Sample Management scripts for telephone interviewing projects must perform the following tasks:

The Sample Management script must have certain information in order to accomplish these tasks. For example, to set appointment times automatically, it needs to know how much time must elapse between the previous call and the appointment. You can change the following settings; the Sample Management script uses default values for any settings that you do not define.

The number of minutes that must elapse between consecutive calls to an unanswered number. The default is 30 minutes.

The number of minutes that must elapse between consecutive calls to a busy number. The default value is 30 minutes.

The number of minutes that must elapse between consecutive calls to a number that was answered by an answering machine. The default value is 30 minutes.

The number of minutes that must elapse before a record that timed out or was stopped during a self-completion (web) interview can be called using telephone interviewing. The default is zero, which means that records for timed out or stopped web interviews will not be called back.

The number of minutes that must elapse between consecutive calls to a number that rejected a call. Calls can be rejected if a mobile phone user has activated a meeting profile that rejects calls, or if a home phone has been set to reject calls that do not also transmit the caller’s telephone number. The default value is 1620 minutes (or 27 hours).

The number of minutes that must elapse between consecutive calls to a number that might have received a silent call. Silent calls can occur when an autodialer generates more connected calls than there are interviewers available to handle the calls. The default is 4320 minutes (or 72 hours). When a silent call occurs, the sample management script changes the value of the Queue field on the participant record to SILENT. To ensure that the phone number will be recalled at the end of the delay, the supervisor must change the value of Queue from SILENT to APPOINTMENT.

Whether the “Before an appointment” setting applies to any available interviewer, or only to the interviewer who arranged the appointment. The default is that it applies to any available interviewer. If you choose that it applies only to the interviewer who arranged the appointment, and the project uses group/predictive autodialing, the interviewer will not be connected automatically to the participant who has an appointment. Instead, the participant’s details are displayed on the interviewer’s screen, and the interviewer must click the Start Dialing button to dial the participant’s phone number.

The number of minutes before the appointment time when a number with an appointment can be called, either by any interviewer or the arranger only, depending on the setting of “No preference for appointments/Give preference to the interviewer who arranged the appointment”. The default value is five minutes.

The number of minutes after the appointment time when a number with an appointment can be called by any available interviewer. The sample management script uses this setting only when the “No preference for appointments/Give preference to the interviewer who arranged the appointment” setting is to give preference to the arranger. The default value is five minutes.

The number of minutes before the recall time when a number with an automatic appointment can be called. The default value is ten minutes.

The time zones in which participants are located. The values that you enter in this field must be the indexes of the time zones in the list of time zones stored in the registry. If you need to enter more than one time zone, separate them with semicolons, and do not include any spaces. If you leave this field blank, UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer will ignore time zones and calling times when selecting records for interviewers to call.

See Time zones.

Whether or not to assign calls to interviewers based on interviewer qualifications. For example, if the participant’s native language is Spanish, assign the call to a Spanish speaking interviewer.

You set these parameters at the start of the project, and can change them throughout the interviewing period to match the current requirements of the survey. For example, if it is the last day of the survey and you are running low on new participants, you might want to increase the maximum number of times that numbers can be called. You might also want to reduce the elapse times for automatically set appointments, so that numbers with callbacks become available for recall more quickly.

If you find that for every new project you always change the settings on the Parameters page to the same new values, you can change the default settings that UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer. For more information, see Changing the default settings.