Research Call Center

Research versus Nonresearch Call Centers

Nonresearch call centers fall into two main groups: (1) predominantly outbound (such as a telemarketing or debt collection center) and (2) inbound (such as a customer assistance contact center for a bank or a catalogue sales support operation).

The common denominator among all call centers, including research call centers, is that there is a group of staff (interviewers or agents) sitting in booths either making or receiving calls. At this front stage of contact, there are rarely any formal educational requirements beyond high school reading ability; however, a clear voice is a necessity. Because calling volumes typically peak for only a small part of the day and often vary over the course of a year, most positions are part-time and often seasonal. As a result, many call centers in the same geographical locale tend to share the same labor pool, and the physical buildings in which they operate and the furniture needed tend to be very similar.

Technologically, there are a lot of similarities as well. All need a telephone system that can support many simultaneous calls and a computer system that will track and store the outcomes of the calls (such as completed questionnaires, completed applications for credit, or queries made and resolutions offered). However, an outbound center will require more sophisticated dialer equipment to place calls, whereas an inbound center will require a more sophisticated automatic call distributor and interactive voice response system to handle the queuing and directing of incoming calls to the most appropriate agent (not always an interviewer).

It is in the processes and procedures that the differences become more pronounced. For example, in comparing an outbound research survey operation and an outbound telemarketing operation, one of the main objectives of a research center is a high response rate, whereas for a telemarketing operation the overriding objective is to obtain a high volume of sales. Essentially, this is the difference between survey quality and telemarketing quantity, and this difference will play out in many ways. A research operation will make multiple calls to the same number following complex calling rules and will spend much more time on that one sample item. Shortcuts cannot be risked, the interviewers almost always will be paid by the hour rather than by the complete interview, in part on the assumption that this will help ensure they conduct the entire research task exactly as required (including gaining cooperation from as many respondents as possible and reading questions exactly as worded to minimize interviewer bias), and the dialer technology will be set to a slower rate to allow the interviewer time to read the call history notes from the previous call and to ensure that if the number answers, the interviewer is ready to take the call. The telemarketing operation will instead discard numbers very quickly and move onto fresh numbers, they will give their agents considerable latitude in the scripts and often pay commission rather [Page 723]than an hourly rate, and they will use high-volume predictive dialers to maximize the time their agents spend talking and selling as opposed to listening for answering machines or correctly classifying businesses.

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