Jeffrey Henning in his article Do phone surveys have a future? argues that while phone surveys have suffered at the hands of online surveys there is still a place for the telephone in the market research process. A point which I completely agree with.

While online surveys are essentially our bread and butter we have recently completed a number of recent projects where telephone interviews have been used successfully to capture the type of data that an online survey could never get.

Online surveys are great at quantitative data collection and are pretty good at qualitative surveying but they don’t allow for the type of probing questions which are quite often essential in qualitative research. (e.g. I see you rated the service as poor, why is that?, what would you do if you were in charge?)

The added bonus of telephone interviews is that respondents are generally far more candid with their responses compared to self completed surveys. Why? – I figure it has something to do with the fact that people are generally reluctant to commit their more sensitive views in written form.  Additionally, writing down your responses takes far more effort that just telling someone what you think.

To sum up, more than often we use telephone surveys to collect qualitative data so we are able to establish the lay of the land. The findings from the telephone interviews can then be used to implement an on-going monitoring which can be done effectively  by online surveys.