I sometimes post a crazy e-mail of the week, today I'm going to relate a crazy voice mail of the week. As you can imagine when your company makes hundreds of thousands of phone calls every week some people are going to call you and leave you an irate message for calling them.
One lady this week began with: "I am on the Do Not Call list (pollsters are exempt) and I can't believe you are calling me up asking for sex."
After a 2 second pause she proceeded to say 'and age and party and race.' Her complaint was that she thought it was inappropriate for us to ask her demographic questions. But that two second pause after the 'asking for sex' made it one of the funnier voice mails we've ever received. I don't think she was trying to be funny, she was definitely mad, and I wonder if the pause was because she realized how bad what she just said sounded. Should have stuck with saying gender ma'am! But you made us laugh...and we took you off our lists.
This is an odd suggestion... but have you ever considered noting the specific demographic information of the people who call/email you asking to be taken off your lists? (if they answered the polling questions in the first place, that is.)
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to see if that group of people is predominantly some demographic over another. And whether your sample might be slightly skewed by their exclusion.
Well, most people who get added to our do-not-call list wouldn't likely get called again anyway, considering we use random samples and don't poll most places more than every couple months, so it has no effect on our sampling. Also, there's no way of knowing their demographic info unless we look it up based on the phone number they provide, and that just seems stalkerish.
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