Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) regulations in the US require that mobile/cell phone numbers are dialed manually. It is generally accepted that the number must be typed into a keypad to meet this requirement.

To help conform to these regulations, you can display a dial keypad in Phone Participants. The interviewer must type the phone number into the keypad. The number typed is verified against the number stored in the participant/sample field before being passed to the dialer. The “Start dialing” button is enabled only when the phone number is entered correctly. Then you can select the “Start dialing” button by pressing Enter or by using the mouse. Once the call is dialed, the dial keypad closes.

This feature affects only Preview dial. You can enable it at the site level or project level.

Create the KeyPadManualDial DPM property under Site\Properties\DefaultCatiProjectProperties.

Create the KeyPadManualDial DPM property under Site\Servers\Projects\<project>\mrInterview.

To force interviewers to enter the phone number into the dial keypad for any record returned for Preview, set KeypadManualDial to True.

To dial the number without interviewers typing it, when the “Start dialing” button is selected, set KeypadManualDial to False. This is the default setting.

To configure a project to preview dial all records, use Interview Options to set the “Never dial automatically” option under “Phone Interview Settings”.

This sets a ForcePreview DPM property at the project level. To set the default value for this property, see Changing the default settings.

To preview individual records, use the RequiresManualDial field: see Force Preview Dial. If the RequiresManualDial field for a record is missing or empty, the record is handled as a Preview record.