Survey Phone Calls: How To Set Them Up For Success!

Survey phone calls are one of the most common research methodologies used for market research, and the reason is apparent. 

• They provide you with immediate responses and insights. 

• They help you cover a wider geographic area more cost-effectively. 

• Survey phone calls have the highest response rate at 30.2%, followed by postal surveys (10.5%) and online surveys (4.7%).

• Telephone surveys provide better control over the response quality by allowing interviewers to clarify questions, examine respondent behavior, etc. 

But you don’t reap these benefits by simply picking up the phone and calling people. You need a perfect process with the right tools. 

So, how do you make survey phone calls that help you perfect the process and reap these benefits? This post will cover what is a survey call and how you can set it up for success.

How to conduct survey phone calls

The process of conducting a telephone survey entails the following steps, assuming that you already have your survey questions ready.  

Set up a campaign on your calling tool. 

To make survey phone calls, you need a call center tool. The right software will have features that make outreach and data collection smoother. You won’t have to:

• Spend time manually looking up and dialing numbers. 
• Note down answers and then enter them again in a shared sheet. 
• Manually divide lists among agents. 

Apart from making the process more efficient, a tool also eliminates any room for human error, such as skipping a contact or calling them twice. 

Create a phone survey script.

A calling script helps guide the conversation and ensures surveyors don’t miss out on crucial points. The script is displayed on the dashboard in a calling tool, so it’s easy to follow.

Here’s a sample of how this works in CallHub:

For survey calls, make sure the script includes: 

• An introduction to the surveyor and the organization. 
• The relationship between the organization and respondent (if any).
• Why the survey would be of interest to the respondent. 
• Disclaimer of how you’ll use the data. 
• The questionnaire you have prepared, of course.

Learn more about crafting effective phone survey scripts here.

Assign people to make calls.

Next, you schedule your calling campaign in your tool and assign calling agents. Each agent can then log into the campaign whenever required and make calls. 

Some calling tools like CallHub let you set the hours during which the campaign is live (and people can make calls). This helps maintain calling compliance during your survey phone calls. 

Follow the script and collect responses. 

Surveyors ask the questions and collect responses from contacts. A few tips to make sure these calls go as planned: 

• Have surveyors practice the script beforehand so it sounds more natural.
• Practice phone etiquette to ensure a positive experience for the respondent. 
• Record calls so you can revisit them in case you missed something. 
• Practice active listening to monitor a respondent’s interest and clarity about the questions. This will give you control over the quality of the data collected. 

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Analyze responses from survey phone calls

Before setting up the campaign, integrate your calling tool with your CRM to enable a two-way data flow. When you collect responses, they are automatically exported to the CRM. 

Your CRM provides reports to analyze responses and gather insights. 

Since survey phone calls are an integral aspect of the research process, check your tool’s analytics and monitor campaign performance. 

CallHub’s analytics dashboard gives you insights like: 

• The number of contacts you reached. 
• The number of conversations agents had.
• Unique contacts called, and 
• Agent activity (when they signed in, how many calls they made, top performers, etc.)

Use these insights to understand what works well and what doesn’t— to inform future campaigns. 

To give you a quick summary, here’s what the process of making survey phone calls should be like: 

Must-have features to make survey phone calls.

A calling tool is critical to making survey phone calls. Your software must be equipped with the following essential features to ensure a smooth process. 

Multiple dialer options for survey phone calls

While a calling tool eliminates the need to dial numbers manually, it should do more than that. With different dialer options, you get control over the following: 

1. Speed of calling. 
2. Time surveyors spend having conversations.

You can choose a relevant dialer based on the 

• Size of your contact list, 
• Number of people making calls, 
• Quality of the contact list, and 
• The type of surveys you’re conducting. 

For example, in CallHub, you can choose between three auto-dialers. 

Learn more about how to choose the best dialer for you here.  

Custom script display on calling dashboard

Most calling tools display a script that surveyors can read through. But for survey phone calls, your tool should allow you to create a custom script with three essential aspects: 

1. Personalization: This is generally achieved with merge tags (like {first_name}) that automatically pull data from your CRM and replace the placeholder with relevant information.
2. Note-taking text box: To help you collect answers for qualitative surveys and make general notes about a call. 
3. Multiple choice answers: To directly mark the respondent’s option in quantitative surveys. This saves the surveyors’ time on noting responses. 

Here’s an example of such a script from CallHub’s calling dashboard. 

CRM integration

Your CRM is the central depository for all data. When making survey phone calls, your calling tool should pull data from the CRM to personalize the calling script. 

Moreover, the data you collect during these calls should also be exported to the CRM for analysis. 

Hence, your calling tool must have a two-way integration with your CRM. Even if it doesn’t have a direct integration, you should be able to achieve this with an intermediary tool. 

CallHub integrates with most major CRMs, such as Salesforce, NationBuilder, etc. You can use Zapier to integrate it with your CRM for others that aren’t on the list.   

Dynamic caller ID

People are four times more likely to pick up a call from a local number. With the dynamic caller ID feature, you can display a local number on the respondent’s phone— irrespective of where you’re located. 

