Curmudgeon to Curmudgeon, Part II

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.

Curmudgeon to Curmudgeon

There I was, all set to write a gloating blog post about how I won a contract away from a competitor because of my reputation for patience and politeness. Then I read someone else's blog post about not getting so worked up when people interrupt. That post pushed some of my buttons. I had to learn this the hard way, so I knew I should not be so quick to congratulate myself.

Patience and politeness are important for any interviewing project, but especially for my current project. Several respondents have told me that they never do telephone surveys. The only reason they are willing to participate is that they are members of the organization for which I am conducting the surveys. I learned to pause after I tell them who I am doing the survey for, so that they can say “Yes!” or “Oh, okay!” I learned long ago that if an interviewer indicates annoyance when interrupted by a respondent, the respondent will perceive the interviewer as rude.

My client told me that he cancelled the contract with the other vendor to do these interviews because that vendor’s interviewers were rude. He had me take over when there were just 17 interviews left to do out of a batch of 100. I started the next batch of 100 the next week. I did not ask my client to show me the emails he got from his client about the rude interviewers. I assumed that his client received complaints from respondents.

The respondents were probably rude to my competitor’s interviewers. Most of the respondents are old and curmudgeonly, like me. The interviewers probably sighed or got irritated tones in their voices. Sometimes that’s all it takes for a respondent to call and complain about the interviewer’s rudeness. It was probably worse than that, though, if my client halted the project with 17 interviews left to do.

Besides pausing strategically and allowing respondents to interrupt, what helps me keep a good attitude over the length of a project is remembering that I am interrupting a respondent’s day to ask them to give me information. I often interrupt their lunch or dinner. Sometimes I even wake the baby. I understand if they get irritated.

By the way, I have heard several times that Americans tend to interrupt more than people in other parts of the world. Especially men. Especially if they’re from New York. I think women interrupt more than men, but that’s just my own experience.