In order to survive in business, every company needs to know what their customers think of their products and services.

A useful way to ask customers what they think is to ask them all, or a selection or sample, by way of a customer survey. As an operational business though, what do you do with the mountains of replies you should expect to receive back?

We are ideal to use as an outsourcing agency as we offer a full range of services including the design and printing of your survey, fulfillment, distribution, prepaid response services, scanning, and providing custom results as charts, tables and reports in any format you require.

From the whole range of services we provide you can pick the ones you need for your project. If you have in-house skills to analyse the data, we will send you the raw data. If you have the data already but want someone to make sense of it all, then we can do just that. If you have a preferred printer, we'll send them the artwork if we have designed the questionnaire for you. If you have mountains of blank surveys you've used before in previous surveys, we will work with them.

The majority of the contracts we have won are price driven, and we are continually striving for new and innovative ways to provide cost effective solutions.

We process and manage many different types of staff surveys, ranging from 200 questionnaires to 200,000. Each project has started with a discovery; usually a telephone call or email stating your requirements and our potential to meet what you need. We will offer help and advice - where it's wanted - on any aspect of your project including the content of your questionnaires, the design of the questionnaires, Data Protection Act issues, data analysis tools, buying third party software through to secure storage or destroying of documents and document image management.

Scancapture is capable of processing thousands of documents every day, 7 days a week. We use a networked system of high speed document scanners and various OMR (Optical Mark Reading), OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) software programs to read the data from your surveys.

Our scanners have optical doubles detection facilities, which means that we will catch any form which goes through the scanner as a double feed, so we'll never miss a survey while processing at high speed.

ICR software is capable of reading hand printed alpha and numeric data, such as a name, address and phone number, or images such as a signature or diagram, as well as common tick boxes. Data is automatically updated into your database, or we can create a database or spreadsheet for you.

Using scanning technology means we reduce keying in considerably, thereby reducing staff costs and increasing the speed of results. Data can be saved as any of the Microsoft Office suite, such as Excel or Access, csv files, or many complex data formats.

Are you getting all ticks from your customers? If you are planning a customer survey in the near future we recommend you read through some of our case studies to get a few ideas.