General Settings

This group of settings can be found on the General tab (see the picture below).

Figure 1 - The General tab of the Resources menu

Call Filtering Behavior for Filled Quotas

The "Call filtering behaviour for filled quotas" option allows specifying how calls that belong to certain quota cell will behave when this quota is closed. It has two settings: "Change status and delete calls" and "Disable calls with re-enabling on open cells". Normally all calls belonging to the closed quota are assigned the extended status "Filtered by call delivery" and all their properties are reset upon quota closure. This happens when the default setting "Change status and delete calls" is selected for this option. When this option is set to "Disable calls with re-enabling on open cells", CATI interviews on quota closure will be set as disabled and will remain in the Scheduled Call list (the State column in the Call Management view will show "Disabled by Quota" for such scheduled calls). Properties of these calls will also be maintained, such as ‘Time to call’, ‘Priority’, ‘Shift’ and ‘Assignment’. If this quota cell is re-opened the interviews that used to belong to that quota cell will be re-enabled automatically.

Note: Calls that were disabled manually by a supervisor would not be re-enabled automatically upon quota cell re-opening (unlike calls that were disabled by the quota management rules). You can tell the manually disabled calls from those disabled by the quota management by the color coding - manually disabled calls are highlighted in the Call Management window in red while calls disabled by quota management are highlighted in yellow (see Disabling and enabling calls regarding the color highlighting of the disabled calls).

Note that there is another setting that allows you to specify that calls with certain extended statuses are not to be removed on quota closure(go to Viewing and Modifying the Extended Status Code Group Properties for more information).

Specifying Default Call Delivery Mode for a Company

This option allows to specify the default call delivery mode that will be applied to all newly launched surveys. This setting can be overridden on the survey level when another call delivery mode is specified on the General settings tab of the Survey View (see Viewing and Modifying General Properties).

The following call delivery modes are available:

• Order by ID (lowest first) - when enabled, CATI interviews will be delivered to interviewers in the order with which they are found in the scheduled calls list (lowest ID first) unless some calls have been given a higher priority.
• Random order - when enabled, CATI interviews will be delivered in a random order, unless some calls have been given a higher priority.

Note that neither the default, nor the survey-level Call Delivery Mode setting should be changed while the respondent sample upload is in progress! This will lead to a situation where calls created for one part of the sample will be delivered in a mode which is different from the Call Delivery Mode for another part.

Setting Up Email Address for CATI Notifications

The email address(es) specified in this field will receive an email whenever a system event occurs, such as an interviewer account is locked out or notification of CATI Clean-Up.

Specifying How Interview Durations Are Calculated

The "Include open end review time in interview durations" option determines how interview durations are calculated. When enabled, this option will ensure that open end review time (the time allowed for call agents to review and correct any open-ended question during the interview) is included in the interview duration time. This applies to all areas where the interview duration data is shown or used in calculations such as productivity reports (which include interview duration time), call attempts report, call history in Call Management, call history data exports, and interview durations when extracted via the API. Historically, before this setting was introduced, call durations included open-end review times. Newer companies will have this option disabled by default, however.

Daily Scheduled Email Reports' Configuration

The supervisor can schedule emailing of the call activity and productivity reports to the selected users on a daily basis.

Emailed reports in case they contain PII can be encrypted to restrict access to the data they contain - refer to Security Settings for information.

There are four report types that can be configured for delivery at the company level:

• Call history,
• Survey overview,
• Survey productivity,
• Interviewer productivity.

Emailing of each report type can be configured independently - you can enable/disable each report type, specify a list of email addresses and the time at which the email is sent.

The time at which reports would be emailed should run out of interviewing hours (where possible).

All report types are generated according to the pre-configured settings - they all provide information relating to the previous 24 hour activity of all interviewers belonging to the company.

The call history export is the same as an “Export Call History” action from the survey list for all surveys, including breaks. Note the additional option for the scheduled Call History report settings. This option is similar to that found in the Call History export dialog (see the Include Variables option description in Exporting Call History Data). Use this option to add columns (variables) to the Call History report scheduled for delivery. Multiple variables can be added to the report - use semicolon to separate them in the Include Variables field.

The other three reports are a PDF export of that report, for all surveys, all interviewers, including dialer attempts (where applicable), zero values are hidden (where applicable) and break times are not included in calculations (where applicable).

Additionally, the supervisor can specify a customized template to be used as default each time an Interviewer Productivity Report is exported according to the specified schedule (see Creating and Editing the Interviewer Productivity Report Templates for details on the customization of the Interviewer Productivity Report template). This is done by selecting a template name from the Applied Template drop-down list.

The report emailing settings can only be configured at the company level without any further customization of filtering and can be enabled for delivery once per day.

File attachment size for each email is limited to 10Mb, if the email attachment exceeds this limit the email will not be delivered, instead an error email will be sent.

Setting up Automatic Database Maintenance Operations

There is an opportunity to set up database maintenance operations to be performed automatically. Such operations include a range of routine maintenance operations which should be carried out regularly. They include operations like rebuilding of table indexes, cleanup of old history data, update of certain statistics, and survey cleanup operations. This set is already defined and the supervisor cannot change it.

The supervisor can specify the shift during which the routine maintenance operations should be performed. To do this the supervisor should:

1. First specify the time of the day when routine maintenance actions should start. 
2. Then specify the day of the week when routine maintenance actions starts. The day time is based on daily shift day setting.
3. Then specify the monthly week number when the routine maintenance should be performed. The day of the week will depend on the setting applied for the weekly day shift. If the first week of the month is selected but the specified weekly shift day does not occur in this week then it will automatically be deferred to the same day in the second week.
4. Next specify duration of the shift. Mind that the shift's end time equals to the sum of the daily shift time and duration.

Automatic Call Prioritization Based on Time Zones

You can enable a setting that will automatically give priority to calls in a certain time zone when the end of the interviewer's calling shift for this time zone approaches. To enable this setting, choose the time interval from the End of shift threshold on the Settings tab of the Resources page.

Here is an example which illustrates how this setting works. There is a survey that has calls in time zone #1 and also in time zone #2, which is 1 hour ahead of time zone #1 (time zone #1 + 1 hour). The interviewer's shift is due to end at 9 PM and it is almost 8 PM in time zone #1 and almost 9 PM in time zone #2. So the interviewer's shift is nearing the end in time zone #2. There is still plenty of interviews for him in time zone #1. If the interviewer continues receiving calls from the time zone #1 he is likely to finish the work without completing a single interview from time zone #2 (which is 1 hour ahead of the time zone #1). To make the most effective use of the remaining time the system can give priority to calls from time zone #2. In this case the interviewer will receive some calls from time zone #2 instead of calls from time zone #1 until his time runs out in time zone #2. This priority will come into effect X minutes before the end of the interviewer's shift, where X is the time interval chosen from the "End of shift threshold" drop-down box.

If the interviewer works in three or more time zones, calls from these time zones are delivered to them in a similar manner: when there is X minutes left until the end of his/her working shift in one time zone, calls from this time zone are automatically given priority over other calls.

If no time interval is selected (0 minutes), no calls are given priority.