If you’re making calls in other geographic locations, the tool should automatically rent a local number for you and display it. This is especially helpful when you’re making cold calls for surveys.

DNC list

A DNC list (or Do Not Call list) stores the numbers of people who have requested not to be contacted. Once this request is made, you must honor it to maintain calling compliance. 

Calling tools, like CallHub, ensure that no more calls are made to that number for existing or future campaigns. 

Good to have features to make survey phone calls

These features may not be as necessary as the ones above, but they can boost the performance and efficiency of your efforts in getting people to take your survey.  

Text from call center for survey phone calls

This feature lets you send out a text right from the calling dashboard. You can either send this text to the number you’re calling or enter a new number (handy when calling landline numbers). 

You can use this to send: 

• Thank-you texts after survey phone calls to nurture a relationship with respondents. 
• Surveys to fill out (if you’re leveraging calls just to convince them to fill one out). 
• Surveys to be distributed among their network to get more respondents. 

Here’s what the feature looks like in CallHub.

Call recording

Recording all calls is a good idea for two significant reasons: 

• It allows you to go over calls for training and quality assurance.
• You can confirm responses or revisit calls you may not have taken notes for. 

Ideally, you should be able to access and listen to these recordings in the tool or download it to your device to share them. 

In CallHub, recordings are available in your campaign’s “Results” tab. Under this, navigate to the call you wish to revisit and click the “Notes” option. 

Clicking this opens another window: 

Clicking on the “Audio Recording” text plays the recording within the tool. You can even copy the link and paste it into your browser to download it. 

Agent analytics

Tracking metrics for your campaign’s performance is essential. However, you can get a better picture of its efficiency if you have insights into each caller’s performance, too.

Your calling tool, at the very least, should help you track:

• Times and dates when agents sign into the campaign. 
• The number of calls each surveyor made. 
• The number of hours they spend making these survey phone calls. 
• The performance of an agent against others. 

In CallHub, these insights are shown as graphs and charts, making analysis easier.

These insights can help you determine your callers’ strengths and weaknesses and prioritize your training and strategies accordingly. 

TCPA-compliant dialer for survey phone calls

Also known as a Fastclick dialer, it helps you make phone calls to cell phone numbers that haven’t consented to receive calls. 

Calls are initiated manually with a dedicated agent clicking a button with this dialer. The tool, however, takes care of queuing calls and routing them to free agents. This helps you make calls to mobiles at speeds comparable to auto-dialers while staying compliant. 

Learn more about the Fastclick dialer here. 

Answering machine detection

This feature can save you time by eliminating the need to drop a voicemail manually. 

When your calling tool detects an answering machine, it automatically drops a voicemail (which you record and save while creating the campaign) and dials the next number. 

It allows surveyors to focus on live phone calls rather than wasting time on these numbers. 

How to set up a survey phone call campaign on your tool

Let’s quickly look at setting up a campaign on your calling tool. We’ll walk you through CallHub’s dashboard as an example. 

1. Login and upload contacts.

First, log in to your CallHub account. You can sign up here for free and get started if you don’t have one. 

Next, select the “Contact List” option in the sidebar to add your contacts. You can either upload a file or import it from your CRM. 

2. Add your calling script.

Once you’ve uploaded your contacts, select the “Create” option under the “Call Center” box to start setting up (screenshot attached below). 

After naming your campaign, you’ll have to add your script. Ensure your survey questionnaire is ready before this since you’ll add the questions here. 

In CallHub, you have three options here: 

• Campaign brief: Use this to add a welcome or instructional text for surveyors who sign in.   

• Questions: This allows you to add different types of survey questions and even import them from your CRM. 

• Call dispositions: These tags describe the outcome of the call. You have several default dispositions like No answer, Answering Machine, Not interested, etc., but you can add custom ones as well.

3. Targeting

At this stage, you select the contact list(s) with the target contacts. You also set a number to make calls from and choose the dialer you want. In CallHub, you can also enable the answering machine detection feature here. 

4. Assign agents to conduct survey phone calls

Now, here is where you assign agents to make calls. In CallHub, you can either select the agents who are already added to your account or assign them later. 

To add them at this stage, search for the names and select the ones you want. 

You can also enable the option to record all calls here and set a maximum call duration. 

5. Set schedule 

Lastly, you set a schedule for the campaign to go live. Set the days and times of operations as per your state’s mandated cold calling hours and click finish. No one can make calls before or after these set hours. 

Once you click finish, the campaign goes live (based on the schedule).

The steps after this are pretty straightforward. Your agents sign in to their accounts and start calling and collecting responses. 

That’s pretty much all you need to make survey phone calls—all this information and, of course, a comprehensive calling solution to help you make these calls. 

Since you’re here, why not give CallHub a try? We have a 14-day free trial period, which is sufficient for you to run a quick survey campaign and get hands-on experience on the tool. Also, we check all the boxes for both the must-have and good-to-have features above. 😉  

Sign up here and give it a try. 

Featured image source: Photo by PhotoMIX Company from Pexels