Data comes in two flavours qualitative and quantitative. A holistic data service takes responsibility for collecting both qualitative and quantitative data. Exploratory research is the fundamental basis of qualitative data. It helps in comprehending the underlying reasons, opinions, and motivations. It provides us with a deep insight into human problems or business problems and helps companies develop ideas or hypotheses for potential fruitful outcome.

Qualitative data collection services aim to uncover trends in thought and opinions and delve into complex problems with challenging outcomes. The techniques that usually employs are unstructured or semi-structured techniques.

Examples of such techniques include focus groups (group discussions), individual interviews, and participation/observations. It is not uncommon for qualitative data collection to have a very small sample size.
Quantitative data collection helps to quantify the problem through numbers and statistics.

The metrics are usable and primarily used quantify attitudes, opinions, behaviours, and other defined variables. For quantitative data collection services to reach fruition the sample size must be large. Such data collection relies on facts and uncovers patterns in the data collected to form a formula and reach decisive conclusions.

Quantitative data collection services are more structured and rely on various forms of surveys – online surveys, paper surveys, kiosk surveys, mobile surveys telephone interviews, face-to-face interviews, online polls, website interceptors, and systematic observations.

Data collection service providers must be thoroughly aware of the differences between qualitative research and quantitative research methods.  These two tools are comprehensive but cannot be used interchangeably. Qualitative and quantitative data collection services providers use a plethora of effective software, especially where structured techniques such as large numbers of respondents and descriptive findings are required.