Web or Phone: Which One?

These are popular choices for collection of customer satisfaction data, and sometimes there are questions about why they both thrive. Why hasn’t one overtaken the other?
These are popular choices for collection of customer satisfaction data, and sometimes there are questions about why they both thrive. Why hasn’t one overtaken the other? That fact alone might seem confusing when choosing a methodology. Believe it or not, there is a clear answer, but it depends on your business objectives and your budget. The simplest way to compare the two is to look at the various issues with respect to data collection and see how the two score against each other.
 
Response Rates: Advantage Phone
This is with the caveat that sometimes web can get comparable response rates, but the conditions have to be just right. In most cases that means that either 1) the established contact method is already via web or e-mail (such as surveying those that have e-mailed a contact center), or 2) the population has been primed to look for and respond to requests for information from the sender (such as in an employee survey)
 
Response rates are important because they usually affect the distribution of scores. Volunteer survey methodologies like web or paper often have low response rates that would indicate that only a motivated few are responding, and that may not be representative of the population, often because the motivation may be largely based on dissatisfaction. As indicated elsewhere on this site, a business cannot and should not be guided by a few negative anecdotes.
 
Quota Control: Advantage Phone
With web, it is almost impossible to control the number of responses from each group of interest, when it is important to get a particular number of responses from, say ,10 regions so that they may reliably compared. Or worse, in even more granular situations such as when a call center would like five surveys per month for each of their 65 agents. A web survey will be a shotgun approach that may yield 30+ responses for more than 20 of the agents, while another 20 may have just a few or none at all.
 
With a telephone methodology, the surveying can stop once the quota is met for each agent, and particular focus can be paid to fulfilling the quota for agents that either have low sample or lower response rates. In this way, the survey goals can be met.
 
Verbatim Quality: Even
However, they are far from equivalent, and ultimately it is a matter of perspective as to which is better. Verbatims typed on a web survey are indeed “straight from the horse’s mouth”, so to speak, but this cuts two ways. While the web comment may be lengthier, or folksier (owing to the inevitable grammar and expletives issues), it may be less useful.
 
Trained telephone interviewers will often ask for expansion or clarification when a comment does not seem to make sense or is non-actionable, and actionable comments are certainly preferable.
 
Another issue with web surveys is that many times, the respondent will use the comments area to communicate the specifics of a problem to the recipient, believing that there is a system for handling such information, which there most often is not. That can lead to (further) frustration on the part of the customer. The web survey comments process must be properly designed, or it doesn’t work well. In the meantime, verbatims collected by telephone are often more useful as a business tool.
 
Cost: Advantage Web
Web is almost always less expensive than phone because only the respondent spends the time on the survey – there is no interviewer involved.
 
Data Reliability: Advantage Phone
Besides the issue of projectability of the results (or lack of ability to use them to predict the true views of the target population) caused by the non-response bias in volunteer surveys such as web, there are some issues that can bring the responses themselves into question.
 
One is the potential for lack of randomization caused by spam filtering. Certain ISPs filter spam in specific ways, as do certain businesses, as well as a certain types of potential respondents. Just as the profile of a “user of e-mail” might differ from that of a “non-user of e-mail”, so might the users or certain ISPs, or specific businesses, or spam filtering schemes differ from the target population. In the end, you do not know who is receiving your e-mail. There are some schemes that attempt to determine this, but they are not reliable and the resulting data has the same issues. If you don’t know who is getting your invitations, you can’t begin to make inferences about the population based on the group who is completing the surveys!
 
The second problem with web in the area of reliability is that if the scale is not understood by the respondent, there is generally no intervening mechanism to catch the problem. The understanding of the scale on the part of a web respondent is largely left to chance.
 
Conclusion
 
A web process can be used when the target population is “primed” by virtue of previous contact or a special relationship that would lead to a high response rate, but otherwise it suffers from the standpoint that the resulting data may not be predictive. It is less expensive than phone, but care must be taken in terms of its use for critical business decisions, even in the cases that it can provide data to the target group level.

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