ESA maintains a pool of over 2,000 retail specialist field workers and supervisors, who conduct interviews, mystery visits, store audits, price checks and other activities with coverage across the whole of the UK and Ireland.  Paper, hand-held and on-line collection methodologies are supported, and we have over 400 hand-held data collection units in field at any one time.

Our teams are comfortable operating in the retail environment, whether it be undercover or with store permissions.  To enable us to turn research studies around with maximum speed and efficiency, we have researchers in every region who are experienced in one of three core skill sets: Interviewing, Price & Data Collection and Mystery Shopping.

Field operations are managed by 15 full time staff, with approximately half of these based at our head office in St Albans, and the other half located regionally to ensure local knowledge is maintained and that ESA is represented at that local level.

All field activities are carried out in accordance with strict industry guidelines.  We have a comprehensive regime of quality checks and performance management in place to ensure the highest levels of accuracy and reliability are achieved in our collection of data.