Sam Winstanley
London
Sam Winstanley is a software professional with over 15 years of experience working with many areas research technology including CAI systems, reporting systems, data warehouses, libraries and data-mining tools. In this time Sam has had the benefit of working with most of the worlds major research agencies and many large multinational organisations and government organisations.
Sam currently runs forgetdata, a consultancy and software house focused on data management/warehousing and data visualisation.
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Posted in: The end of telephone surveys
I can't see much future in polling consumers there's no hook for the consumer at all. Like Peter says there's always areas where telephone will be appropriate for at least a portion of the fieldwork and having a good range of options, I think there's potential that's not exploited... I still see new investment on telephone facilties, its not expected and I don't have hard numbers just first hand experience. Mixed mode/Multi mode is driving this more than anything else I see, business leaders thought they would have shut down all of their call centers by now indeed a lot have been closed. Taking those pure online companies out of the mix, what's left are agencies with more diverse methodologies and some are starting to realize that having telephone as part of the mix is a USP now where it was a low margin commodity before. This is stimulating investment in data collection systems, and there's some increased focus on how to really get solid operational efficiency/effectiveness for mixed mode studies, most agencies are further behind with mixed mode than they would have you believe. So in the area of mixed-mode there's a lot of untapped value.... Another shifting area is more drive towards flexible pools of interviewers geographically distributed assigned to particular studies, with the availability of IP based telephony and web based CATI interviewer systems there's more scope for any agency to spawn its own vast telephone interviewing team from nothing but software, without even going near a physical call center so the barriers to entry into CATI are dropping quickly as are the risks associated with carrying high staff numbers which can only mean that the potential cost of CATI should drop, and this could hurt the traditional telephone houses very badly unless they respond fast enough. Has anybody asked the question... how much more telephone interviewing would happen if it cost 30% of what it does today? my hunch is there's definately price elasticity and there's therefore potential for increased demand if the agencies and the technology can keep up... Sam Winstanley, forgetdata