What is a Call Disposition in Market Research?

What is a Call Disposition in Market Research?

A call disposition in market research is a document summarizing the outcome of calls placed through the outbound call center. This document can either be auto-populated through the CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing) software or can be easily compiled and formatted into an Excel document once the data is exported. This is typically reviewed by both the project manager in the call center and the lead analyst on the project on a daily basis to understand daily output from telephone surveys.


A call disposition in market research helps you quantify all of this in a call center. All call centers use their own internal call log codes but some of the most common terms used include:

  • Complete (C): a completed survey
  • Call-Back (CB): respondent answered the phone and requested a call-back (AM or PM)
  • Refused (R): respondent answered, refused the survey or asked to be removed from the list
  • No Answer (NA): no one at the designated number answered the phone
  • Answering Machine or Voice Mail (AM or VM): call rang and went directly to AM or VM
  • Bad Number (BN): the number as dialed did not go through
  • Busy (B): number dialed offered busy signal

There are many other codes call centers use internally to run dispositions. The call disposition will detail both numbers and percentages for each of the codes which can then be tallied by call center representative, by day, by week, and even at the end of fieldwork for a given project. These dispositions can be reviewed to understand why productivity may be low and whether call center hours are better applied during different times in a day which offer better returns. Call dispositions are valuable deliverables to keep you as the client manager in the loop on projects in the call center and relay the information along to clients to encourage transparency.


Drive Research is a market research vendor in Upstate, NY. Drive offers a full range of phone surveys and executive interviews conducted by telephone. For more information about our market research company, visit our about us page here.

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