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Pricing guide · 4 min read

How Much Does CATI Telephone Surveys Cost in India? A Pricing Guide

What drives the cost of cati telephone surveys in India: sample size, audience, method, cities and reporting. Learn how to budget and get a fixed quote.

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Quick answer

The cost of cati telephone surveys in India depends on five things: how hard your audience is to reach, the sample size, the method (cati scripting or quota control), the number of cities and languages, and the depth of reporting. A defined brief lets a research firm give you a fixed-fee quote.

At a glance

Guide type
Pricing guide · 4 minute read
Method covered
CATI Telephone Surveys
Research family
Quantitative research
Typical timeline
2–4 weeks end to end, which makes it the fastest route to a representative read
Typical sample
300–800 completes; budget eight to twelve dials for every completed interview
Written for
Founders pricing a first study · Procurement comparing quotes · Insight leads defending a budget

Key takeaways

  • Audience difficulty is the biggest cost driver, more than sample size
  • Each extra city and language adds fieldwork and translation cost
  • Quantitative studies are priced differently from other research types
  • A clear brief gets you a firm quote instead of an estimate

Reader intent

Who this guide is for

Three readers arrive here with different problems. Each should be able to act on this page without reading all of it.

  • Founders pricing a first study

    You need to know whether cati telephone surveys is a two-lakh or a twenty-lakh exercise before you put it in front of a board.

  • Procurement comparing quotes

    Three proposals against the same brief rarely contain the same scope. This guide shows which lines to make every vendor itemise.

  • Insight leads defending a budget

    Use the cost drivers here to show finance exactly what an extra city, language or segment buys in return.

01

What drives the price of cati telephone surveys

Every cati telephone surveys quote is built from the same components. Knowing them helps you compare proposals like-for-like and avoid surprise costs.

  • Respondent profile and incidence: how rare your target audience is
  • Sample size and number of segments to be read separately
  • Method: cati scripting, quota control, call monitoring, multilingual teams
  • Geography: number of cities, plus urban versus rural coverage
  • Languages, translation and back-translation
  • Analysis depth: tables only, or a full insight report and workshop

02

Metro versus Tier 2 pricing

Fieldwork in Tier 2 cities can cost less per interview, but harder recruitment and travel often balance that out. A multi-city cati telephone surveys study priced as one project usually works out cheaper than separate city projects.

03

How to keep costs under control

Prioritise the decisions the research must inform, and cut questions that won't change those decisions.

  • Agree must-have versus nice-to-have objectives
  • Use online or telephone methods where the audience allows
  • Phase the study: a qualitative pilot first, then quantitative scale-up
  • Reuse existing data and desk research

04

What you should receive for your budget

A professional cati telephone surveys engagement should deliver daily progress, clean datasets, topline reports, along with transparent quality-control evidence.

05

How Market Research India can help

Market Research India designs and runs cati telephone surveys projects across 50 Indian cities and 30 industries. A senior research director leads every study, and our own supervised teams handle the fieldwork. You get clear recommendations, not just data tables.

Share your objective and we will send a scoped, fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours, with a recommended method, sample and timeline.

What goes wrong

Common mistakes in cati telephone surveys

Most disappointing cati telephone surveys studies fail for reasons that were visible in the design, not in the fieldwork. These are the ones we see most often, and what to do instead.

  • 01

    Calling only during office hours

    A sample collected between 11am and 5pm over-represents people who are not at work. Spread dials across three time slots and include weekends.

  • 02

    Dialling a stale list

    An unchecked database burns the budget on dead numbers before it reaches a respondent. Clean, dedupe and test-dial a sub-sample first.

  • 03

    A script written for the eye, not the ear

    Long scales and nested brackets work on paper and collapse on a phone call. Read every question aloud before it is programmed.

  • 04

    Monitoring too few calls

    Without live listening on at least 10% of calls you cannot tell a refusal conversion from a leading prompt. Audio-audit a further sample afterwards.

  • 05

    A questionnaire nobody piloted

    Routing errors, ambiguous scales and a 35-minute runtime are cheap to find in a 30-interview pilot and expensive to find in the full dataset.

  • 06

    Fieldwork without an audit trail

    GPS tags, timestamps, audio snippets and back-checks are what let you defend a finding when a regional team disputes it. Specify them in the contract.

Run through this before sign-off

Your checklist before you brief anyone

A working sequence for a cati telephone surveys project. Most of it costs nothing, and it saves the two weeks a re-field would take.

  1. 1

    Clean, dedupe and screen the number list against do-not-call registers before dialling begins.

  2. 2

    Keep the interview under 12 minutes and read the script aloud before programming it.

  3. 3

    Train interviewers on refusal conversion, with a scripted response to the three common objections.

  4. 4

    Spread dials across morning, evening and weekend slots, with at least four attempts per number.

  5. 5

    Live-monitor 10% of calls and audio-audit a further 10% with supervisor notes attached.

  6. 6

    Publish the sample design, response rate and weighting scheme alongside the numbers.

  7. 7

    Agree in writing who acts on each finding, and by when, before the debrief ends.

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Answers

Frequently asked questions

The questions buyers ask us most often before they commission cati telephone surveys.

Is cati telephone surveys expensive in India?

India is generally cost-effective by global standards. The final price still depends on audience, sample and method.

Can I get a fixed quote?

Yes. With a defined brief we provide a fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours.

Are there hidden costs?

There shouldn't be. Ask for respondent incentives, translation and travel to be itemised in the quote.

Request a proposal

Talk to a cati telephone surveys specialist.

From guide to project

Where cati telephone surveys actually gets commissioned

If this guide has settled the method, these are the pages worth opening next: the service itself, and the markets where cati telephone surveys is most often run for our clients.

Keep exploring

More reading on cati telephone surveys

Grouped rather than listed, so you can find the one page you need instead of scanning a wall of links.

More on cati telephone surveys

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Every angle we have published on this method: what it costs, how long it takes, how large the sample should be and how to choose a partner.

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Other pricing guide articles

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The same pricing guide written for each of our other research methods, so you can compare like with like.

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CATI Telephone Surveys city by city

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Local field teams, local languages and the sector mix each market is strongest in.

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Related research services

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Quantitative methods first — these are the ones most often combined with cati telephone surveys in a single study.

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