In-house CATI vs outsourcing: weighing up the benefits
The build-or-buy decision for telephone fieldwork, and the costs that only show up after the first study.
The arithmetic on bringing telephone fieldwork in-house always looks favourable, because the comparison is usually drawn between an agency’s day rate and the marginal cost of an interviewer-hour. That is not the comparison. The question is whether you want to own a capability, and capabilities have fixed costs that a per-project quote does not.
What you are actually buying when you build
A functioning telephone unit is a licence, a dialler and a room — and then a supervisor, a recruitment pipeline, a training curriculum, a quality-monitoring routine, a sample-management discipline and someone accountable for compliance. The software is the cheap part.
Interviewing is a skill that decays without volume. A unit that runs continuously gets better; a unit that runs three studies a year has a permanently new team, and the interviewer variance that CATI is supposed to suppress comes back through the front door.
Where in-house genuinely wins
Continuous work. Tracking studies, rolling satisfaction programmes and anything that runs every month justify the fixed cost and benefit from a team that knows the subject.
Sensitive or highly technical subject matter. Interviewers who understand the category ask better follow-ups and are harder to mislead.
Data that should not leave. Where the sample is your own customer list, keeping fieldwork inside removes a whole processing relationship and the contracts that go with it.
Where outsourcing wins
Peaks. Nobody staffs for their busiest fortnight.
Reach. Multi-country or multi-language studies need capacity you cannot sensibly build.
Independence. This one is routinely underweighted. When you telephone your own customers about your own service, you are a party to the relationship being measured. Respondents are politer to the supplier than to a third party, and the resulting satisfaction score is flattering and useless. An independent fieldwork house buys you the right to be told bad news.
The obligation that does not move
Whichever way the decision goes, the duties do not transfer. Under the industry codes the organisation commissioning the work remains responsible for how respondents are treated, how data is handled and how findings are represented. Outsourcing the dialling does not outsource the accountability — which is a good reason to read a fieldwork supplier’s quality procedures as carefully as its price list.
