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Opinion-Tech History

History of Opinion-Tech Network

Opinion-Tech Network is a combination of technology and services provided by Opinion-Tech for OpTech users. Its story begins long before the 2003 announcements in Baltimore, with the conception and development of OpTech distributed interviewing. This breakthrough technology was developed in response to needs and trends observed at OpTech sites.

Several distinct factors led to this lengthy and difficult but important development project:

• Large call centers have problems. Their very size creates quality control challenges, adds overhead, and make it difficult to find adequate staff over time. Call centers frequently exhaust the available pool of quality labor over the course of a few years.
• Industry load is cyclic. During peak periods it's hard to find enough callers. But during slack periods the fixed cost of a large shop makes it impossible to stand down without losing money.
• Traditional CATI systems, using a single server, run into performance problems with large numbers of users.
• Using multiple call centers on a single job is often desirable, for reasons including workforce demographics, caller language/dialect, scheduling flexibility, workload blending, and resource availability. But multiple-location jobs were not practical with traditional technology, requiring that sample be carved up, and responsibility for project quality shared among locations. This created unacceptable concerns and uncertainties for researchers, who could not be confident in the reliability of job results.

OpTech's new system architecture makes it possible to distribute work without losing central quota management, quality control, and job oversight. With this new technology in place, suddenly the old way of doing opinion research had to be rethought. Rather than designing workflow around a single call center, OpTech has made job management the core activity. Interviewing can be viewed as an ancillary function (as it should be).

Like Copernicus, realizing that the sun, not the earth, belonged in the center of the planets, OpTech users have discovered that the phone room is not the center of the universe. Suddenly, job management could be restored to its correct importance...regardless of who is doing the calling, and where they are located.

In this framework, Opinion-Tech Network was a natural idea, a way for OpTech users to share work and resources. The network's technical and operational concepts were developed and tested at key OpTech sites during 2001-2003, primarily by firms with call centers at multiple locations. By early 2003, the foundations were in place for these firms to start sharing work with each other, rather than just distributing work in-house.

As job managers started 'attaching' remote call centers, Opinion-Tech Network became a reality.

From this point forward, expanding Opinion-Tech Network will just be a question of adding members and making it easier for them to communicate. The hard work is done.

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