The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Professional Survey Taker
Tuesday - May 16, 2006 01:34 PM in
One of the more frustrating aspects of doing survey-based research is the "Professional Survey Taker." These are people who sign up for every paid survey panel they can find (sometimes more than once) in order to try to make as much money as possible for taking surveys.
The Professional Survey Takers (PSTs for short) make life very difficult for a reputable research company because they are not representative consumers, and too many of them in a survey will spoil the data. Many focus groups make an extra effort (and pay recruiters extra money) in order to find participants who are not PSTs.
We get our share of PSTs in VocaLabs' panelist pool, and we've dealt with the problem by both keeping survey payments low (so that it isn't worth the time of someone doing it just for the money) and removing people who are signed up multiple times. We once found an intrepid PST who had signed up a couple hundred times, and frequently did the same survey multiple times.
So imagine my astonishment when we got this response to a survey invitation this morning:
On the positive side, I won't have to make the effort to remove him from the survey.
Posted by Peter Leppik
We get our share of PSTs in VocaLabs' panelist pool, and we've dealt with the problem by both keeping survey payments low (so that it isn't worth the time of someone doing it just for the money) and removing people who are signed up multiple times. We once found an intrepid PST who had signed up a couple hundred times, and frequently did the same survey multiple times.
So imagine my astonishment when we got this response to a survey invitation this morning:
i am a professional survey taker , i charge $25 per survey, if you wish to pay this, get back in touch with me in the next 30 minutes
On the positive side, I won't have to make the effort to remove him from the survey.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 01:34 PM by | | | |