Attention Panel Companies – Your Panelists Want to Talk to You

In the course of conducting studies, we have inadvertently discovered something about panel companies. They don’t want to talk to their panelists. True to the nature of their online business, they want all correspondence with panel members to be through email or the panel member portal. They make it close to impossible, if not completely impossible for a panelist to talk to them on the phone. I understand being “true to the method” and the cost implications a panel company could have if they actually talked to their panelists, but I still don’t get it. As consumers, and yes panelists are consumers (or we wouldn’t want to talk to them), we all know how frustrating it can be when you want to talk to a real person. Think about the last time you called your bank, an airline, or your cable company. It probably was not a fun experience, but with some diligence, you hopefully did get to speak to a live person.

As a matter of policy, when we place product for an in-home-use-test, we provide respondents with a toll free number. The intent is for them to have a way to contact us if they have any issues or concerns with using the product. But we have noticed more and more respondents are calling us because they want to talk to their panel company. By default, we get the calls.

Panel companies, it is time for you to address this. If you don’t talk to your panel members, it will only be a matter of time before they are talking about you – and not necessarily in a good way.