You can pass responses to UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server questions to IVR. You might do this if you want to save the answers to some of the screening questions in the IVR data or if you want the IVR questionnaire to follow different paths dependent on respondents’ characteristics. However, do not pass data that is not needed in the IVR interview as this just wastes time. If you want to analyze the UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server and IVR data together you can merge the two datasets once interviewing is over.

Because the respondent answers the IVR questions using the keys on the telephone handset, most questions in an IVR questionnaire have to be answered using the digits 0 to 9. This restriction affects which responses you can pass from UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server, because you have to be able to set up a suitable question in the IVR questionnaire to receive the UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server data. It means that you can pass numeric (integer) and single categorical responses but not real or open-ended data. To pass multiple-choice categorical data you have to convert it to single-choice format first.

The most important thing about passing data from UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server to IVR is the number of digits in a response or response code. IVR is not particularly concerned with whether the digits are numeric values or response positions in a list. Instead, it is concerned with whether a question can be answered by a single digit, by a fixed number of digits, or by a variable number of digits. Examples of UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server response lists that result in a single digit being passed to IVR are as follows:

An UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server response list that results in a fixed number of digits being passed to IVR is:

Examples of UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server response lists that result in a variable number of digits being passed to IVR are as follows:

When passing data to IVR, you must pass the questions in the order they appear in the IVR questionnaire as the allocation of responses to questions is positional rather than by question name.

When the answer to a question is always the same number of digits in UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server, you can pass the answer to IVR by placing the question name in the DTMF string. For example, if the metadata contains:

the DTMF string would be:

This example (and others in this section) assumes that the IVR system requires a # character to jump to the first (or next) unanswered question in the script. Your system may require a different character or no character at all.

The IVR questionnaire must contain a blank Get Value command with the minimum and maximum number of digits set to the same value (1 in this example).

You can pass lists of answers in the same way. For example, if the metadata is:

you could pass these two answers to IVR by typing:

If Age is defined in IVR as requiring two digits, the first two characters of the DTMF string will be assigned to the first blank question in the IVR questionnaire and the third character will be assigned to the second blank question.

If the number of digits in an answer may vary, you must send a symbol (#, for example) after each answer to mark the end of that answer. For example, suppose you want to pass the respondent serial number, and the respondent’s age (18+) to IVR. You would type:

The respondent serial number can be anywhere between one and five digits long so you must send a terminating symbol such as # to mark the end of the serial number. Age is a numeric two-digit value, but because it comes at the end of the string it is followed by an end-of-DTMF # symbol.

You cannot pass categorical values direct to the IVR system, but you can pass responses' positions in the response list (also known as their index) and IVR will recognize these as valid answers. If the question is defined as:

you can pass the answer to IVR by typing:

Response indexing starts at 0 for the first response in the list, and there are more than ten responses in the list so the answer must be terminated by # in the DTMF string.

The IVR questionnaire must contain a blank Get Value or Get Response command to receive the categorical data. Use Get Response for ten or fewer responses and Get Value for more than ten responses.

See Creating an IVR script to receive UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server data for further information about the Get Value and Get Response commands.

Be careful if a numeric response list contains any of the special responses na, dk, or ref as these responses insert non-digits in the DTMF string, causing the IVR questionnaire to fail. It is therefore best to avoid these keywords in numeric responses lists if you can. If you cannot — for example, you want to allow respondents not to give their age — you should write some additional code to process the response before it is added to the DTMF string. For example:

Later, when collecting the SQL data from IVR, you can convert 00 back to Refused.

You could expand this example to cater for other special responses simply by allocating a different code to each one.

When testing your UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server script, you may find that you need to wait a few seconds after dialing the IVR system before passing information to it. You can achieve whatever delay you need by starting the DTMF string with a comma for a one-second pause or a dot/period for a five-second pause. You can use any combination of these characters to achieve the delay you want. The following example shows how to send a one-second pause followed by the respondent’s serial number, age and gender:

‘Passing information to the IVR system’ on page 1125