Proper Inflection Can Reduce Refusal Rates

I received some free coaching on telephone presentation skills from a prospect during my telemarketing career.  He asked me, “Are you asking me or telling me?”  I was telling him about a service so that I could set an appointment for a sales rep to make a presentation.  I was inflecting up at the end of sentences so that they sounded like questions.  The prospect went on to tell me that this habit was extremely annoying and showed a lack of confidence.  

Anyone who sells anything needs confidence.  If a salesperson is not confident the prospect immediately doubts the product or service.

I remembered this free coaching when I started working in market research and public opinion research.  We are not selling anything, but the same principles apply.  If an interviewer does not sound confident when he reads an introduction to a questionnaire, respondents will doubt the legitimacy of the survey.  They will think that it is not really a survey but a sales scam.  An interviewer can sound more confident by reading statements as statements and questions as questions.  An interviewer who is not confident will read an introduction to a survey like this:

‘Hello?  My name is John Stevens?  I’m calling from Saperstein Associates?  A public opinion research firm in Columbus, Ohio?’

An interviewer who reads an introduction this way is rarely conscious that she is doing so.  She is asking the respondent a question, which is ‘May I continue?’  If an interviewer can be aware of this and overcome it, he will have a better chance of having respondents listen long enough to learn what the survey is about.  This results in lower refusal rates, which helps and interviewer to feel more confident, which can further reduce refusal rates.

John C. Stevens
Saperstein Associates
(614) 261-0065

jstevens@sapersteinassociates.com

Slow Down!

I was out of town for several days while a telephone survey project was going on at my office.  When I got back to work and started editing the completed interviews I noticed some odd things in the data.  I cannot give too many details without violating the client’s confidentiality, but I can say that it was a problem that I anticipated before I left town.  I briefed our interviewers on the project the night before I caught my flight to Phoenix to visit my mother.

The survey was one that we have conducted almost every year for the last several years.  The sample for the survey is retired people and the questions with the weird answers can be confusing to people of any age.  We ask people to calculate percentages of their household income.  When I briefed the project last week I told interviewers to slow down, especially when reading these questions.  I reminded the interviewers that we are interviewing people in their 70s, 80s and 90s, so they might not hear or completely understand the questions if the interviewer reads too fast.  One of the interviewers, a man in his 70s, said in the briefing that he was offended by this.  I replied that I was basing the instruction on my experience with the project.  I knew that we would have problems if the interviewers did not slow down.

A good interviewer will mirror their pace to the pace at which a respondent speaks.  A good interviewer will also listen for when a respondent is not listening and re-read questions as appropriate.  Our questionnaires are written with certain words EMPHASIZED so that respondents have a clearer understanding of what we are asking.  When I brief and coach interviewers, I usually tell them to emphasize sibilant words.  Words such as “IF” and “BOTH” do not travel well over the telephone, so respondents sometimes do not hear them.  When this happens, respondents often become confused by the question or think we are asking a different question.

I held a meeting with the interviewers on my first day back at work, before we started the dialing shift.  I told them I was cutting off their coffee until they slowed down.

Don't Get Discouraged

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race”  Calvin Coolidge

We finished a huge telephone survey project yesterday.  By huge, I mean 1,000 interviews.  We usually conduct 300 or 400 interviews on a project.  On the last few days of the project I held very brief pre-shift meetings.  These meetings were quite brief.  The purpose was to tell the interviewers not to get discouraged.

It is easy to get discouraged during the last few days of a survey project involving random digit dialing.  We ask to speak to the person in the household who is having the next birthday.  We almost always have quotas by gender, and we almost always fill our quotas of women before we fill our quotas of men.  When we fill our quotas of women, we call random households and ask to speak to the man in the household who is having the next birthday.  It takes many calls to find a man who is willing to participate in a survey.  This project was even more difficult because we had to interview people between the ages of 18 and 55.

I have conducted interviews on and supervised many such projects.  An interviewer can sit on the phone for an hour and listen to answering machine messages and busy signals.  When someone finally answers the phone, they tell you to take their number off the list.  Another hour goes by.  A woman answers the phone.  She says that her husband is not home and he doesn’t do surveys anyway.  Fifteen minutes later a man answers the phone.  He says to unrandomly select another household for the survey.

