From Manual Coding to Modern Insights at the Largest Mexican Research Agency 

Rafael Conde, Insights & Innovation Lead @ De la Riva Group

De la Riva is one of Mexico’s most respected market research agencies with a 30-year  history  combining deep qualitative expertise with modern quantitative capabilities. With over 100 employees and three specialized business units (Qualitative Hub, Auditor Service, and Lemon Ice for quantitative analyses), the company supports some of the region’s biggest brands across consumer goods, private and government clients. 

Within the Lemon Ice quantitative division, De la Riva is known for delivering rigorous analysis at scale. But with growing project volumes and rising expectations for speed, the team needed a smarter way to handle open-ended responses.  

Highlights 

• 150–200 projects coded per year with Caplena 

• Instant insights with high-quality, AI-driven coding 

• Time reduced from 2–3 days → just a few hours per project 

• 20-30% lower cost per verbatim 

• 25,000 USD annual savings by eliminating outsourcing 

• Beyond cost savings, significant upgrade in analytical depth, enabling more modern reporting, chat exploration and advanced segmentation 

The Challenge 

With over 10 years of account management experience under his belt, Rafael Conde took the lead on innovation, with the goal of automating quantitative research workflows. After adopting Quantilope to streamline the programming of questionnaires, the next challenge for the Lemon Ice team was coding.  
 
Coding open-ended responses had become a bottleneck. 

For every quantitative project, Lemon Ice planned 2–3 full days solely for manual coding. When workload piled up, the team had to outsource. That’s an expensive, slow, and rigid process. Their coding specialist was overloaded, while the rest of the organization struggled to adopt consistent practices. 

Despite being Mexico’s largest local agency, the team felt stuck behind manual processes while global competitors were moving faster. 

Meanwhile, customers increasingly expected: 

• Shorter turnaround times 

• Richer insights 

• More segmentation 

Lemon Ice needed something that could scale without sacrificing quality, and ideally, elevate their analytical capabilities. 

Transition to Caplena 

While evaluating next generation coding solutions, Lemon Ice explored various options. But none offered the automation, Spanish language coverage, or ease of use the team needed. 

Caplena stood out immediately.  

"

The quality of the analysis we get from the very first minute is extremely high. And now you can talk to your data. It takes us to the level the big players are working on.”

Rafael Conde

Insights & Innovation Lead

Rafael assembled a test team of young analysts with no prior research experience. Within days, they were producing accurate codebooks, proof that Caplena could democratize open-end analysis across the company. 

Caplena’s support team was also key in time-to-value through being responsive to the needs of Lemon Ice: 

• Clear video walkthroughs 

• Spanish-language guidance  

• Fast, precise troubleshooting 

The implementation was “smooth, visual, and clarifying,” allowing Lemon Ice to transition from manual coding to AI-driven workflows across all ad-hoc survey projects. 

Results 

Massive Time Savings 

What used to require 2–3 days of manual effort now takes: 

• Minutes with straight AI coding 

• Just a few hours for quality assurance and fine tuning.  

Caplena’s new LLM-topic assignment accelerates that process even further. Its high initial accuracy (often achieving 80+ Quality Score without human adjustments) allows the team to trust the model and streamline the full workflow.  

Significant Cost Reductions 

• ~25,000 USD saved annually by eliminating outsourcing 

• 20–30% lower cost per coded verbatim 

• More consistent margins on ad-hoc projects 

"

There was a direct challenge against Caplena: ‘Give me everything they give for the same cost.’ There was no way to match it.” 

Rafael Conde

Insights & Innovation Lead

Better Insights, Faster 

Caplena enabled Lemon Ice to:  

• Explore themes across segments instantly 

• Visualize patterns instead of relying on raw tables 

• Use AI-powered chat to dive deeper into product differences 

• Scale coding across 150–200 projects per year with confidence 

Even analysts new to research quickly identified insights using Caplena’s tools, something impossible with manual coding. 

Higher Quality & Reliability 

Caplena helped shift the organization from “opinion-driven” legacy code frames to data-driven, broader, more objective category structures.  

The team gained trust in AI-generated insights, thanks to Caplena’s precision and transparent adjustments. 
 

"

Caplena elevated us to a global level. We’re faster, more accurate, and more automated. It gives us reliability and trust, and the support is world-class.”

Rafael Conde

Insights & Innovation Lead

Future Direction 

Rafael’s priority now is to expand adoption of Caplena beyond Lemon Ice, into the Commercial Teams and other business units via the unlimited access to reporting.  

He sees a clear opportunity: using Caplena not just for coding, but for storytelling, segmentation, and modern insight delivery.  

"

What I really love is when people come to me and say, did you see the new feature that Caplena has done? Did you see that you can do that? Like prompting and do the analysis? Success for me will be when the commercial team uses Caplena fully — and then you turn to us and ask, ‘What else can we build for you?’.

Rafael Conde

Insights & Innovation Lead