Western Wats logs millions of survey calls per year

By Alex Methvin

May 6, 2009 | Last year, 7,860,840 calls came out of an unassuming little building on Golf Course Road, and that's not just calls but completed surveys. The surveys are from Western Wats, just one of 11 phone survey centers in the nation and several more around the world, though most are in the Intermountain West. The total number of calls, based on an average day's amount, is around 84 million.

Wats stands for wide-area telephone service, and clients hire Western Wats to collect data to improve business decisions and better understand their customers. Clients pay anywhere from $1 to $200 per survey, which can take anywhere from a minute to an hour according to phone survey manager, Braquel Ellis, who is in her 10th year at Western Wats.

Thanks to the recession, Ellis said revenue is down about 25 percent from this time last year. Western Wats has not been hurt as much as other businesses, but Ellis definitely notices that "the clients have tightened their belts." The prime months for business are October and March with October being especially productive because it marks the end of the fiscal year and companies hope to increase sales by better suiting their customers' needs. The Logan location always makes $1 million its goal every year.

Western Wats began in 1987 and won the 2008 "Best in State" award for data services in Utah. It was founded and currently has headquarters in Orem while the Logan location has been in service for 15 years.

Western Wats conducts surveys with companies and individuals in respective day and night shifts. The night shift employs 98 interviewers and 10 supervisors and day shift numbers are about the same according to Ellis.

Clients often write the surveys themselves and stress that Western Wat's interviewers read them verbatim. They also give PAT responses for how to react to certain things the interviewee might say. Occasionally clients send a representative to Western Wats to give presentations about how they want their survey conducted.

When clients come in to Western Wats, manager Cortney Hunsaker said, "it's nerve-racking, but cool." He added, "I like working with important people."

Most calls are not recorded but all are randomly monitored by the supervisors. Usually only the consistent clients of Western Wats have their calls recorded. If a call is being recorded the interviewer must let the interviewee know that the call is being recorded.

Ellis said college towns are the prime ground for Western Wats locations. Because the employee turnover rate is so high, most employees work for 3 months, a college town is the best place to have a constant influx of workers.

The vast majority of calls are conducted in English. However, across the Western Wats operation most languages are conducted. The Logan Western Wats only performs French and Spanish outside of English and on a much less frequent scale.

Employees don't know what company they will be dialing for when they come in. They check in at the front desk and are assigned a certain survey depending on the demand for that survey and the interviewers' past experience with that survey.

Employees then go to a seat and log into the dialing system called Wats Integrated Research Engine or W.I.R.E, their proprietary data collection engine. Depending on the survey the system then dials the next customer within a list of presumably qualified individuals. WIRE either lets the phone ring and waits for an answer or dials predictively, meaning that the line connects once the system detects someone has picked up on the other line.

This leads to the employees often presenting the introduction to their survey when no one is on the other line. Dialing predictively greatly increases the potential production rate as several calls can be started and subsequently terminated within a few seconds. Another downside is that the interviewer may sound awkward as he may read an intro when a person is still in the process of picking up the phone, essentially coming in a moment too late.

The rate of pay varies depending on production rate, quality rate and number of hours worked. For night shift, base pay is $7 an hour and with at least 25 hours, high production rate and quality phone calls, the pay rate can go up to $10. Day shift pays 25 cents more per hour. The job requires good phone skills and adequate typing dexterity as interviewers often ask open-ended questions which are recorded verbatim. Upon hiring, employees receive one to two days of training and are then able to begin dialing.

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