software packages that let them do their jobs quickly and efficiently," said Carol Birman, director of data production for NFO Research Inc. "But the coding of open ended questions, which was done by our coding and coding design departments, remained a time-consuming, hands-on process. We weren't even looking for a software solution to help us code open-ended questions efficiently because we didn't believe that one existed."

Today, all of the code designers at NFO Research use Verbastat to create and export open-ended data files. Birman said, "Everything that code designers need is now on the screen in front of them. There's no more sorting through documents. At the end of a telephone survey project, we generally have the information available within hours, while before it might have taken a couple of days."

About SPSS MR

Businesses of all sizes drive their success using SPSS MR software and expertise for data collection, data management and insightful analysis and reporting. With a background in market research and business intelligence, SPSS MR offers an extensive technology suite with unrivaled breadth and depth proven consulting skills and a truly global service through our international network of offices.

About SPSS Inc

SPSS Inc enables organizations to develop more profitable customer relationships by providing analytical solutions that discover what customers want and predict what they will do. The company delivers analytical solutions at the intersection of customer relationship management and business intelligence. SPSS analytical solutions integrate and analyze market, customer and operational data in key vertical markets worldwide including: telecommunications, health care, banking, finance, insurance, manufacturing, retail, consumer packaged goods, market research and the public sector.

Headquartered in Chicago, SPSS has more than 40 offices, over 900 employees and 1999 revenues of $142 million. The company also has won the following awards: No. 70 on Forbes 1999 list of the "200 best small companies" and as the 22nd most profitable company on the Nasdaq exchange by Equities magazine; 1999 World Class Solution award in business intelligence and named "best decision support system for business intelligence" in the 1999 RealWare award competition; No. 14 in DM Review's 1999 Data Warehouse Top 100; placed No. 16 on the 2000 Soft-letter 100, a ranking of the top 100 personal computer software companies in the United States; and No. 115 in the 2000 Software 500, a ranking of the world's largest software vendors by Software Magazine. For more information, visit www.spss.com.

Contact SPSS Inc, Susan Kalell or Matthew Martin, 800-525-4980, pr@spss.com.