Mar 28, 2016
My elderly father got one of these late afternoon a week ago. He wouldn't know Twitter from a bird-shaped cat toy. The canned message began when his phone recorder started its greeting. I've made a transcript from what I could decipher. Capitalized words are the recorded speaker's emphasis. Phonetic spelling is used to represent what I heard. Bracketed parts are my annotations and guesses.
[sentence in progress:] "... questions about clam-dish-shuns"
[Then a different female voice clip makes a brief statement in "Espanol", followed immediately by the first voice and question.]
"How off-ten do you use online social media, [like?] Facebook and Twitter? Please press 'one' if you use social media daily, or more off-ten. [unintelligible, guessing keypress "2"] use social media [unintelligble] weekly, [unintelligible] less often than weekly, or 'FOUR' if you don't use social media."
[eight seconds silence] [Heard different female voice at weak volume, first phrase unintelligible.]
"... still there? If yerr still there, please press INNIE key on yer phone NOW. Once ag'in, if you are still there, press INNIE key NOW."
[seven seconds silence, disconnect]
We don't have the front end, therefore no way to tell the name of the surveyor's client or the survey's purpose, or if indeed any such disclosures were not made. I've answered phone surveys when they are conducted live and on behalf of entities I know. Those are quite infrequent. Without a name or an agenda, a respondent could be walking into a sales lead generation trap.
If the survey masks a sales purpose, it loses exemption from the DNC Registry and Telemarketing Sales Rule requirements, and those responsible lay a path for TCPA lawsuits. Per recent TCPA revision, surveyors are already liable to those of you receiving canned surveys on mobile devices without your consent. Gallup, for example, settled a $12M class action in Spring 2015 for doing just that over a four year period.