ACCORD Research Consultancy Ltd: Privacy Policy

About Us

ACCORD Research Consultancy Ltd is a market research agency utilising multiple research techniques to obtain insight and opinion from you and then use it to create recommendations to our clients. Our registered office is 21 Ventnor Avenue, Stanmore, Middlesex HA7 2HX and our company registration number is 4421613.

 

Privacy Statement

Your privacy is extremely important to us. We go to great lengths to preserve your privacy and protect the personal data used in our processing activities. This Privacy Policy describes how we collect, use and share information, and what choices you have with respect to any information we may hold about you.

We are committed to meeting the requirements of all applicable data protection legislation and requirements, including the following laws, codes and standards:

  • The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
  • UK Data Protection Act 2018
  • Market Research Society’s (MRS) Code of Conduct
  • Our data Protection Officer (DPO)

Any information that you supply to ACCORD Research is used solely for legitimate market research or statistical purposes and will never result in an attempt to sell you anything based on your responses.

Our Data Protection Officer (DPO)

If you would like to receive any further information regarding this Privacy Policy or would like to submit a Subject Access Request please contact our DPO

Email: DPO@accordresearch.co.uk

Data Protection Officer
ACCORD Research Consultancy Ltd

21 Ventnor Avenue
Stanmore
HA7 2HX

Types of personal data we may collect from you

During the course of a market research study we may process the following information about you:

  • Full name
  • Phone number
  • Email address
  • Postal address
  • Potentially bank details (if your incentive is paid with BACS)
  • Other demographic information such as profession and age
  • Product information you may have with one of our clients
  • Your opinions
  • Photos of you
  • Audio and video recordings of the market research sessions
  • We may also collect your IP address and which type of web browser you are using if you participate in an online market research survey

If there is a requirement to collect and process sensitive personal data (such as gender, ethnicity, political opinions, religious beliefs, trade union activities, physical or mental health or sexual life) we will obtain your explicit consent and provide a full description of how it will be used and where it will be located.

How we collect it

Depending on the project, ACCORD Research will obtain contact details in a number of ways. These include:

  • From one of our clients, who you are a customer of or have had contact with in the past
  • From a research panel that you have signed up to in the past and for which you have consented your personal information to be used for invitations to future market research studies
  • From one of our third parties who have previously made contact to invite you to conduct market research activities.
  • From the Contact Us form on our website
  • From information that is publicly available

ACCORD Research sometimes obtains contact details from its clients, usually where you have had some contact with them previously and they are seeking feedback on a service they provide to you.

If your contact details have been provided to us by one of our clients, or you have been routed to our panel participation form, you will either have agreed to this when you gave them your contact details (consent) or they should have informed you that your information may be passed to third party research company such as ACCORD Research. In this case the lawful basis used for the information provided to us is either explicit consent, or under our client’s legitimate interests to conduct the research, or where they are a public authority, and that it is necessary to share the information in order to conduct the research task in the public interest.

Our clients will sometimes give us additional information about you, along with your contact details, but this will only be information needed for conducting or reporting the research. We will not seek to pass back any information which could identify you without your explicit consent, unless you are otherwise informed during the course of the research.

We may have also received your information from a third party you have previously been in contact with and with whom you have actively agreed that they may pass your contact details on to market research companies like ACCORD Research. If this is the case, we will let you know how and where your personal data will be used during and shortly after the research. We will then request consent to participate from you before the research starts.

We want to make sure that you are happy for us to use your information for market research purposes. If you think that your details should not have been passed to us, please inform us by DPO@accordresearch.co.uk so that we can raise the concern with the organisation that provided us with your contact details.

How it is used

Your personal data is used by us to assist in our market research activities. These activities include:

  • Contacting you to invite you to participate in a market research survey
  • Attendance checking and coordination activities during face-to-face research interview sessions or internal quality control purposes
  • Recording your research responses as either audio / video files or as text files, depending on the research methodology used.
  • Sharing with carefully selected third party vendors to conduct additional processing activities relating only to the research survey you have participated in
  • Reviewing your research responses in combination with the responses obtained from others in order to identify trends and key messages
  • Feed back to our client anonymised findings we believe to be of interest to them

At the start of these activities, you may be asked for consent to an audio recording of the session being made. The recording is simply to enable our researchers to more easily and accurately report on the findings of the session. These recordings are typically kept for 12 months after the end of the research study, or longer in certain circumstances (in which case you will be advised of the actual period during the interview or discussion group), but they will be deleted after this time.

In obtaining your cooperation, we will not mislead you about the nature of the research or the use that will be made of the findings.

We will not send you unsolicited email or pass on your email address(es) to others for this purpose. If we want to send you future email or contact you using other methods, we will ask your explicit permission for this.

How long we keep it for

Unless a longer retention period is required by our client, or by law, we will only hold your personal information on our systems for the period necessary to fulfil the purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy or until you request it is deleted.

Most personal information held about you by us in order to conduct our market research activities will be retained for 12 months after the completion of the work. This is to ensure we can respond to any validation requests from our clients or otherwise complete the provision of our services to our clients.

All information is securely deleted as soon as the retention period has been met.

The only personal data belonging to you that is not deleted after 12 months is your name and date of attendance which is securely stored in a separate database for a further 2 years. This is for legitimate internal quality control purposes.

We need to keep any signatures your provide against the receipt of monetary incentives for seven years to meet statutory requirements.

How we secure it

At ACCORD Research we make best efforts to ensure your personal data is protected at rest and in transit throughout its lifecycle (from creation, processing, sharing, through to deletion). Your personal contact data is saved in files that are permanently password protected.

All video and audio footage is kept on encrypted hard drives . If we need to share audio or video footage with a third party we use carefully selected file transfer services that provide end-to-end encryption.

Your rights explained

At any point while we are in possession of or processing your personal data, you, the data subject, have the following rights:

  • Right of access: you have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you.
  • Right of rectification: you have a right to correct data that we hold about you that is inaccurate or incomplete.
  • Right to be forgotten: in certain circumstances you can ask for the data we hold about you to be erased from our records.
  • Right to restriction of processing: where certain conditions apply to have a right to restrict the processing.
  • Right to object: you have the right to object to certain types of processing such as direct marketing.
  • Right to judicial review: in the event that we refuse your request under rights of access, we will provide you with a reason as to why. You have the right to complain as outlined below.

Please contact our DPO (DPO@accordresearch.co.uk) if you would like to exercise any of these rights.

In some cases, we will be acting as Joint Data Controller of your personal data along with our client, who would have provided us with your contact details to conduct the research. In such cases we will provide you details of our data protection policy and contact details for our Data Protection Officer should you have any queries. If you would like to update any of your information we will ensure that all other Data Controllers are notified.

Review of this Policy

We keep this Policy under regular review. This Policy was last updated in September 2025.