CATI survey: car mechanics, UK

Our client was working with a company that supplies high-quality refurbished electronic control units, such as engine control units, to car repairers in the UK. We were provided two lists by our client. The first list contained details of the company’s active customers in the UK segmented by how recently they had purchased while the second list contained details of car repairers who had showed interest in purchasing from our client but hadn’t actually done so yet. We contacted individuals on the first list in for 7-minute phone interviews (CATI) and invited the contacts on the second list to complete a 5-minute online survey in return for a shopping voucher. The research was designed to find out about respondents’ views on the use of refurbished electronic parts, the factors which influence them to select new parts or refurbished parts, their awareness of the company’s brand and competitor brands and, amongst those who knew the company’s brand, the perception of their services.

After guiding our client on developing a suitable questionnaire and ensuring that our calling team was fully briefed on the study, we started making calls to contacts on the CATI list. We ran into some challenges with outdated information on the company’s contact list, and after speaking to the client we kicked off an in-house recruitment process to uncover further potential respondents who also knew of the company. We emailed the contacts on the survey list and sent a number of reminders to people who did not click on the survey link, and people who started the survey but did not cmplete it.

Using these approaches we completed 110 CATI calls and obtained online responses from 96 different car repairers.

Our client was extremely pleased with how we overcame the challenges with the CATI calls and the completion rate for the online survey, and they ended up getting some great insight from our respondents.