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I work for a "Research Service" company. Other companies pay us to conduct telephone surveys, taste tests, and any other "market research" that they might want done. My job mostly consists of calling people and businesses and trying to conduct those telephone surveys or to ask them to participate in "Group Studies" at our company's facility. Sometimes we pay people to talk to us, sometimes we don't. It's usually pretty stress-free for a McJob, but occasionally people seem to go out of their way to make things more stressful than they need to by not being plain about not wanting to participate. These are some of the most common ways potential respondents (read: people we’re trying to get to the survey) shoot themselves in the foot when trying to get rid of us, as well some advice on how to make the survey process as short and painless as possible.
This is the most common mistake potential respondents make when they try to get rid of us. Whenever someone says something like this we are required to infer that they might have time to take the survey at a later date, so we mark it down as a call-back. It’s nothing personal, we just have to.
Second most common way to accidentally insure we call again. If you recognize the incoming number as a research service company and you pick up the phone and hang it up again, we can only assume that we were disconnected by accident. So we’ll mark it as ‘No Answer’ and you’ll probably be called again in the next couple days.
This is one of my favorites because they always act so flustered when I respond, as if it should be illegal to ask them about their opinions.
Now, we can add you to our company’s “Do Not Call” list and our company will never call you about surveys ever again. However, the possibility of you getting a call from a different one in the future is almost guaranteed, and there are hundreds of research companies in the United States alone, so really asking us to put you on ours is a futile gesture.
This has several variations such as: "Why are you calling me on a Saturday?" and "You know that it's eight o'clock on a Tuesday night?" Fact is, by law we're only allowed to call people between the hours of 9am and 9pm and since most people work 9 to 5 jobs, most weekdays we interviewers are usually only scheduled to work from 4pm-9pm and if we didn't make survey calls on the weekend, most of us wouldn't be able to make ends meet.
Of course, some people just don't like to be called for surveys on particular days and we understand that. If we do happen to call you on one of those days, we will usually be more than willing to schedule a call-back pretty much whenever you want it to happen.
Why people ask this is beyond me. If we call someone it's because either they have participated in a survey with similar subject matter in the past or the number was randomly generated by a computer.
Occasionally, we're only interested in a particular kind of consumer (like smokers) so we probably got the number from a corporation (like a cigarette company) they gave the number to (like when signing up for newsletters and special offers from those cigarette companies) but we're not allowed to tell people that because it might cause them to give biased answers, so just assume it's randomly generated.
Seriously, if you don't want to do the survey, just say so, it's no skin off my nose. There are tons of people out there who might actually be interested in doing the survey so most interviewers won't try too hard to convince you to participate. Besides, we're paid by the hour, not by the survey, so even if everyone we call that night says no we still get paid. The interviewer might give you a pat-response about how helpful it would be if you participated, but if you just ignore that and repeat “I’m not interested in taking a survey” once they’re finished, they’ll thank you for your time, mark you down as "refused" and stop calling about it.
That being said, telephone surveys are one of the only ways corporations study public opinion. Any changes a corporation makes to its products or services are usually influenced by information gained from them, so it's usually a wiser move to ask what the survey is actually about before refusing outright. Who knows? It might concern something you're really passionate about.
This happens annoyingly often. They ask how long the survey will take (which, BTW, we are usually more than willing to tell them), say they've only got just enough time to take the survey, then they take near-ridiculous amounts of time to answer each question. Then they get mad when we’re only halfway through the survey by the time limit the interviewer predicted!
The question “What is your total annual income?” (or really any question about how much money the respondent or the respondent’s business makes) is the question we usually lose people on because they think it sounds suspicious. Thing is, we only use that information to classify which demographic they belong to, so we rarely need an exact number. Not to mention the fact that this information doesn’t have any practical nefarious uses. What, am I going to be able to steal their identity by simply knowing a rough estimate of how much they make a year?
If all that doesn’t help you feel any better about disclosing that information, just lie to us. We have no way of knowing that you’re lying and we’ll move on to the next question without a second thought.
I have a limited number of ways I can mark your answers on the survey and most questions don’t have a place to make any other kinds of notes. If the question is open-ended like “How do you feel about such and such?”, please feel free to expound on your opinion as much as you like, the longer the better. But if the question is a ‘yes or no’ or a multiple choice question, I can only choose from those choices and all of the other stuff you say gets completely ignored because I have no place to record it. This also makes the survey take much longer than it normally would.
Sometimes this question makes sense, like if we’ve contacted them before and we’re asking for their mailing address. However, even if we did have whatever information we’re asking about in our records, we would still have to ask to be sure that it hasn’t changed recently.
This actually happened to me, word-for-word. The respondent was obviously ************ just so he could get rid of me and it was oh so delicious to be able to say, "Actually sir, if you complete this 10 minute survey we will send you a check for $50. Now I've never been great at math, but I'm pretty sure that that's even better than $100 an hour." He still refused, but if he had simply done so from the beginning without trying to be a smart ass, the call would've been much shorter and far less embarrassing.
