Cint Quality Charter

The Cint platform and its products comply with ESOMAR, MRS, ARF, MRIA, AMA, AMSRO and Insights Association standards. Cint also complies with ISO 20252 and is certified in Australia.

Our commitment to quality

Cint quality charter
Cint ranks quality as a top business priority as the world’s leading insight platform. Cint has invested in a Quality Charter consisting of a dedicated team focused on further expansion of Cint’s Quality Processes, Proprietary Technology, Technology Partnerships, and Product Road Map to confirm Cint as an industry leader for Quality.

Industry bodies
Cint takes quality very seriously and complies fully with ESOMAR, MRS, Insights Association, ARF, MRIA, AMA and AMSRO standards often going above and beyond standard requirements.

Data privacy
Being a European based business Cint has followed data privacy guidelines from the start and are fully GDPR compliant. Consumer permissions are core to our business model and fully controlled by Cint’s Permissions Engine.

Transparency
Transparency is at the centre of Cint’s technology. All clients get full and direct access to information about supply sources to allow them the ability to monitor and evaluate their recruitment source quality.

Fraud and quality checks at multiple instances

Registration
We apply a combination of proprietary Cint Fraud Detection Services and industry-standard 3rd party solutions – including GEO IP check and CAPTCHA – to ensure data quality is kept to optimum standards.

Sampling and survey
Deduplication through proprietary Cint Unique Respondent solution as well as Imperium RelaventID and Maxmind Minfraud. (Address verification and exclusion from banned database).

Rewarding
Running Cint proprietary Cint Fraud Detection Service before panellists are rewarded.

Proprietary technology

Cint Unique Respondent
Proprietary deduping solution.

Cint Fraud Detection Service
Proprietary solution to score and detect fraudulent behaviour among panellist through analysing data points, behaviour and patterns including speeding and straight-lining.

Customer Feedback
Real-time and post-survey feedback from customer data collection to feed into automated panel cleansing and self-learning Cint Fraud Detection Service.

Banned Database
Database for banned panellists containing identifiers for future automatic blocking.

Automatic detection of anomalies
Systematic detection and removal of fraudulent panellists

Unique Survey URLs and Secure API transactions with 3rd parties

3rd party solutions

  • Imperium (Relevant ID)
  • MaxMind (minFraud, VPN/Proxy Detection, Geo-IP Verification)
  • Firehol (IP database)
  • Apility (Email scoring)
  • Google (reCAPTCHA)
  • SmartyStreets (Address verification)

Cint supply quality

All Cint’s supply panels are carefully reviewed and vetted before entering a partnership to ensure they meet specific contractual requirements that are essential for sample and research quality. 

These include:

  • Compliance with ISO 20252 and ISO 26362 quality requirements including panel operation, maintenance and hygiene requirements.
  • Compliance with all applicable industry codes of practice, including but not limited to ESOMAR and Insight Association.
  • Exclusion (removal of specific supply / remove specific panellists in case of issues)
  • Defined/standardised incentive requirements
  • Defined/standardised survey invitations

Quality and anti-fraud measures taken by Customer and Partner Success teams

Partner Success
Cint has a dedicated Partner Success team that works with suppliers to assure the highest level of quality from suppliers in the Cint Insights Exchange.

Partner Cooperation
Continuous follow up with suppliers which are over-represented in bad quality or fraud activity reports. Share of best practice in recruitment and fraud detection where suppliers can be excluded or put in quarantine until issues are resolved.

Partner Monitoring
Cint’s Partner Success teams monitor the performance of supply sources daily. Conduct further investigations at both panellists and panel level to determine current settings and security processes and any trends and performance patters. A panel can be put on hold until any data quality issues are resolved, or to choose permanently to remove them from the Cint Insights Exchange.

Client Cooperation
Cint does not host any surveys. We work diligently with our clients to ensure surveys get deployed after the appropriate engagement and validation checks. These include analysis of questionnaire completion time, data outliers, unanswered questions, straight-lining, red-herring questions, and report any quality concerns in real-time to Cint to learn and improve Cints automatic detection services.

