Give researchers their week back
Ask any researcher where their week goes and “research” is the rare answer. The week goes to programming a questionnaire someone wrote, clicking through every path to confirm a skip works after a stakeholder edit, rebuilding quotas in a second tool, and reformatting a spreadsheet so the data lands where it belongs. The thinking that clients pay for happens in the gaps.
We built the Flashpoint.AI survey builder to take that work off the researcher's plate. It is shaped by the people who do survey research for a living — agency methodologists, and a professional survey programming shop that put the platform through the wringer and handed us a list of everything they needed to move their business over. We built all of it.
The result is a platform that runs your current process at a faster pace. Write the survey your way, hand the platform the busywork, and spend the reclaimed time on design, interpretation, and the client.
Where the week goes
A typical survey cycle has five steps: draft the questionnaire, program it, QA every path, set up quotas and fielding, and export and reformat the data. For our clients that cycle took the better part of a week. On Flashpoint.AI it takes two days, and the savings come from the middle three steps.
Programming used to mean handing a questionnaire to someone else and waiting. The platform does it in minutes. Upload a Word doc or XLS of an existing questionnaire and the platform programs it — hidden variables, terminates, block looping, and reCAPTCHA included. Our lead survey engineer uploaded nine client questionnaires, went out for coffee, and came back to nine programmed surveys. Every logic and validation feature is available both as a point-and-click setting and in a full XML editor, so the researcher who wants to click and the programmer who wants to script are working on the same survey, not two versions of it.
QA used to mean clicking through a hundred-question instrument by hand after every edit, and reconciling a client's Word-document comments against the live survey. The survey proves itself. The platform explores every combination of answers the logic reads and reports how many paths exist, which ones complete, and which questions no path reaches — before a real respondent hits any of it. Clients review on a no-login link, and their comments land on the exact page and answer they were looking at.
Delivery used to mean an export that locked you into one tool, or a set of rules that broke the moment someone edited a list. Flashpoint.AI deletes none of your logic, no matter what you edit. Everything exports in any format you need: the questionnaire, the program, the data. You program and field for free; your only charge comes when real people are in the survey.
Over the next few weeks, we'll show each of these pieces in more depth. This post is the why. The rest of the series is the how.
Every hour the platform takes back from programming, QA, and reformatting is an hour a researcher spends being a researcher. Upload your last questionnaire and see what comes back.