From creating and maintaining interactive client research initiatives, to tracking reward point earnings to facilitating decision making, and much, much more, our Information Technology staff have years of experience developing internet based business applications as well as supporting them from both a technical and human side. While we are a technology-intensive organization, our judicious use of technology is a key ingredient in the success and cost-effectiveness of our myriad of programs. A few examples of information processing "systems" corresponding to our various business units:

"CARE"

Our Customer Assessment Reporting Engine allows clients to implement customer service (and other audit/inspection) performance monitoring programs quickly and easily via our unlimited collection of options. This web-enabled solution is flexible and easily adapted to related employee incentive or other customer/employee program needs.

This high-tech researcher and process management system was developed in house by drawing on 30 years of incremental changes and considerations in customer assessment. It was developed to orchestrate quality visits, timely feedback, seamless coordination, and insightful results for national and multi-national mystery shopping programs. It conducts all aspects of mystery shopping, from global screening and selecting virtual customers to powerful reporting at the local, national, and global levels.

CARE enables real-time, company-wide distribution and management of communications, training, assessments, surveys, and learning materials to a widely dispersed workforce, all via the World Wide Web. This can be done as a stand-alone program, or can be implemented in conjunction with employee feedback programs, or other employee and customer support systems.

"OpinionWeb"

Setup in minutes, this easy online survey collection, tracking, and analysis tool allows clients to fully administer a customer or employee survey without the involvement or costs of the more traditional mystery shopping and other assessment tools.

Employee "Monitors"

Whether checking out a person's background through our network of partners, collecting employee satisfaction surveys using online systems, or interviewing employees upon exit, quantitative facts as well as anecdotal and narrative information is collected and managed using web-based content management and project management applications.

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Are you worried about compatibility between a new research project and your internal data systems, legacy programs or other related data processing systems? Have no fear, we are well versed in the substantial differences in data "flavors" and have the ability to both accept (input) and deliver (output) raw and compiled data in any format (proprietary or low-level) to assure seamless integration with related data sources.

Two ways of sharing data between organizations:

    Direct Data Connection:
Our enterprise level MS SQL-Server 2000 can be directly linked to remote data stores for input, manipulation, and extraction of data through standard SQL requests. This enterprise level database is designed specifically to handle diverse distributed system architectures, and excels at subtle data integration issues resulting from sharing data across organizations.

    Data Acquisition/Sharing Through File Transfer:
We are equally capable of accepting, incorporating, or exporting data through incremental file transfer to communicate between two or more diverse systems. Data can be "sent" or "received" in incremental updates, with an agreed upon frequency for updates to guarantee data freshness. File transfers methods include (but are not limited to) FTP, email, and digital hard-copy (cd-rom,zip and floppy). The "flavor" (import & export) of the data is equally flexible and includes - delimited text files, excel or other spreadsheet formats, MS Access, DBase, or any other data "dump" method used in the enterprise management industry.

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In order to take full advantage of the benefits provided by the Web you need a trusted research partner … a partner who brings the right combination of research expertise and innovative use of Web-based technology.

NSS provides insightful guidance on the design and implementation of your Web-based research project. It goes beyond a simple understanding of the technology, to a comprehensive research-oriented approach to your specific information gathering needs.

FEATURES:

NSS can provide a service few others can - full-service data collection, web reporting, and project management. We are a research industry leader in project management services, setting us apart from traditional data collection organizations. A dedicated account manager and web site provide a single-source solution to ensure worry-free coordination of your study. We can coordinate all the pricing, scheduling, fielding, reporting, and data processing that a successful research study requires.

For worry free data storage and processing, here are just some of our guarantees:

• Speed of Access - We are connected to one of the fastest and most reliable Internet backbones in the industry.
  
  
• Reliable Internet Connections - NSS utilizes a back-up DS-1 connection that provides automatic failover in the event our primary server were to lose service.
  
  
• Security - By running an IIS server using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption, all sensitive data that is transmitted will have restricted access.
  
  
• Traffic and Scalability - Since NSS Web servers are proactively monitored for server utilization, security intrusion, and performance, they can be scaled and safeguarded before any problems or other interruptions can occur.
  
  
• Back-Up and Disaster Recovery - NSS IT staff performs daily back-ups of all web server data, with off-site recovery storage.
  
  
• 24/7 Server Monitoring and Availability - The NSS data, site maintenance, and other support centers are staffed and operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Why are these features important?
You want to ensure that the user experience is pleasant (no long delays or crashes) and that your information is secure. Few suppliers of Internet research applications provide the same level of sophistication and security as NSS.

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