PHONE SURVEYS: PROS, CONS, AND TRENDS

It seems like phone surveys have been around for as long as the telephone has. And still they remain a staple in market research. Why? Just about everyone in the US has a phone or two, and this method still delivers some great benefits. But with a cell phone in nearly every hand, the advent of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, and an explosion in offshore call centers, the landscape of phone surveys is changing.

Pros

If you decide to launch a phone survey, you can count on a few standout benefits. Some of these benefits include…

• Audience! Most Americans can be reached by phone. There are exceptions – a phone survey of the homeless population isn’t a good bet – but when you don’t have e-mail or street addresses, you still usually have phones. This also means that phone number lists are affordable and readily available. Targeting respondents through a good list purchase helps reduce costs and increase cooperation.
• Knowledge! Phone surveys are time-tested. Because of this, there are plenty of resources (web sites, books, etc.) and industry experts (like us!) to work with.
• Cooperation! Response rates for phone surveys are still much higher than they are for mail and Internet surveys. This makes phone surveys more reliable, since you’re reaching a more representative group. Many people still find it harder to say “No” to a live person than it is to zap an e-mail or trash a mail invitation.
• Lower Fulfillment Costs! Most phone surveys are conducted without a reward for participation (incentive). This saves money and eliminates the tendency of respondents to try and please the interviewer in exchange for an incentive.
• Clarity! Phone surveys are usually conducted by a trained caller at a call center. Having a live person on the line can help your survey, especially when a respondent has questions or when a complex survey needs more explanation.
• Speed! Phone surveys can be fast. Unlike mail surveys, there is no wait for invitation printing and processing. Though phone surveys can be conducted just as fast as Internet surveys, there can be benefits to scheduling a longer recruit, such as reducing bias that might occur when calling happens on one night, or on a weekend when people are more likely not at home.
• Control! Like Internet surveys, modern phone surveys use sophisticated software to manage complex survey paths, multiple quotas, real-time customization based on response, and much more. In this way, survey calls can be more fluid and dynamic than mail surveys.
• Results! Monitoring phone survey projects has never been easier, with daily e-mail reports, remote silent monitoring, digital audio recordings of actual surveys, and the Internet-based reporting provided by many call centers.

Cons

Phone surveys can have downsides though. Some things to consider when electing to pursue a phone survey include…

• Expense ~ Phone surveying can be expensive, especially compared to Internet surveying. It is not uncommon for a call center to charge $15 to $30 per completed survey. Costs like these can run tens of thousands of dollars for a single project, especially if you need to reach a lot of people. For this reason, many researchers consider using multiple modes – such as telephone and Internet – for the same survey.
• Visual Limitations ~ Because phone surveys happen in an auditory environment, things like pictures and video can’t be incorporated. This means that some types of tests, like brand testing and taste testing, have to take place in another environment like a focus group facility, on the web, or live mall intercepts.
• Verbal Limitations ~ Callers are only human. They can have a bad day, misunderstand something in your survey, or mispronounce a name. (Call someone in Pierre, South Dakota and see how far you get after pronouncing their city as the French would). This human factor can be unpredictable.
• Loss of Access ~ More and more Americans are replacing their landlines with cell phones. People without landlines tend to be younger, less affluent, more liberal, and less likely to be married or to own their home. The cell-only population also includes a higher proportion of minorities, especially Hispanics*. The proportion of individuals that have forsaken their landlines is growing. As this segment grows, the appeal of conducting landline-only surveys will diminish. Alternatives include…
• Conducting a mixed-mode survey, perhaps using methods such as a phone survey alongside an Internet survey.
• Obtaining calling lists for both landlines and cell phones. Unfortunately, the Pew Research Center estimates that interviewing cell phone sample is approximately 2.4 times more costly than interviewing landline sample. This is due to a higher incidence of underage respondents, lower cooperation rates, and the cost of incentives to compensate respondents for their cell-phone minutes.
• Setting a quota for the number of respondents in cell-heavy demographics, such as age. With the quota in place, the research can move forward without concern for under-representing this group.
• Weighting survey data to match specific demographics. When weighting data, survey results are adjusted to give greater value to answers provided by respondents from an under-surveyed group.
• Callers ~ Finding the right call center can be difficult. This is one of the benefits of working with a professional market research firm. Firms such as ours try many different call centers and can lead you to the best ones.

Selecting a Call Center

There are many factors involved in selecting the right call center…

• Specialization: Call centers typically specialize in certain types of calls, such as telemarketing, B2B surveying, home surveying, qualitative recruiting, conducting depth interviews, etc. Using one with a skill set outside the stated goals of the project is almost guaranteed to be a bad idea. Their callers won’t have the right training, management will not have the experience, and they certainly won’t be able to provide you best-in-class programming or technology solutions that you should expect.
• Experience: A few years ago a local business owner dropped in and mentioned he had a small call center that he was trying to build up. His center had never run a survey before, and it was clear he didn’t know what he was getting into. Fortunately for our clients, we were experienced enough to know better. Had we jumped on his offer, all parties (including the call center) would have ended up unhappy.
• Size: Call centers with less than one-hundred call stations may find it hard to compete with larger centers, both in terms of cost and project speed. These factors can have a huge impact on the outcome of a research project.
• Quality: Some call centers are hard-pressed to train their callers for the nonprofit arena –an area in which few specialize. Or they hire callers that are not professional or friendly in nature. This can greatly affect the quality of the data you collect, and the impression you leave with the thousands of people that are called on your behalf. More and more call centers are using offshore callers. We have tended to steer clear of offshore callers out of concern for helping our nonprofit clients put their best foot forward in donor and member relations.
• Cost: Call centers can vary greatly in their costs from one project to another. One reason for this is the uniqueness of every project. Another is supply and demand. When a call center is having a slow month, they are more likely to provide a low bid in an effort to keep their callers busy.
• Language capabilities: If you need your survey conducted in different languages, you need to select a call center that has adequate capabilities for the languages you are working with.
• Dialing technique: Many call centers use automated/predictive dialing to keep costs down. This can annoy potential respondents, so you need to weigh this cost with the savings that it brings.

Interactive Voice Response

Whether your survey is reaching out to the respondent, or your constituents are reaching out to you, technology has brought us to the point where we have begun to replace human callers with computers. This technology, called IVR for Interactive Voice Response, can ask questions and interpret spoken responses from the respondents using script pre-recorded by a professional caller. A computer places calls from a phone number list, and attempts to initiate a survey just as a human caller would when someone answers. If the person agrees to take the survey, the IVR system will go through each question and record the responses either as text data or as a speech recording.

IVR technology can drastically lower phone survey fielding costs, and makes it possible to automate many inbound surveys. However, for a number of reasons, we do not recommend using IVR for surveys among donors, members and alumni. If you can afford the extra cost of live callers, it is usually worth it.

Conclusion

So when should you use phone surveys? Even if you do not have phone numbers in the list you are working with, there are services out there that will match phone numbers to whatever information you have, such as mailing addresses or email addresses. So phone surveys are a valid option for most studies, unless…

• Non-audio elements are a part of your questionnaire
• You do not have the funding necessary to conduct a phone survey
• A population you are surveying is difficult to reach over the phone

When in doubt, seek the input of a professional researcher – even if you plan to conduct the study in-house. Getting advice from a professional may save you money and time, and is also likely to improve the quality of the data you collect.

*The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, The Cell Phone Challenge to Survey Research, May 15 2006, on the Internet at http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=276 (visited December 3, 2007).