The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Earn CASH to Take Surveys!!!!!
Thursday - December 01, 2005 04:28 PM in
Every so often we get an e-mail at VocaLabs which along the lines of, "You b******* are so f****** cheap to only pay a lousy m************ buck for your survey!!! I refuse to do it!!! Just watch as you f***** go out of business when nobody does your s***** surveys!!!" (the obscenity is, sadly, typical).
And our reaction is always: "Good thing he's out of our panelist pool."
And our reaction is always: "Good thing he's out of our panelist pool."
We're always very upfront about the kinds of surveys we offer, and how much we pay. Typically we offer about $1.00 for a survey which takes 15 minutes or so, and we always tell people how much we'll pay them and how long a survey will take. Clearly, nobody is getting rich (or even making minimum wage) doing VocaLabs surveys. Yet some people have the curious notion (promoted in part by web sites like this one, or this one which charge for access to a list of companies which offer paid surveys--a list which anyone can find with a little Google searching) that they can take surveys as a full-time job.
But part of the reason we only pay $1.00 for a survey is that we really don't want people to take our surveys for money. The buck is a token of appreciation, not payment for doing a job.
To begin with, consider the kind of person we want to survey: typical American and Canadian consumers. The typical consumer does not spend hours a day just filling out surveys, and anyone who does is not typical. Therefore, we do not want a "professional" survey-taker in our panelist pool.
Instead, we want people who are motivated by the fun of doing the survey itself, and the idea that they're helping our clients. If someone is doing the survey just to get paid, then we won't get the kind of honest feedback we're looking for: instead, we'll get (at best) the answers the survey-taker thinks we're looking for, or (at worst) he or she will just check the first box on every question to get it done quickly. Professional survey-takers are a big enough problem that there are companies which specialize in nothing but recruiting people who have never taken any surveys before (and they charge a bundle).
Also consider: if someone signs up for the money, then he might sign up twice in order to get twice as much money. Having the same person take the same survey twice means that we have to throw out that data, and go find someone else. This is a real problem: we once had the same person sign up with us over 200 times using different names and addresses from the phone book (he wasn't even located in North America, which is even worse). When we discover people like this--and we usually discover them within a few weeks--we have to go back and invalidate every survey that person ever did. If this is a problem when we pay a buck for a survey, imagine how much worse the problem would be if we paid $5 or $10.
We have about 90,000 panelists right now. If every one of them was trying to make a living taking surveys, that would mean an annual payout of around $2 billion dollars just for survey payments (never mind any of our other expenses). I doubt the entire survey industry is that large, but we certainly aren't.
So it is very unlikely that very many people can actually make a living doing consumer surveys, and to the extent those people exist, we don't want them in our panelist pool. (By the way, this is different than mystery shopping, which actually can be a real job and often requires some real training and work.)
Posted by Peter Leppik
But part of the reason we only pay $1.00 for a survey is that we really don't want people to take our surveys for money. The buck is a token of appreciation, not payment for doing a job.
To begin with, consider the kind of person we want to survey: typical American and Canadian consumers. The typical consumer does not spend hours a day just filling out surveys, and anyone who does is not typical. Therefore, we do not want a "professional" survey-taker in our panelist pool.
Instead, we want people who are motivated by the fun of doing the survey itself, and the idea that they're helping our clients. If someone is doing the survey just to get paid, then we won't get the kind of honest feedback we're looking for: instead, we'll get (at best) the answers the survey-taker thinks we're looking for, or (at worst) he or she will just check the first box on every question to get it done quickly. Professional survey-takers are a big enough problem that there are companies which specialize in nothing but recruiting people who have never taken any surveys before (and they charge a bundle).
Also consider: if someone signs up for the money, then he might sign up twice in order to get twice as much money. Having the same person take the same survey twice means that we have to throw out that data, and go find someone else. This is a real problem: we once had the same person sign up with us over 200 times using different names and addresses from the phone book (he wasn't even located in North America, which is even worse). When we discover people like this--and we usually discover them within a few weeks--we have to go back and invalidate every survey that person ever did. If this is a problem when we pay a buck for a survey, imagine how much worse the problem would be if we paid $5 or $10.
We have about 90,000 panelists right now. If every one of them was trying to make a living taking surveys, that would mean an annual payout of around $2 billion dollars just for survey payments (never mind any of our other expenses). I doubt the entire survey industry is that large, but we certainly aren't.
So it is very unlikely that very many people can actually make a living doing consumer surveys, and to the extent those people exist, we don't want them in our panelist pool. (By the way, this is different than mystery shopping, which actually can be a real job and often requires some real training and work.)
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 04:28 PM by | | | |