Using phone methods in a digital age

Editor's note: Al Fitzgerald is president and founder of Answers Research, Inc., Solana Beach, Calif.

As companies strive to gain a footing in today's uncertain economy, marketers are faced with a difficult mission: to conduct the most useful research studies while spending the smallest percentage of their reduced research budgets. It seems, more than ever, marketers are under pressure to retain current customers, tap into additional markets, and refine existing offerings while creating new products/services based on vital customer feedback. With worldwide Internet usage continually rising, online panel research is a logical method to complete actionable and economical market research projects. But despite the surge in popularity of online methods, telephone deployment remains a viable technique. In fact, combining a traditional telephone approach with innovative online deployment methods may be just the way to achieve marketers' sought-after goal of low-cost research with high-quality results.

Combined Web and telephone deployment solution

Here's how it works. Once the survey is finalized, it is programmed for computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) and Web completion. By providing for both techniques simultaneously, programming costs are not increased; this dual-programming accommodates both methodologies. Further, with either method, no respondent is able to take the survey more than once. Any skip patterns, rotations, and randomizations are programmed once but serve a phone or Web purpose. Additionally, English surveys can be translated into multiple languages, including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean character translation.

You've determined who you are targeting when you planned your study and created the survey instrument. Once you have a reliable sample source with which to reach your group you're ready to begin your telephone recruitment. Using the mixed-method approach, participants are screened and initially invited to take the survey via telephone. If convenient for the qualified respondent, the interview is completed at this time. If a respondent refuses to participate, they are given the option to take the survey over the Web. In this case, collecting their e-mail address and e-mailing them a password-protected link to the survey are the next steps.

Deployment methods impact response rates

One of the biggest deterrents to completing a successful research project is finding qualified participants to respond to your survey. If a project manager gets tripped up in the fielding portion of the study, it can cost valuable time and precious budget dollars while decreasing the time that can be spent studying and using gathered data. Particularly when faced with the host of typical fielding pitfalls - limited sample, a busy or over-surveyed population, and restricted incentive allotments - it becomes critical to offer respondents the most convenient method possible to increase response rates.

When conducting business-to-business studies, most researchers find that small businesses are often the most difficult of all target audiences to elicit cooperation to take surveys. In research where contacting the business owner or general manager of a company is critical, taking valuable time away from store or business management to participate in a market research study may not even make the top 20 on a manager's daily list of "fires" to extinguish. Further, while many small firms do not have Internet connections, virtually all small business executives/owners have Internet access at their homes. By offering the opportunity to participate at a time and with a method most convenient, response rates inevitably rise.

Another research target becoming increasingly difficult to reach is the IT professional. While this group has a vested interest in participating in research that will impact future product designs vital to their job functions, they are a regularly-contacted population. To gain the necessary feedback from this critical target, it is important for researchers from advanced technology manufacturers and service providers to consider strategies that will encourage IT manager participation. Offering the option of either online or telephone completion can provide the flexibility needed to secure the opinions of this group.

Larger sample sizes = greater statistical accuracy

Regardless of the participant criteria, a research project's statistical accuracy is largely a function of the sample size. The larger the sample size, the greater the statistical accuracy of the results. Keep in mind that we often will want to look at a subset of the entire sample which we call a "cell" (e.g., small companies versus large companies). When this is the case, the statistical accuracy depends on the number of people in each cell. While at some point, the increase in statistical accuracy may not be worth the additional cost, to achieve a statistical accuracy of ±5 percent, a sample size of 400 must be reached. When dealing with populations that are difficult to contact (often coupled with limited sample with which to approach them), a goal of 400 completes might as well be 4,000 - an equally impossible and exhausting goal. Offering the proposed dual-methodology can help minimize the strain of fielding while maintaining statistical accuracy.

Case study

My firm has successfully implemented the suggested telephone/Web-based approach and we have seen response rates increase dramatically in studies using this technique. In a study completed for a computer hardware manufacturer in November 2001, we recruited respondents from small, medium, and large businesses and gave them the option of completing the questionnaire immediately by phone or via the Web at a later time. Approximately 80 percent of the respondents opted to complete the survey via phone, and 20 percent online. Most of the online respondents initially indicated that they were too busy to take the survey. The only way to elicit their cooperation would have been to try to schedule expensive (and inefficient) call-backs. Because the screening criteria for these upper-level IT managers were so stringent, the cost per completed interview by phone was over $135. By completing 80 surveys by Web, we saved our client to cost of recruiting an additional 80 phone respondents. In short, use of the dual-methodology saved our customer over $10,000 and several precious project timeline days.

Limitations

No deployment method is without limitations. While a dual-method approach works well with many study designs, it works best among populations having both phone and Web access. Careful monitoring of results by mode must be conducted to ensure there is not a vast difference in results among methods. If a study is to sample a general population without the use of weighting or other data manipulation methods, a single methodology, random digit dial (RDD) approach may be necessary.

Ultimate remedy

In an effort to maximize diminished budgets while completing reliable research studies, marketers are seeking increasingly innovative research techniques. Looking beyond a typical telephone or Internet-only deployment towards a combined phone/Web methodology, marketers may find the ultimate remedy for difficult fielding studies. By maximizing the cooperation rate (e.g., minimizing refusal rates), researchers can minimize the bias in their studies while improving the reliability of the data collected - benefits enough to consider using a dual-method approach.