Cint Quality Charter

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