Interactive Voice Recognition Communication in Electoral Politics

This research tested the conventional wisdom that interactive voice recognition (IVR; also known as robocalls or auto calls) are not listened to by receivers. The study found that three out of four people (75%) listen to over 19 s of a message, which equates to over 40 words. The vast majority of people, 97%, listen to at least 6 s. This innovative, unobtrusive field approach for measuring actual listening time eliminates self-report bias. The unique data set, provided by a third-party vendor, consisted of 156 call projects with a total of 389,588 live answered phone calls from the last week of the 2012 election.

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