CATI Telephone Market Research

What is CATI Telephone Market Research?

In quantitative market research, CATI stands for computer-aided telephone interviewing and is used by most modern telephone survey research companies to run telephone surveys.

Today CATI can be used in a telephone call centre or by telephone interviewers located at home and is used to help interviewers carry out both B2B and consumer telephone research. Essentially CATI is a software/computer-based system that allows the interviewer to read from a computer screen in the same way as from a paper questionnaire. However, it also allows respondents’  responses to be input directly into a system which holds all responses for analysis later.

The key advantages of CATI telephone interviewing are in both speed, quality and ease of use – as the respondent is automatically routed through the questionnaire based on their answers – removing the potential for human error. Programming can also sense-check responses to ensure mistakes are prevented and the digital nature of CATI removes the need for transferring data from paper to electronic formats for analysis.

Another advantage of telephone research companies is that the results of each call can be heard and seen in real-time – which means that researchers can see the results live before fieldwork has been completed.

CATI methodologies also remove the need for transferring data from paper to electronic formats for analysis – saving time and again reducing the opportunity for error. More information explaining computer-assisted telephone interviewing is on Wikipedia.

Vision One has its own in-house CATI telephone market research unit which specialises exclusively in B2B and Consumer surveys. If you would like to know more or are interested in joining our telephone unit, please contact Alex Brown,