We know, we know. Switching market research platforms is not a typical case, but it happens in our industry. The reasons can be many; let’s list just a few of them here:

• Quality of the provided services. Of course, this is one of the leading reasons for switching services in general. No matter where the process gets broken – survey programming, system stability, respondent gathering, data collection, and processing – anything matters.
• Hard to customize and provide a required level of user experience. Some of the industry tools for online market research are quite outdated. They are crippling the user experience and flow, which might be crucial for the accuracy of the data collected.
• Lack of or poor mobile experience. This experience relates to the above point but in a different matter. The users prefer their mobile devices to fill surveys, and this is a persistent trend to stay. Some platforms cannot adapt fast enough with their mobile surveys, which opens the market to new, light, and easy to use mobile-friendly tools.
• Sample acquisition. The battle for a quality respondent sample is evergoing. Some big players on the market research scene have built their integrated panels, and this another reason for switching.
• Security and privacy. The recent years with the GDPR and CCPA gaining traction, the privacy and the protection of the users have become an essential factor for staying with or switching service.

No matter the reason, there are always several pain-points throughout the re-integration with the new platform when switching services. In market research, especially when talking about international surveys, one of the complications is the migration of survey translations between two platforms.

The problem with survey translations

The questions and the responses are the same for both platforms, but the way the survey is coded, the question and response labels, and the logic would be different. Although the export of the survey texts and translations from the old platform should not be an issue, merging the new platform’s data is. The particular languages often follow a different logic, and some have even specific question IDs reserved for their purpose. When handling such situations with .xls files, the work is manual and time-consuming, especially if the foreign languages are not known or familiar. The human error rate is high and often results in re-doing and re-uploading the language. It feels like being lost in space.

Ok, what’s the solution?

As a company that works with Forsta Surveys™ as a survey provider, we often receive requests from new or existing customers to migrate their survey data from an external platform into Forsta Surveys™. 

We have solved this issue by developing a tool that allows handling survey translations in a more centralized and automated way: our Translation Engine. Along with the other features it has, the automatic translation, the per-customer database, and the Forsta Surveys™ API integration makes this process a breeze. All you need to do is link your Forsta Surveys™ API key and location, then import the survey language pairs into your system. When you have re-built the English version into Forsta Surveys™, you can pull the language versions properly as these are already present in your customer database. And you match not IDs but survey strings! 

If you’re curious about how you can do this for your surveys, even the platforms you’re migrating between are not Forsta Surveys™, do not hesitate to get back to us here. We have a built-in process for extending supported APIs and would be glad to explore the options to help you.