I had an unexpected meeting with a client today that confirmed some conclusions I drew last week. He told me more about the complaint calls his client received about interviewers at my competitor’s phone room. He listened to recordings of two of the calls that generated the complaints. He said both the interviews were by the same interviewer.
My client told me that on one of the calls, the guy said the respondent’s name wrong and got impatient with her. The interviewer said, “Have you done a survey before?” in a real snotty tone of voice. When my client talked about it with the guy’s supervisors, they said they considered the performance acceptable. My client was incredulous. He said he told the other company that he fired them because they were endangering his relationship with his client.
I figured the complaints about rudeness stemmed from the interviewers becoming impatient with elderly respondents. I told my client this, and added that it’s easy to do if you don’t get over yourself. He tried not to let me see him smile, but said “Exactly right.”
Now that I am an independent interviewer, I would like to focus on conducting business to business projects, gathering competitive intelligence. I still plan to focus on that area, but my current project causes me to believe that perhaps I have skills that I take for granted. Apparently, not everyone can be patient when conducting telephone surveys with an elderly population. I need to find a way to gauge the demand for this skill.
It gratifies me that I took Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare to heart as a child. I can make more money being patient with people than I can being impatient with them. That’s what I thought, even before all of this happened.
