The basics

Is the facility able to scale appropriately between small and large projects? What kind of contact services are provided? Do you have inbound and outbound calling capabilities? Do you provide additional contact capabilities (e.g., Web, mail, e-mail, etc.) for multimode research? Do you have international/multilingual reach?

The staff

What are the required qualifications for interviewers? How are interviewers trained and what ongoing training is provided? What is the supervisor-to-interviewer ratio? What percentage of interviewer completes is monitored?

Available technology

Does the telephone research facility have clear remote-monitoring capabilities to adequately monitor projects as they first go into the field? What ability will I have to do live monitoring of active interviews? Can you record interviews? If so, how would I receive the recordings? How do you handle states where two-party consent is required? Do you have cost-saving technologies like interactive voice response and predictive dialing? Do you provide online real-time reporting capabilities on survey data? Does the CATI
software ensure that no data or sample is stored on the local interviewer computer in the call center? Does the CATI software provide separation of data for each project dialed? Does each project have its own database?

Standard operating procedures

How are interviewers incentivized? What times do you normally dial business and consumer studies? How do you oversee interviewer dialings/completes? How are cell phone numbers handled, if at all?

Quality control

What are your quality-control procedures? Is there a secure on-site server? If so, how often is it backed up? How do you keep track of monitorings and validations? What percentage of phone calls is actively monitored for quality? How is the quality of a phone call measured and reported? What metrics are used? Do interviewers read verbatim or are they allowed to paraphrase if a respondent does not understand the question?

Your deliverables

During and after the telephone interviews, what are the deliverables? What time are my reports ready each day and how do I receive them?

Special thanks to Thoroughbred Research Group, Louisville, Ky.; Opinionology, Orem, Utah; and DataPrompt International, Chicago, for providing input on the questions.