Advantages and disadvantages of a telephone market research

What is the purpose of a market survey?

If you are reading us it is because you are our follower, our customer, or maybe a potential one or simply because you are interested in the subject and you have landed on our pages while searching for something on Google and now you are waiting for some answers (which we hope we can roughly give you ).

The purpose of a market research, (the famous market research) we will never get tired of repeating it, is to collect and catalog structured information about samples of people and / or consumers over a good or a service they have used, they use or will use. But not only that. Yes, because market research are not just about clarifying consumer buying behavior, but also decoding people’s behaviors and responses with regard to social choices, for example. Once the objective of the survey has been developed, this will be carried out through structured questionnaires, called interviews.

We have seen many different types of interviews developed over the years, from those made by post to the face-to-face ones, by email but also by telephone.

And it’s just about telephone interviews that we want to talk about with you today.

What are their advantages? And what about their disadvantages?

Beginning with the advantages we can undoubtedly say that a CATI interview as the ones we make in IFF International is reliable and accurate in all cases. We use interactive software through which we submit our interviews that are real-time monitored. Standardization of data collection allows us to not have any standard error.

The other two advantages of undoubted importance are speed of data collection and reduction of resources where information should otherwise go through. These two advantages lead us to identify another one: the reduction of investments that in this way can be focused on the purchase and maintenance of cutting-edge software.

And what are the disadvantages of CATI?

Telephone interviews certainly require a technique to be more and more improved, especially if we think that humanity has been constantly evolving, changing habits and uses. We may find some small disadvantages in these, which are probably a formal defect linked to the sample of people who do not want to have a telephone contact and who are not actively helpful in surveys.

Basically, there are absolutely just a few disadvantages compared to the many pros that the CATI method holds for us and on which we have decided to invest higher and higher so we can provide always deeper and reliable surveys and analysis to our clients.

What do you think about all this?
Can you tell us your CATI experience?

If you need help, write me e.armato@iff-international.com

Ennio Armato (Branch Manager, Italy)