Here at Lake Market Research our call centre has been an integral part of our business, anyone that has worked in the right call centre environment will tell you that it is fun, bubbly yet very rewarding. Having the opportunity to speak to such a diverse range of respondents on a variety of subjects is exciting and interesting.
So what has changed? Earlier in the year one of our interviewers told us; "When I first started working for Lake, with my managerial/secretarial/admin background in the Civil Service, I didn't think telephone surveys would be my thing but, a combination of working with nice people, both in the telephone room and in the office and getting to speak to so many nice people during the surveys, I really enjoyed the work - shame Covid-19 threw a spanner in the works!"
Unfortunately Covid-19 has forced us to adapt our approach and re-think our strategy for conducting telephone interviews, why should it get the better of us? We are still nice people, we can still work together as a team and more importantly we can still make sure the public are engaged and have the opportunity to speak to so many nice people. So, a few months on and adapting to life working from home, our interviewers are enjoying projects. After speaking with the same interviewer on a recent project it's still good to hear about stories that were once told within the call centre.
"Today I was told I was a rare specimen, Why? One customer I spoke to was apprehensive about doing a telephone survey as they often had personal and intrusive questions and she had been caught out before and had also then been inundated by follow-up-calls. I assured her and at the most she could get a call to verify that she had taken a survey and that it was not completed fictitiously. I also told her that if, at anytime during the survey she was unhappy with the questions, I would be happy to halt the survey and it would be voided. She then agreed and it was when I had completed the survey, that she called me a rare specimen and said that it wasn't often a telephone survey agent spoke the truth"
It is a shame that we live in a world where we have to be cautious when we answer the telephone but it's nice to see that our team are not only conducting their work but installing confidence that it is safe to answer questions over the telephone. We are pleased with how engaged the general public has been over the last few months and that all our interviewers are excited to work, even though we are not in the same building, after all its the respondents that give us the real satisfaction.