11 IVR

In an IVR survey, the interviewer is replaced by recordings of the questions and the respondents answer questions by pressing keys on their touch telephones. An IVR survey may operate with respondents ringing in to GEIS, or by having GEIS ring the respondents. GEIS can handle the scheduling of calls to households, which can be configured through the Utility functions in the develop window.

The computer containing the voice card may have up to four telephone lines connected. GEIS is installed to this computer as usual but Visual Voice software must also be installed on this computer.

An IVR script resembles a CATI script, except that an IVR script must handle all aspects of the interview, including ringing the household, identifying the eligible respondent, conducting the interview, and hanging up. Messages to be played within an interview are saved in wave files in a directory on the computer running GEIS. They are referred to within a script item by keywords. Alternatively, if the keyword is set to SILENT then no recording is played.

Those item types that are only used in IVR or whose usage in a IVR script differs from CATI script are described below.

TITL

This item must have the SURVTYPE option set to IVR²⁴. Some options set by TITL that are specific to IVR include the location of the system voice file, the AUTOCALL data set, and the location of recordings made by respondents will be saved.

CALL

The CHCE item causes the voice card to ring the respondent's telephone number. The item also sets the length of time to continue ringing. Depending on the result of the call attempt, the CHCE item is assigned a numeric value given in Table 14. The full list of codes can be found in \GEIS\BIN\FORMATS.SAS. The script must respond appropriately to the CHCE value. For example, a busy code should be followed by a STAT that sets the interview status code to ET, while a connected code should cause a welcome message to be played.

Table 14: Selected CHCE codes.

8	Connected
9	Busy
11	No answer
14	Fax machine

CBDT and CBTM

These items are used together to set a date and time that GEIS should call back if the current time is inconvenient to complete the interview. After the interview session terminates, the date and time in the CBDT and CBTM items, are copied to the CBCKDATE and CBCKTIME variables, respectively. Both the CBCKDATE and CBCKTIME variables are in the CONTROL data set and are used in call scheduling (Section 11.3).

CHCE and MULT

Whereas in the CATI mode these item types display a selection box, in IVR mode a series of options is read out following the question text. Each option is assigned a text and code value, as in CATI. Additionally in IVR, the key to be pressed on the telephone keypad must be specified for each option.

HUP

This item hangs up the connection.

INFO

This item is used to play a message. Depending on the options set for the item, after playing the message GEIS will either move on to the next item, pause briefly before moving on, or wait for a key to be pressed. A time limit can be set to wait for a key to be pressed.

NUM

This item will allow entry of numeric quantities that may be entered using a touch-phone keypad. For example, it may be used to ask for a respondent's age. By assigning a SAS date. informat it can also be used to enter dates in the form: ddmmyyyy.

OPEN

This item allows the respondent to record a spoken answer. The answer is saved to a wave file that is stored in a directory that is set by the TITL item. The maximum recording time in seconds may be set. This recording can then be examined at a later time. Alternatively, the recording can be e-mailed to an appropriate person by inserting a MAIL in the script.

TRNF

This item transfers a call to another number. It is used when the IVR and CATI modes are combined. This is described further in section 11.2.