It is important for an interviewer not to get discouraged because if he or she gets discouraged, he or she will sound discouraged.  If an interviewer sounds discouraged, a respondent will be less likely to want to participate in the survey.  This makes it even more difficult to get the last few interviews needed to finish the project.

Our recent survey was not as difficult as a project we did last year.  We did a survey in which respondents had to be 25 or older and thinking about going back to school in the next six months.  After we filled our quotas of women on that project, we had shifts in which we completed one or no interviews.  That is how I knew that I needed to give our interviewers some encouragement on our recent project.

Engagement

I have had some success at social media marketing since my earlier blog post.  The type of marketing that I do is different from most other types of marketing in that I do not sell a product or service.  I recruit interviewers for a market research and public opinion research firm.  Still, I am in the online marketplace offering something in exchange for something else.

My supervisor told me a few weeks ago that my recruiting efforts through Facebook and Google+ plus were a good idea, and that they had produced some good results, but that they were not enough.  We have several large projects that need to be completed by the end of the year.  So, I got busy again.  We were slow over the summer.  During that time I built my networks on Facebook and Google+ and worked at practicing engagement.  I Liked and +1ed comments and pictures.  I engaged in discussions about some of these posts.  I remember spending most of a morning arguing with Facebook friends about President Obama’s “You didn't build this” comment.

The engagement paid off.  I got my first Google+ referral as a result of sharing a blog post on Google+.  I sent emails to several Facebook friends.  Here is what I sent them:

Saperstein Associates recently started a very interesting and worthwhile project.  It must be done sooner than I expected so that we can start on several other interesting and worthwhile projects.

I need to recruit a few more people to fill our phones through the holiday season.

Please take a look at the link below and let me know if you can help out and make a little extra money over the next few weeks.  If not, please pass the link along to anyone you think might be interested.

Thanks for your help.

John

http://www.sapersteinassociates.com/default.asp?contentID=514

Not everyone responded, and not all of those who responded were able to become interviewers, but the email campaign resulted in several good hires.  I got a phone call from a Facebook friend about an hour after I posted my letter to the editor of the Columbus Dispatch.

We could still use a few more interviewers, especially for our Saturday and Sunday shifts.  Please give me a call if you are interested.

John C. Stevens

Saperstein Associates

(614) 261-0065

jstevens@sapersteinassociates.com

Establishing Rapport

Telephone survey respondents sometimes tell me that they will do my telephone survey, but they don’t usually do surveys.  Experience has given me some skill at getting people to answer survey questions, but my voice probably deserves most of the credit.  I have a deep and authoritative-sounding voice.

One reason that many people do not participate in telephone surveys is personal or hot-button questions.  We tell people when we read the introduction to a questionnaire that the survey is confidential.  We tell them that their responses will be reported in the aggregate and not individually.  Respondents often do not hear this.  If they do hear it, they perceive it more from the tone of voice of the interviewer.  Some respondents ask direct questions about the confidentiality of a survey.  If an interviewer can answer such questions without getting flustered, the interviewer can usually establish rapport with the respondent.

Establishing rapport with a survey respondent is important not simply to get them to participate at all, but also to give honest answers to hot-button and personal questions.  If a respondent perceives that an interviewer is truly neutral the respondent will honestly give answers that may be considered socially unacceptable.  If we do a survey about household financial management, we want accurate information about gambling habits and credit card debt.  We ask demographic questions about age, income, marital status and education level so that we can make sure that we get a representative sample of a population.  We usually ask these questions at the end of the questionnaire.  An interviewer who can establish rapport at the beginning of the call is less likely to have a respondent refuse to answer these personal questions.

Sometimes it is too easy to establish rapport.  Some respondents love to talk.  Several years ago I worked on a survey in which we asked women about their experiences at the maternity center of a local hospital.  One woman went into great detail about childbirth, but was offended that I asked about her annual household income.  Some respondents want to talk about anything but the questions on the survey.  They view the call as an opportunity to get something off their chest.  The interviewer’s responsibility in such situations is to keep the call on track by continually bringing the respondent back to the questions.  This often requires tact and diplomacy, which is also part of establishing rapport.  

Probing for Illuminating Information

My work as a market research interviewer helps organizations to be more competitive and efficient.  Businesses commission market research studies to learn how to add value to their product or service.  They may also conduct market research to uncover problems.  Market research studies are also done so that public relations workers can learn how to put the best spin on a message.

