Arbitron blames Ike

[InTIMadate]

Did you read that Arbitron is closing their Houston Calling Center because it was “rendered useless” by Hurricane Ike? I’ve driven by the 6464 Savoy Drive building in Bellaire and the parking lot is full of cars for the other offices in that building. Sounds like smoke and mirrors to me.

Arbitron is letting go 269 part-time employees and 29 full-time employees in Houston. That’s a lot of calls and contacts for a company that is barely holding on to their one accreditation from the ratings board. Anybody want to guess how far off the next Houston PPM sample will be?

What a bunch of crooks.....

 

[davideduardo]

Arbitron is letting go 269 part-time employees and 29 full-time employees in Houston. That’s a lot of calls and contacts for a company that is barely holding on to their one accreditation from the ratings board. Anybody want to guess how far off the next Houston PPM sample will be?

That's a call center that mostly placed diaries each week. There were only 3 centers in the whole US for phone recruiting and follow up, and there are nearly 300 measured markets.

The phone recruiting could be done from literally anywhere. In this case, they are consoldating with the Dallas center, per their report. The in-home recruiting is not done by a call center staff and they say it is not affected.

The PPM panel does not roll over weekly like the diary one, so there is no "next sample" although the attrition rate is about 8% monthly (much in the initial few weeks or months, I suspect). It's pretty much the same sample in the short term...

 

[aunti-terrestrial]

I'm sorry to hear about the jobs.

 

[davideduardo]

I'm sorry to hear about the jobs.

Keep in mind that nearly all were part time, and the average turnover of a seat in a call center is 2.5 to 3.0 turns a year... although, to their credit, Arbitron paid more and gave better incentives and such to call center staff than the average telemarketer.

 

[aunti-terrestrial]

Oh, I'm sure that makes it all okay, when you explain it to those folks like that. I mean, good thing it's not like, a month before Christmas, or anything.

 

[davideduardo]

Oh, I'm sure that makes it all okay, when you explain it to those folks like that. I mean, good thing it's not like, a month before Christmas, or anything.

As I said, just about nobody regards those jobs as " a career" or permanent. And in the overall picture, what was lost in Houston was gained in Dallas; Arbitron still makes the same number of calls so if the Houston site had problems, there was still no net loss of jobs.

I agree, any loss of jobs is sad. But it's not like Arbitron is laying off people and not replacing them.

My intent, anyway, was to point out that the location of the call centers does not affect telephone based recruiting and should not affect the Houston sample, as generally phone recruiting for a market is not done using a call center in that market.

 

[InTIMadate]

David is once again a pantload full of useless misinformation.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the operations are being consolidated to its Columbia, MD call center. I'm sure that the Columbia call center has a superior bilingual pool of talented Texas impersonators highly focused on quality control in order to provide the most accurate radio listening information for the 65% increase charge to Houston radio.

Mi habla English?

 

[davideduardo]

David is once again a pantload full of useless misinformation.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the operations are being consolidated to its Columbia, MD call center. I'm sure that the Columbia call center has a superior bilingual pool of talented Texas impersonators highly focused on quality control in order to provide the most accurate radio listening information for the 65% increase charge to Houston radio.

Well, the Chronicle is wrong, which is a common situation when competing media comment about each other.

Arbitron's release specifically says that the work done by the Houston call center is being permanently taken over by the Dallas call center which was doing the work as the Hurricane moved towards Houston.

Generally, local market recruiting is not done in the same market for security reasons... that goes for the P&F study on diapers, too. It's likely that DC and Baltimore are done in Texas, in fact. Only the in-home recruiters work locally, and that is a tiny fraction of the recruiting and follow up call work.

The combined call centers place diaries in nearly 300 markets, and do the multiple follow up calls for those who accept diary, starting with confirmation of receipt and going all the way to "did you send it back?" The PPM does not have weekly total turnover, so each market may only need a few new households a week to keep the panel going... but there is lots more follow up.

So you can see, with 3 call centers, there was no local calling in about 280 markets... and even a few more if Arbitron follows the normal call center custom of swapping local market calls to the "other" center(s),.

There is no such thing as "Texas" Spanish, by the way. In fact, the Hispanics in Columbia and Texas recruit Hispanics in California and Arizona... with no apparent issues.

Again, it is unlikely that the PPM panel in Houston was recruited out of the Houston call center... since a panel is ongoing, everything possible would be done to keep the panelists "secret" which is why Arbitron does not even release respondent level data, which they do for the diary.