Why do telephone marketers have a “no call” list while telephone market researchers do not? How do you tell the difference when they call you and why do they always call at dinner time? I am disgusted with all these phone calls. I think it is a conspiracy!
A) Because telephone market researchers are conducting public opinion services while telemarkets are trying to sell you something. Telemarkets fall into the category of “commercial speech” which can be regulated more tightly.
B) Ask who they are calling on behalf of. Ask if they are trying to sell a product or service, or set up an appointment. If they say yes, they are a telemarketer. If they insist they are conducting research, ask how many questions are on the survey.
C) They call at dinner because they know more people are at home during dinner.
D) A conspiracy of whom? Telephone market researchers HATE telemarketers. Telemarketing has just about ruined telephone market research. It now takes as many as 25 calls for a researcher to get one valid household to participate in a survey.
Funny you should mention this, I work as a telephone market researcher and am compiling a rant about the people who answer, coming to a Pit near you soon!
Before you proceed to flame me to the depths of hell I am not based in the US, and I understand the situation there is somewhat different due to various unscruplous business practices and aggressive techniques.
The reason we call at dinner is because we call from 9am to 9pm. Somone is always eating somewhere. There is no specific time at which everyone eats dinner, just as there is no specific time at which everyone puts the kids to bed, and people are in the middle of watching an important sports match at just about any point in the day too. Since you can’t second guess, you can only ask if you are ringing at an inapropriate time and agree on a better time to call for that household.
I work in marketing research, too, and have found that telling the caller upfront my line of work usually terminates the interview. Supposedly, since we know how the research works, we can bias the findings and most legit companies don’t want our opinions. Overall, if I don’t recognize a caller’s voice, I say “she’s not home” and ask to take a message. The telemarketers will never leave one and won’t waste their spiel.
I’ve worked both in both telemarketing, and market research on and off since I was 18; about 30 years. And for the past six years I have been supervised, and managed call centers for two social research organizations. We conduct telephone interviews on a variety of subjects such as teen pregnancy, drug use, genetic testing, race relations, and many other interesting topics.
We always say upfront who we are, what the study is about and what and how the results will be used. Often offering to send respondents a copy of the results of the survey. We also state that we are not selling anything. In fact, for some studies we pay the particiapnts for their time.
I’ve trained nearly 500 interviewers, and one of the first rules we have is when someome says “take me off your list”, “don’t ever call me again” – the Interviewer is to code that household so that they are not called again.
And I agree with the previous posts. Reseachers hate telemarketers. If I were to apply for a job with another social research organization, I would never list telemarketing experience on my resume.
I worked for WZLX radio in Boston for a few weeks in college as part of a so-called “marketing internship” where they just had us doing telephone marketing research all afternoon. They were already paying a professional agency to do the same job, but they wanted us to do it too in order to see if we got the same results.
Anyway, with regard to kunilou’s point B: “Ask who they are calling on behalf of,” we were specifically instructed by our boss to lie about this, using the name of a research agency which had gone out of business a few years earlier. His attitude toward the callees, when someone balked at lying, was “who gives a fuck about them? Your job is just to complete those response sheets.”
It was a festering armpit of a job, and I quit after the third week because my boss (the programming director) was such a [Pit-worthy language]-faced [PWL]-nibbler.
Twice I have taken part in health surveys conducted by the NSW Department of Health. I have no idea which market research organisation they use to conduct their surveys, but each time I have been told the purpose of the survey and how long it will take to complete. I’ve been asked whether this is a convenient time and advised that if I need to terminate the interview (to answer door, attend to children, whatever), to let the caller know and they can arrange another time to call back. I’ve been advised that it’s perfectly fine to not answer any given question. I’ve been told that a supervisor will call in a few days to confirm that I did in fact take part in the survey. I’ve been asked whether I wish to receive a copy of the survey when the results are compiled. And I’ve been asked if I have any comments I’d like recorded about the structure of the survey itself or the issues it addresses.
If I received these calls as often as I do telemarketing calls, they would probably become annoying; but I’ve noticed that one of the first questions most market researchers ask is whether you’ve recently taken part in any other market research.