The new service carries out surveys with an online panel and delivers results from up to 1,000 respondents in 36 hours. Harris said that each piece of research work carried out through Flash Poll will be treated as a custom project.

The firm has launched the service in the UK, France and Germany, and said that more countries are scheduled for coverage in the first quarter of 2011.

Caterina Gerlotto (pictured), senior associate director at Harris, said: “During the build-up to the general election this year we were commissioned to undertake a series of standalone polls that had to be on our media clients’ desk, weighted, within 36 hours of commissioning.”

“It is not often as researchers that you get to validate your data and this cemented our belief in the approach and spurred our desire to want to offer it to other clients. We packaged the offer up and so Harris Poll Flash was born.”