Hiring guide · 4 min read

CATI Telephone Surveys: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Research Firm

Ten questions to ask any cati telephone surveys provider in India before you sign, covering fieldwork, quality, sampling, data security and reporting.

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Quick answer

Before hiring a cati telephone surveys firm, ask who does the fieldwork, how quality is checked, how the sample is designed, which languages they cover, how data is secured, who writes the report, and what the deliverables include.

At a glance

Guide type: Hiring 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: Buyers running a vendor call · Procurement scoring proposals · First-time commissioners

Key takeaways

Good firms answer these questions confidently
Ask for QC evidence from past projects
Check DPDP Act compliance
Meet the person who will lead your project

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.

Buyers running a vendor call
Questions that reveal whether an agency has actually run cati telephone surveys at your scale.
Procurement scoring proposals
A way to score the answers rather than the presentation.
First-time commissioners
What good answers sound like, so you can tell them from merely fluent ones.

The 10 questions

Do you run fieldwork in-house in my cities?
How do you verify interviews?
How will you design the sample?
Which languages do you work in?
How do you handle translation?
How is data secured, and are you DPDP compliant?
Who leads the project day to day?
Who writes the report?
What exactly will I receive? (e.g. daily progress, clean datasets, topline reports)
Can I see a sample report?

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
Significance claimed on thin bases
A gap between two sub-groups of forty respondents is rarely real. Agree the minimum reportable base before field and grey out everything below it in the tables.
06
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.

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
Clean, dedupe and screen the number list against do-not-call registers before dialling begins.
2
Keep the interview under 12 minutes and read the script aloud before programming it.
3
Train interviewers on refusal conversion, with a scripted response to the three common objections.
4
Spread dials across morning, evening and weekend slots, with at least four attempts per number.
5
Live-monitor 10% of calls and audio-audit a further 10% with supervisor notes attached.
6
Publish the sample design, response rate and weighting scheme alongside the numbers.
7
Agree in writing who acts on each finding, and by when, before the debrief ends.

Need cati telephone surveys?

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Answers

Frequently asked questions

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

Will you answer these questions for us?

Gladly. Ask us on a discovery call.

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

CATI Telephone Surveys: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Research Firm

Who this guide is for

The 10 questions

How Market Research India can help

Common mistakes in cati telephone surveys

Your checklist before you brief anyone

Frequently asked questions

Where cati telephone surveys actually gets commissioned

More reading on cati telephone surveys

More on cati telephone surveys

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