Ipsos Reid to Close Canadian Call Center

Polling firm Ipsos Reid is to close its call center in Ottawa, Canada in June, citing client demands for cheaper research. Around 40 full and part-time staff will lose their jobs.

The firm is now moving more towards online research, using pre-screened panels of respondents, and SVP John Wright explained: 'Clients are looking for new and effective ways of doing things. Online research, when you do it properly, is accurate and is a lot cheaper at the moment than using the telephone.'

Yesterday, Kantar Operations also announced it will be shutting a telephone centre in the UK in June, in response to a 50% decline in telephone volumes since 2005, as online methodologies have become a more popular means of data collection.

Many of the part-time telephone interviewers who work in the Ipsos Reid call centre are university or college students, and the firm is trying to cushion the blow by giving some of them 12-weeks' notice and scheduling the closure after the end of the school year.

Ipsos Reid's research office in Ottawa will remain open, as will its call centres in Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal.

Web site: www.ipsos.ca .

So far this year, Synovate, Western Wats, Kantar and ICT have all announced plans to close call centers.

Meanwhile, in January, Canadian firm Consumer Contact opened a new center in the north east area of Toronto, Ontario, from where it will provide specialized customer satisfaction and loyalty monitoring and reporting services.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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