In the world of conducting phone survey research; whether you’re running a call center, conducting polls, or doing market research for clients — driving productivity and saving time is king.

As margins and response rates skew downwards, it’s crucial that researchers from all kinds of organizations optimize their workflow in all ways possible.

Using the right CATI software is central to shaving time off calls and increasing interviewer productivity.  As a research manager, you must ensure that the software you’re working with has the right built-in features to make programming and interviewer management easy.

Below, we’ll outline a few of our tips for saving time with the right CATI features:

Survey Programming Tips
1. Copy & Paste

Let’s start simple! One of the best ways to save time is to not re-do what you’ve already done! Copy tasks, settings, or full projects to get started with new projects quickly (for example: callback rules, disposition codes, quotas, time zones, or questionnaires.)

2. Pre-Scheduled Extracts

Regular extractions of your survey data are commonly needed to report to management or clients throughout the project. Most of the time, data must be reported daily. So, it’s important that data is extracted on a pre-scheduled basis, depending on your needs, to make regular reporting simple.

3. Standardize Sample Variables

This may not be possible for all research projects, but keeping variables consistent from project-to-project can help with streamlining data extraction and survey programming — specifically, keeping list headers identical. However, this may not always be effective, for example: Canadian provinces are often coded as numbers, but in the United States, the states have standard two-letter names. In essence, standardization of naming conventions should be applied where possible.

survey icon blog pink
Interview Management Tips
4. Streamline Productivity Reports

For research managers from organizations of all types, productivity reports are important in making sure that your interviewer team is doing their best. Productivity reports use built-in stats like average call per hour, average length of call, idle time, and others. This can also be customizable based on disposition codes to further refine the report.

5. Rapid Dialer

Connecting interviewers to respondents as fast as possible is essentially the bottom line of driving productivity for call centers conducting surveys. The Voxco Dialer actually works dynamically with the rhythm of your call center, with features like predictive dialing to continually adjust the pacing of calls to match forecasted interviewer availability.

6. Automated IVR

In cases where interviewers are not necessarily required, the solution is using an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Survey System. It gives research managers an easy and cost-effective way to deliver self-completion surveys and automated messages to a broad audience. In survey mode, respondents can answer questions any time they want through a touch tone interaction on the phone.

callcenter icon blog pink

Running efficient phone survey projects seems to be an increasingly difficult task, but the good news is that there are actionable tactics to ensure your organization’s success. On top of employing these productivity methods, it is integral that you are working with the most effective CATI software.

Voxco CATI Software has been the global industry-leading phone survey solution for over 25 years. It’s time to maximize your phone survey ROI with the advanced features, flexible hosting options, and seamless integration. And, of course, our solutions are priced for most research budgets!

You can have a look at our Market Research Hub for more insights into research, and case studies on how experts leveraged our omnichannel platform to meet and even exceed their research goals.

Read more