This infrastructure equipment company is driven by its values and goals to provide a safe working environment for its customers. Motivated to pursue this objective, the company needed to explore what are the possibilities on the market. Therefore, they have decided to perform a CATI survey to discover the opinion of the customers in relation to different products. This would allow them to connect to their clients while improving the quality of the company’s services.
The Client
This infrastructure equipment company has its headquarters on the West Bengal, in India. Since most of their clients live in Nepal, they have decided to perform the CATI survey in this country. To this aim, they have contacted us at Thakur International, to provide them with the requested service.
The Indian-based company has multiple specializations and products. For example, they repair and maintain heavy equipment, such as regular and hydraulic escalators, generators, etc. They also provide services like construction, surface, and underground mining and product transportation. Being this a company encompassing many fields, we opted for a flexible and respondent-oriented method, namely CATI.
To perform a CATI survey regarding heavy equipment, the agent must have excellent communication and language skills in English, Nepali, and Hindi. The main goal was to use a CATI survey to ensure customers satisfaction. Moreover, this method would provide immediate and actionable feedback on specific products or interaction touchpoints, such as sales experience. Gauging customer satisfaction without surveying is challenging and time-consuming. On the contrary, a CATI survey could significantly speed up the process. The procedure requires that the agent collects data by phone. This allows the questioner to immediately clear any doubts expressed by the respondent during the CATI survey. As the final part of the process, the agent patches up a collection of data.
For this challenge, we have chosen an agent with the following skills
- Deep knowledge of the heavy equipment.
- Familiarity with the services provided by the company.
- Understand customer’s satisfaction levels.
- Detail-orientation, so to successfully capture every point of the CATI survey.
- Knowledge of technicalities so to answer queries posed by prospective customers.
The challenge
During the CATI survey, we found the interaction with the customers to be the major challenge. It proved hard to gather detailed and proactive from them, as they didn’t provide any recommendations, feedback or suggestion for improvement. Therefore, we had to invest extra resources on the research methodology, the call center, and phone traffic, including the cost of the interviewer.
We have encountered the following major challenges:
- Preparing questionnaire along with making it run error-free on a system.
- Finding an interviewer with a good typing speed, so to be able to record the open-ended comments.
- Changes in the answers on the part of the respondent in the course of the CATI survey. In fact, the interviewer has to both take note of the new answer, while eliminating its previous version.
Advantages
A CATI survey proved to be an incredibly effective method for these reasons:
- Assimilation of high-quality data: A CATI survey ensure the collection of high-quality information. In fact, any misunderstanding can be cleared directly between the interviewer and the respondent.
- Time-saving: The data is automatically inserted and diverted to a database. In turn, the interviewer is not overwhelmed by the task and can perform the CATI survey in a relaxed way. This proved to have major benefits as far as the interview speed is concerned.
- More accurate data collection: The odds of committing mistakes of data are close to non-existing. The data compilation is more accurate because the whole interview process is automated and the content is directly displayed on the computer screen.
Disadvantages
- CATI surveys involve the inevitable interaction with people who do not want to be contacted via phone. This often leads to irrelevant or misleading contributions to the surveys which could lead to data inaccuracy.
- CATI survey is limited by time constraints. In fact, they should be completed within a maximum of 15 minutes.
- CATI surveys are not appropriate for audiences with a low level of literacy.
At Thakur International, we have overseen the entire project: from the questionnaire design to the call scheduling and reporting. Thanks to our experience with the CATI methodology, we have developed a way to create practical, sensible and rational survey structures. Moreover, before starting the task, the interviewer has undergone extra training to present powerful, pertinent and relevant questions so to improve the quality of the data collection. The team of interviewers at Thakur international has years-long experience in performing CATI surveys, however, every task has its own details. For this reason, the team is constantly keeping up to date, so to produce the best results.
The solution
Deciding what to measure is the first step of any successful survey. In fact, the questions for the survey must be clear, concise and simple. Therefore, to overcome the possible obstacles we hired an employee with a good knowledge of CATI software, as well as multitasking abilities. This is because dealing with multiple projects at the same time, while still delivering quality results, is a must for fast and effective work. In the same vein, our employees were skilled in working in teams, in communicating with different departments, stakeholders and clients. They were able to work and collaborate effectively with minimal supervision and gather all the data deriving from the project.
Thanks to the data collected by the team at Thakur International, the Indian infrastructure equipment company managed to reach its goal of getting a deeper understanding of its clients. In turn, they have implemented the strategies to improve their effectiveness on the market based on the clients’ feedback, reaching higher levels of client satisfaction.
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