Since the beginning, marketers, researchers, and businesses relied heavily on telephone surveys to interview people to gather and understand customer feedback. They used CATI/ phone surveys to gather insights about the customer challenges, expectations, and behaviors to launch or improve products and services in the market.

So, what are CATI or Phone Surveys?
CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing) or phone survey is a method where an interviewer uses a script on his computer screen to interview or collect responses from a participant or a customer over the telephone.

They recorded all the responses within the computer to save time transferring data from paper to digital format. Yet, the issue was that they had to wait for a long time until they collected a certain number of responses. And not just that, they had to dedicate a team to compile all these responses manually and prepare reports.

It was widely used in the past as respondents did not need a computer to respond to the questionnaire but only a telephone. Organizations used CATI/ phone surveys to promote materials, understand customer satisfaction, introduce new products and services, etc.

Yet, we witnessed the rapid downfall of CATI/ phone surveys since 2000 as more and more innovative and appealing methodologies were introduced. The response rate went too low, and CATI surveys became more challenging and tedious in the next couple of years.

Further Reading: https://www.surveysensum.com/blog/why-phone-survey-has-low-response-rate/