Case Studies / CATI-Related Tools
CATIHelp: Too Good to be True?
By Bill Sutton of Telesurveys Research Associates
One of the ironies of the interviewing business has been that those of us who provide information to other companies frequently have little information about our own. We are often in the dark about interviewer productivity, true job cost (including overhead), objective employee evaluations, effective call scheduling and some dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other factors.
Telesurveys Research Associates made the decision in June of 1998 to move into this century before it ended. We significantly upgraded our server and network software, and we moved from a 12 station CATI license to a 36 station license. One of the natural inclusions in that decision was CATIHelp. We decided to make this investment based, in part, on the information on cost savings that CATIHelp would provide.
To have expanded our network without adding CATIHelp would have been reckless, because this program provides the management tools necessary to safeguard the overall investment. Tthe software makes it possible to learn as much about your organization as you care to know. In fact, it provides more tools than any one user will ever likely use.
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Managing means deciding. Good decisions depend on good information. The product provides that information. Do you want to know about job costs? Sure, for today or job-to-date? Interviewer productivity? Certainly. Do you want it by one job, a group of related jobs, across all jobs? Overhead allocation? You determine it, and show it in a report or not. How about tracking productivity on the supervisor screen in real time? Can do. Accounting reports can provide hours by employee, hours by job, staff time hours, and hours by activity.
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And CATIHelp eliminates the need for paper time sheets.
CATIHelp works by integrating completely with Ci3 CATI. It reads the sample database file (DB.CON) for dispositions and status and recognizes interviewer numbers and job numbers. It takes that information and the information that it acquires from the timekeeping module to form the basis of its calculations. There is much more to it than that, but that is the crux. From that data it can calculate hours by interviewer, completes per hour by interviewer, hours worked by job, numbers of call attempts by hour and endless other permutations of cost accounting and productivity. It then can create reports at the end of the day at the touch of a button, requiring no computer literacy.
But accounting and job costing are only measurements of what happened. Good management means active management of employees to improve the future. CATIHelp helps again. Employees can access the hours worked for the pay period, see their sign-in and sign-out times, and receive greetings or messages from management on their screens.
These small things make for a better work environment. More importantly, interviewers have a much more accurate and objective measurement of their productivity than before.
CATIHelp calculates their hours and completes and compares them to the overall average for each job they work. From that calculation it creates a standard deviation. That number is a basis for rating all employees, by one job, or by all jobs. It is now possible to see all interviewers rated by an ongoing objective measurement. Interviewers can see their rating compared to the average and be judged by production, not a supervisor's bias.
If an interviewer is struggling, there is a tool to assist. Another report generates a dialing analysis that shows, by day, all dials and dispositions for that interviewer. It also shows time between dials and compares all data to the averages for the job. A supervisor can identify those who might lose time because they are upset over a refusal, or a terminate. The supervisor and the interviewer can be much more comfortable discussing production when the information is objectively obtained and shared.
Even implementing CATIHelp is instructive. The software has extensive customizing capabilities. These require management to answer some questions during setup that some small businesses overlook. How much time should be allowed between sign-in and the first dial? How many minutes mean someone is late from break? Exactly how should we assign tasks, and what are the task names? How should staff costs be allocated to studies?
The software is capable of much, much more. Many of the reports can be exported to programs such as MS Access for further manipulation and analysis. Extensive README files and a responsive help line make installation easy.
There are, of course, caveats. Anything that sounds too good to be true probably is. But the warning is this: once this system is fully installed, your business will very likely change. So will the skills it takes to run it. Supervisors who once were accounting zombies, checking time sheets and counting tally sheets, will need to develop other skills. Managers who had ideas about who was productive and who wasn't may find those ideas in need of revision. Favorite clients who once were thought to be profitable may turn out not to be, and vice versa. Change will occur and CATIHelp is a tool to manage that change as well as create it.
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