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Another CATI-specific quota setting is CATI Delivery when Quota not Full.
The system provides a choice of two alternative system behaviors for handling quota closures. The older (original) behavior is that when the setting ‘‘CATI Delivery when Quota not Full" is enabled, CATI interviews will automatically be removed from the CATI scheduled calls list and be given an extended status value of 27 ('Filtered by call delivery') when the quota cell they fall into is fulfilled.
The newer behavior will automatically set the applicable calls in the scheduled list to be flagged as disabled so the calls will remain in the scheduled list. The key benefits are:
- Disabled calls will retain their associated call properties, for example call priority, call time, user assignment and shift. This is helpful if the quota must be re-opened.
- Quota-disabled calls are color-coded in yellow for easy identification in the Call Management UI. Calls disabled manually by a supervisor in Call Management are color-coded red.
- If a cell is re-opened, for example by a supervisor increasing the limit, then the applicable disabled calls will automatically be re-enabled; there is no need to re-activate calls manually. Any manually disabled (red) calls will remain disabled.
- In optimistic quota mode, calls will automatically be disabled as soon as the desired quota limit has been met by the in-progress interviews. If the in-progress interviews fail to compete then the system will automatically re-enable the applicable calls.
As there are several benefits with the new behavior, it is recommended to switch over to this if you are not already working with it. To switch to this mode, ask a CATI administrator to go into the Resources/Settings area of the supervisor UI to make the required change. This change is a company-level setting that will affect all subsequent surveys. Note that it is possible to switch back, though it is not advisable to switch back and forth or to make the change while live interviewing is in progress.
Why is this ‘CATI Delivery when Quota not Full’ feature useful?
When a survey contains quotas that are based on background sample variables, the CATI system may become slower to deliver calls to interviewers as the quota targets in the project begin to close.
For example: Imagine a survey contains a sample-based quota for gender, and the desired quota target for male respondents has already been achieved. Despite this, there still remains a number of fresh sample records for male respondents in the call queue.The default operation is to process these respondents through the execution engine. As it does so, the male respondents will be automatically repositioned to the “Quota failure” status as expected. However, as each record is processed individually, Forsta Plus may take some time to sort through the sample to find records that are still available to deliver to the interviewer(s). The interviewer(s) would see the screen flickering as calls are being processed and the supervisor may observe a rapid increase in the number of calls being repositioned as “Quota failure”.
To avoid such delays the CATI specific quota setting in “CATI delivery when quota not full” can be applied. When this setting is enabled, all interviews in the call queue which fit into any given quota cell will be automatically disabled OR placed into the default extended status “Filtered by call delivery”.
This setting is only available for background variables that are based on single type variables; multi and numeric type questions are not supported.
Note: When a survey has this setting enabled the quota tab will always be made available to Supervisors via the main supervisor control panel in addition to the “Quota Targets” view in the main menu. The variables used in the quota will automatically be given the property ‘Available as CATI filter’.