Telephone interviewsare used for business-to-business and consumer-type research. The majority of the interviews are undertaken from a centralised call centre location, although a small number involve interviewers using their own home-based tele- phones. The main benefit of the centralised location is control. The interviewers can be briefed and trained in one location. Their calls can be monitored using unobtrusive monitoring equipment that allows supervisors to listen in on interviews and correct or replace interviewers who are interviewing incorrectly. Quality control checks can be done on the questionnaires immediately after they have been com- pleted. The cost of calls can also be logged accurately. Finally, interviewers need to clock in and out of work, allowing control of the timing of the interviews and ensuring that interviewers work sufficient hours regularly.
Unlike personal interviews, the interviewers do not need to be located near the respondents and the need for interviewer travelling time and expenses is eliminated. Interviews can be undertaken nationally or internationally from one central location, with many of these locations being situated outside major cities where office rental costs and staff costs are much less. Some of the interviewer bias that may exist with personal interviewers is also reduced, first through the tighter supervision, which ensures that questions are asked correctly and responses are recorded accurately, and second, through the interviewer’s selection of respondents being dictated by the names and/or numbers supplied rather than the approachability of different types of respondent. The telephone also has the advantage of reaching people who otherwise may be difficult to reach through any other means, such as businesspeople travelling around or people who live in flats with entry-phones.
The other major benefit of telephone interviews is speed. Interviewers can be briefed and be conducting interviews within hours of the questionnaire being devel- oped. It would take much longer to brief a team of personal interviewers. This speed can mean that interviewing can be timed to happen immediately after a specific event. For example, an advertisement or an electioneering party political broadcast may appear on television at 7 p.m., and interviewers can then be phoning viewers to seek their attitudes towards the broadcast by 7.05 p.m.
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The telephone survey does have some inherent disadvantages. The biggest disad- vantage relates to respondent attitudes towards the telephone. Over the past 15 years there has been a major growth of telephone usage for telemarketing purposes throughout Europe. Home improvement companies, financial service organisations, catalogue marketers and even charities use the telephone to generate sales/funds, either directly or by arranging for a sales representative to visit prospective pur- chasers. Many are persistent and relatively aggressive callers and in certain situations some disguise their approach as being marketing research. This activity is called ‘sug- ging’ (selling under the guise of research) by the marketing research industry. As a result, many members of the public are confused about the difference between marketing research, where the confidentiality of the respondent is maintained, and telemarketing, where names and data will be used for selling purposes, either directly or by selling the information on to other companies. Refusal rates are therefore increasing and consumer concerns in certain countries have led to legislative controls on unsolicited calls for telemarketing or telephone research (e.g. in Germany and parts of the United States). Consumers are also using equipment such as answering machines to screen their calls before answering them. The Market Research Society in the UK provides a freephone service for respondents to phone in order to check that the research is bona fide. However, this is only of benefit to those who are will- ing to spend time checking on the credentials of the agency and the research; many respondents will take the easier option of simply refusing to take part.
Researcher quote: You get home improvement companies that phone up saying they are doing marketing research. They usually only ask one question about whether the respondent has double glazing. If the respondent says no, they proceed immediately into a sales pitch. They make telephone surveys so difficult for the rest of us!
Although some telephone interviews can last 25–30 minutes, they are normally much shorter and certainly shorter than face-to-face interviews. Respondents lose interest more quickly when they only have their sense of hearing stimulated (no visual or tactile cues to occupy the other senses) and it is easy for them to hang up the phone when they become bored. Certain types of question such as complex ranking ques- tions or questions with a large number of multiple-choice responses are also more difficult to undertake over the phone.
In international telephone surveys there may be specific problems in undertaking interviews. One of these relates to low levels of telephone ownership, particularly in many of the developing countries in Africa and Asia. This can result in telephone samples in these countries being biased towards particular types of consumer (especi- ally in the professional classes). Even in developed countries there may be problems relating to the coverage of telephone networks owing to the growth of the use of
mobile phones and people choosing to rely solely on mobile rather than landline networks (e.g. students, people on low incomes, professional-type people, countries with poor public networks). Even if respondents can be accessed through the tele- phone network, different cultures will react differently towards a telephone survey. For example Mediterranean and Arab peoples are reluctant to divulge personal details over the telephone whereas North Americans and northern Europeans are more open towards providing information over the telephone.