This article is taken from the October 2011 edition of the RMS Newsletter. Customers have always been the backbone of any successful business. Therefore, it makes sense that a business should ensure its customers’ happiness. After all, happy customers supply repeat business, greater opportunities for cross and up-selling, word of mouth recommendations, as well as Read more

The RMS Bunker Blog was recently added to the Market Research Blogs page on Quirk’s.com.  Quirk’s has always been a favorite source for us Bunker authors.  A quick visit to Quirk’s.com or a flip through their magazine is a sure-fire way to spark ideas for future blog posts.  The market research blogs webpage offers a comprehensive list Read more

I recently came across an article in the latest edition of Quirk’s titled “A Systematic Method for Checking Online Questionnaires” written by Jerry Arbittier of SurveyHealthCare.  Read it here.  He discussed the importance of testing your online survey before launch, which we have covered before here in the Bunker with this post.  The article offers six quality Read more

When it comes to improving your HCAHPS® scores, you may not know where to start.  Or maybe you are a hospital who scores very well in specific survey composites such as Responsiveness of Hospital Staff or Nurse Communications but you cannot figure out why your recent discharges rate your Doctor Communications so low.  Or perhaps you Read more

Environmental Scanning – it sounds like some form of new Green technology, but really it’s just a fancy term for something that all organizations need to do: taking a look at the environment in which they do business and using the information to shape future decisions. All market research is a form of environmental scanning, Read more

Here in the Bunker, the RMS Analytics team has worked on a number of different market research projects for our higher education clients.  The types of market research for our higher education clients spans  both qualitative and quantitative – from focus groups to demand modeling.  This is a marketing piece that RMS put together related to Read more

Polls are constantly in the news these days. You can rarely scan the day’s headlines without finding a reference to the President’s approval rating, or the results of some other news poll about a current issue. And, of course, sports and entertainment websites are littered with unscientific reader polls, that usually consist of a single question Read more

In the market research industry data quality is everything.  Data quality needs to be a top priority – everything relies on it.  Putting your energy into monitoring the quality of your data will help ensure the quality of your results, quality findings, and quality recommendations.  In previous blog posts we’ve talked about things such as pre-testing, Read more

Did you know that CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) allows hospitals to change their approved HCAHPS® survey vendor on a quarterly basis?  That means you can select a new HCAHPS® vendor at four different times during the calendar year.  This depends on the current contract you have with your vendor, but if you Read more

I have a confession to make: I’ve been obsessively following the recent story about NCAA athletic conference realignment, hanging on all the details, developments, and speculation the same way a lot of people did with the Casey Anthony trial or Charlie Sheen’s public meltdown earlier this year. A lot of that is because Syracuse, my Read more