More signs of the decline of CATI

The April issue of MRS’s Research Magazine arrived through my letterbox today and on pages 4 and 5 were two more articles which augur the decline of CATI. The first was the news that GfK Custom is to close its last call centre in the US. This decision is the product of the shift towards outsourcing and offshoring call centres and of the modality shift to Internet based data collection. The article highlighted that other agencies such as TNS, Harris Interative, and Synovate have also been reducing their US-based call centre capacity.

The article also quoted the CASRO Trends Survey for 2006 which showed that telephone is still the largest primary medium, with 47%, ahead of Internet which is the primary data collection method for 39% of agencies. Jeff Sperring, head of operations at GfK Custom, said that the new strategy was “more fiscally sound”. “It transfers a large fixed cost to a variable cost,”.

The second article was on the news that the Australian telecoms regulator has set new, restrictive times of when researchers can call people, wrapping them in with tele-marketers. The new time slot will be 9:00am to 8:30pm on weekdays, between 9:00am and 5:00pm on Saturdays, and not at all on Sundays and public holidays – unless recipients have given prior permission. The weekday restrictions are in line with researchers’ own guidelines, but the loss of weekend slots will surely impact the representivity of surveys.

Most of the discussion of trends concentrates on the growth of online and the decline of other modalities, but I suspect the big change is away from sampling towards panels. We are already seeing a growth in mobile phone panels and I am sure that most CATI as well as most online research will be conducted via panels in the future.