Other quality and standards

Survey control checklists

  • correct implementation of re-directs
  • appropriate logic in the survey
  • correct set up of quotas
  • whether or not there is any personal, sensitive or illegal questions being asked
  • whether or not panellists can choose a ‘prefer not to answer’ option with any income or ethnicity questions
  • overall general quality before proceeding with fieldwork.

If any of these points are not in compliance with Cint’s quality standards, the survey is not launched.

Panellist rating by activity
All panellists are scored by their level of survey activity. If a score drops to a certain agreed level, panel owners can use this scoring system to automatically clean their panels.

Automatic housekeeping
Panellists are automatically removed from panels in Cint platform when their email address is proven invalid.

Random and stratified sampling
Within the required targets, sample is randomly generated as well as being stratified by high, medium and low responders.

Frequency of invitations to surveys
All panels in the Cint platform are given the option of deciding how often they want their panellists to receive survey invitations. The default number of days set is 10, however, panel owners or panellists can change this to be lower or higher.

Exclusion management
When sending sample to studies, panellists can be excluded on projects and specific statuses.

Refusal of panel abusers
Unique identification data is required in the validation process as well as to redeem incentives such as: ID number, home address and bank details.

Panel blending
Sample can be drawn from multiple panels simultaneously to reach hard-to-find target groups and eliminate source bias. This allows users to benefit from selecting sample generated by different recruitment methods, from CATI recruited panels to panels built from natural online communities, where members have a relationship with the panel owner’s brand.

Panellist survey rating
Panellists have the ability to rate each survey on length, language and logic as well as other errors in surveys. This feedback can help buyers to improve the quality of their surveys.

All surveys run in our system require a soft launch to obtain 10% of the overall sample size. This serves as an extra check to ensure any errors are detected before fully launching.

Maximum limits on survey lengths
Cint believes that the length of survey has a reciprocal relationship with the quality of data. Therefore, a longer survey may illicit lower quality results. Having stated this, Cint does not allow surveys over 35 minutes in Cint platform without the written approval from independent panel owners.

Performance and security
We strive to always produce the most advanced technology in terms of performance and security. If you have specific questions, please direct them to learnmore@cint.com. We would love to be of service!

Panellist quality control process
The Cint Platform takes special care to check every link for topic, content, language, length and logic before the initial launch. In addition to this, we have some of the strictest panel quarantine procedures in the industry. Our security measures and quality assurance efforts eradicate the common problems associated with sampling.

See our Platform Features to learn more about the technology behind these quality processes.

  • At registration
    Cint hosted registration pages can make use of Geo-IP verification technology to ensure that the registrant is located in the panel’s stated country. Captchas can be employed to stop automated (non-human) registrations.
  • When sampling
    When selecting panellists to invite to a project (sampling), panellists cannot be invited more than once to the same survey, and any other panellist using the same email address for more than one panellist account is also excluded from sampling. There is also the option to exclude panellists that have previously participated in other projects.
  • At survey start
    Cint tracks the status of each respondent, i.e. unique panellist invited to a specific project. Respondents can only start a survey if their status indicates that they have not previously responded or, if they have responded, have not completed or have been ‘terminated’ for some reason. Further, Cint relies on two de-duping technologies, ‘Cint Unique Respondent’ and ‘Relevant-Id’ which can determine if a respondent has started the survey before. Cint also has the ability to apply Geo-IP validation on survey start to ensure the respondent is located in the panel’s stated country when responding.
  • In survey
    Cint provides end-points (redirect URLs) that the client can use for terminating respondents that don’t provide quality responses (e.g. straight-liners).
  • At survey finish
    Upon reaching a survey end-point (Cint redirect URL), responses are checked for duplicate completes while ‘Speeders’ and fraudsters are automatically detected and tracked (as suspicious).
  • At reconciliation/project closing
    As each respondent is associated with a unique identifier it is possible to compare IDs between the Cint platform and the client. Any suspicious responses can then be investigated and, when required, excluded from the complete count to be marked as a bad response in Cint’s records.
  • Panel care
    Cint uses respondent records to regularly identify and remove/disqualify fraudulent panellists from the platform