EXPERIENCE MATTERS
Customer List Traps and How to Avoid Them

Summary
  
Are respondents for your market research being recruited from a client-supplied list? Will the list have the leads needed to complete the recruit? How will using a list affect recruiting and incentives costs? Will disclosing the client's identity help or hurt recruiting efforts?
 
Challenges       

Client disclosure: advantages and disadvantages

Disclosing the research sponsor to a list of potential respondents does reduce recruiting and incentives costs. Respondents are usually more receptive to a market research invitation when they know who's conducting the study. (The exception, of course, is when the sponsor is experiencing negative media attention, or is not a highly-regarded company.)

This same advantage can also be a disadvantage--respondents know who the sponsor is!

And on those occasions when a respondent feels they've been wronged during the recruiting process, the next call they'll make will be to the sponsor of the research.

A respondent who didn't pass the screening was adamant that he be allowed to participate in the focus group. Attempts to explain that his occupation made him too much of an "expert" only made him furious. When he called his local office of the research sponsor, they knew nothing about the research study. Believing that the research was a sham, they launched an investigation and needed to be assured the customer wasn’t mistreated.  This situation is sometimes unavoidable, as no matter how hard you try with potential respondents, some are just having a bad day and earmark your research projects for their wrath. 

Lesson: Make sure the Sponsor knows there will inevitably be disgruntled or skeptical customers from a recruitment effort and to have some appeasement measure available, and ensure customer service know they may need to field it.  One recent idea is to have a short supplementary questionnaire from those who screen out but are willing to share an opinion.

Nondisclosure impact

When you’re unable to disclose the sponsor, expect your costs to be higher and your recruiting to take longer. Cold-calling a list is time-consuming. The interest level among people who are not familiar with market research can be pathetically low. What does that mean? The more time it takes to recruit respondents, the higher your recruiting price, more no shows and the bigger the incentive needed to get them to participate.

Protect the customers

Customer lists are usually pulled by Information Technology or database management departments. Since database administrators don't always know what personal information is needed for recruiting (or they're unable to cherry pick the data) they tend to include everything they have. And everything they have can include extremely personal customer information... birthdates, bank account numbers and the like. For that reason it's best practice to remove all fields that recruiters don't need before a customer list leaves your office.

Lesson: To save yourself time and the potential feel of impropriety – ask for a sample of the database first and then, express what you’d like removed before you receive the balance, this communicates that you have a strong ethical approach.

List Accuracy

Customer lists are never as well-maintained as you are led to believe, expect a high number of disconnected and wrong numbers. When you have a limited list, this can spell disaster. If directory assistance lookup is needed for missing or incorrect phone numbers, your costs can skyrocket.

Worse still is a database that is unable to be segmented effectively to match your research qualifying criteria, the irony is you’re left calling and upsetting a large batch of a Sponsor’s customers just to get a small group together to ask what the Sponsor can do better.

Lesson:  You never know what you're going to get from a client-supplied list until you start making the calls so forewarn and manage expectations carefully around this.

Enjoy your week, Angela.

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See a further Article on Researching Older Australian's