Time to Hang Up on Telephone Research
Posted by Dean Wiltse on Mon, Apr 14, 2008
Researchers... I said it before... Listen to your customers... Stop surveying using the telephone!
I have had it. In the last week I am getting a call every night at the dinner, just like I did before the Do Not Call Registry was made law. Is this happening to you too? Researchers are as bad as the marketers. On my most recent call, I told the interviewer to "take me off your list" and hung up. Ten seconds later the same man called me again and said that he would not take me off the list. I hung up and he called a third time. He was doing a survey. Yes there are bad apples in every bunch and respectable phone interviewers would never treat me like this, but here is what is happening. The telephone survey industry is attempting to compete with lower cost online survey methods and are hiring cheaper labor and moving offshore. The quality of interviewers is getting worse. They are also forced to make many more calls because all of us on the do not call list, don't want to be called, so their response rates are dropping. Lower response rates, lower cost labor spells trouble for us!
I know this sounds self serving because I am in the business of helping companies gather feedback online, but I am also a very vocal consumer.
Listen up researchers. We need someone to lead the charge to stop telephone research. It is an intrusion on my privacy. I can't lead the fight because people will say it is self serving.
Think about what needs to happen now to complete a survey on the telephone now that more people are only using cell phones and response rates are dropping. It means... more calls. Yes more calls! No wonder so many people are now using their cell phone and do not have a land line. Maybe the phone companies will wise up and offer a way for me to program my land line so only people I know can call me. That's it! Phone companies need to give me this capability or I am gone as a customer.