One of my best memories is of when a client said that the information we gathered was illuminating.  To get illuminating data, an interviewer must be able to probe well.  Probing is asking questions that are not written in the questionnaire to clarify vague or general responses to open-ended questions.  We also probe with questions such as “What else?” or “Why else?” to get as much information as possible from a respondent.

Probing well requires the ability to think quickly and the ability to read a respondent.  An interviewer must not ask leading questions.  For example, a respondent might say that the most important issue to be addressed by local public officials is education.  One person might be thinking about teacher salaries when they talk about education.  Another person might be thinking about outdated textbooks.  Still another person might be thinking about dropout rates.  If the interviewer asks “Do you mean the high dropout rate?” the interviewer is asking a leading question.  The respondent might mean the dropout rate, but they might mean something else.  If it is something else, we could lose the information by asking a leading question.  Many respondents will just say “Uh, yeah” rather than correct the interviewer.

A stock probing question is “What do you mean?”  This question usually gets a respondent to be more specific, but sometimes a respondent will give a definition of a word that they used.  Such a response is not usually useful.  A few years ago I did a telephone interview about an upcoming election.  I asked a respondent how he would vote in a race for a seat in the United States House of Representatives.  He told me how he would vote.  The follow-up question was “Why?”  The respondent told me that he would vote for his candidate because the other candidate was a slacker.  I could tell that this guy would give me a definition of the word “slacker” if I asked what he meant, so I asked “What gives you that impression?”  He talked about missed votes and failure to answer letters and phone calls.  This is the kind of information clients need to address why people make the choices that they do.

Another good probing question is “Why is that important to you?”  This usually gets at information that is not revealed by agree/disagree statements or demographic information.  It must be asked appropriately, however.

John C. Stevens

Saperstein Associates

(614) 261-0065

jstevens@sapersteinassociates.com

Neutrality in Political Polls

A Facebook friend who lives in Florida recently posted about a polling call that his wife answered.  The interviewer asked if she planned to vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming election.  When she said no, the interviewer said they hoped she would change her mind and ended the call.

I commented on my friend’s post that this did not sound like a legitimate poll.  It was really a canvassing call.  A real poll would not ask a leading question.  Where I work, we even go so far as to rotate the names of the candidates in a race so that half of the respondents hear the name of the Democratic candidate first, and half of the respondents hear the name of the Republican candidate first.  That is one way that we work to reduce bias in polling.

Respondents often ask our interviewers who is sponsoring a survey.  When we conduct political polls we often do not tell the interviewers the name of the client.  We tell them to tell respondents that interviewers are intentionally not told who is sponsoring a survey, so as not to bias or influence anyone’s answers.  We have done several polls for the Columbus Dispatch.  At the end of the call we ask respondents if a reporter from the Dispatch may call them to discuss their answers.  When we do these polls, we tell interviewers to tell respondents who is sponsoring the survey after they have completed the survey.

When I brief interviewers on a new telephone survey project I like to remind them that they are free to have opinions about candidates and issues, but to keep those opinions to themselves when interviewing respondents.  If an interviewer asks:

“If the election were held today, who would you vote for President of the United States, Barack Obama, the Democrat, or Mitt Romney, the Republican?”

OR

“If the election were held today, who would you vote for President of the United States, Mitt Romney, the Republican, or Barack Obama, the Democrat?”

The interviewer should not emphasize either choice.  If the interviewer asks a respondent if they agree or disagree with a political position, the interviewer needs to read the question in such a way that the respondent cannot tell if the interviewer agrees or disagrees with the position.  We occasionally have respondents ask interviewers how they feel about issues.  They are permitted to discuss their opinions only after the respondent has answered all of the survey questions, and then to keep it brief.  We remind interviewers not to say okay or uh-huh after a respondent answers a question.  These utterances can be interpreted as approval or disapproval of answers to questions.

As far as I know, CBS News, Gallup, Quinnipiac University and Rasmussen train their pollsters in maintaining neutrality.  These organizations have an interest in making sure that the data they collect is accurate.  The larger the phone room, the more difficult it may be to make sure that each interviewer is asking questions in a neutral manner.  Errors in sampling may also skew polling results slightly.  That is why a margin of error is always reported with survey results.  For the most part, however, polling organizations have neither a Democratic nor a Republican agenda.

John C. Stevens

Saperstein Associates

(614) 261-0065

jstevens@sapersteinassociates.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-political-polls/2012/10/12/21408264-13de-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html