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FGI has been conducting telephone surveys since the paper and pencil days. We still have employees here who remember rifling through phone books to select telephone numbers for dialing.
Our industry has changed so dramatically over the past two decades, and FGI has changed with it.
FGI operates a state of the art 80 station telephone center located in Virginia Beach, Virginia. After many years of maintaining a phone center at our headquarters in North Carolina, the decision was made to move our telephone operations to Virginia Beach, for two very good reasons:
- The labor market in Virginia Beach provides a steady stream of prospective interviewers and supervisors with extensive market research and call center experience. The average interviewer comes to FGI with at least a year of previous experience in a market research and/or call center environment, and frequently much more than that.
- Because this labor market allows us to keep our phone center fully staffed at all times, all FGI interviewing continues to be conducted from the United States. This helps us to maintain a level of quality that we believe is key to delivering good data to our clients.
Our telephone center utilizes the Quancept CATI system with a predictive dialer to allow for the most cost-efficient and speedy data collection possible.
The center is staffed with trained and experienced interviewers and a dedicated supervisory team. A quality control team carefully monitors interviews to ensure that surveys are being conducted using the best telephone data collection techniques in the business.
Our staggered shift schedules allow us to accommodate business and consumer studies across time zones.
While our phone center handles many different kinds of projects, there are certain areas where we truly excel.
Response rate driven studies - In this era of Do Not Call legislation and rapidly declining response rates for telephone data collection across the board, it becomes even more critical to maintain project-specific minimum response rates for certain kinds of studies.
These kinds of requirements are nothing new to FGI - we have several clients who have long-running projects with us who continue to renew year after year because of our ability to meet their response rate needs. Careful study management and excellent interviewers make this possible.
Hispanic interviewing - As the Hispanic population in the United States continues to increase, so does the need for research with this population. This is a group with significant influence and buying power in the marketplace, and their opinions will continue to be a priority for many industries. A portion of the Hispanic population in the US is unacculturated, speaking little English and maintaining strong ties to their native culture. To effectively reach this segment, a well-rounded staff of experienced Spanish speaking interviewers from a variety of nationalities is a must-have, and FGI has it. Almost 30 percent of our interviewing staff is bilingual. Because of the compelling need of our clients to be able to reach Hispanics, maintaining this asset is a priority for FGI.
Multi-modal research - Telephone research can become expensive, with online studies becoming more and more cost effective by the day. However, there are some studies that simply cannot be conducted in their entirety on the Web without compromising the methodology. These situations call for a multi-modal approach. FGI is proficient in conducting multi-modal studies. Whether your need is for phone/web, phone/mail, web/mail, or some other combination, FGI has the infrastructure in place to deliver data seamlessly across the multiple collection methods, and we can assist you in determining which combination is right for your study.
Learn More...
If you have a telephone study that you would like to receive a cost estimate for, or if you want to receive more information about FGI's telephone research services, please contact us.
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