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In the event some "respondents" have asked not to be contacted, CATI Supervisor can prevent specified telephone numbers being dialed. This option is applied on the company level, and the list of "not to be dialed" telephone numbers (the "blacklist") is automatically used with each survey conducted by this company.
To open the telephone number blacklist go to the Resources > Telephone Blacklist option.
You create the list by adding numbers to it, and to simplify the process you can import a file containing the telephone numbers. You then activate the blacklist function in the Forsta authoring application on the Survey Settings > CATI Options tab. The blacklist will remain in effect until it is disabled using the same procedure, and it can be edited at any time.
Note that the telephone blacklist can include a maximum of 4,000,000 telephone numbers. Refer to the appropriate section of the Forsta authoring documentation.
The current blacklist status can be monitored in CATI Supervisor for each survey. It is displayed as a non-editable option on the Survey Information > General tab (go to Viewing and Modifying Properties for more information).
Before a call is sent to the Interviewer's console or to a dialer, the CATI system compares the telephone number to the blacklist. If the number matches a number on the blacklist, the number is not dialed, the call is not delivered to the interviewer, the interview extended status is changed to "Blacklist", and the scheduling is not run for this call.
The authoring module performs the check whenever a fresh sample list is uploaded. Refer to the authoring module documentation for further details.
A count of the numbers that are blocked by the Blacklist procedure at sample loading time is displayed in the Sample Utilization Report in the "Blocked by blacklist" column (go to Generating the Sample Utilization Report for more information).
Note that interviews/calls will not be executed via the survey scheduling rules even if the sample was loaded with the "Full Scheduling" option enabled.
Important!
Bear in mind that a number from the blacklist CAN still be dialed in the following situations:
1) When the "Manual Redial" operation is executed from the console an interviewer can type in any telephone number, and this could be a number which is contained in the Blacklist. This is only possible when a dialer supporting Redial functionality is used and the "Redial" button is enabled AND the additional option to redial with an alternative number is enabled (go to Interviewer Console Settings for more information).
2) If the ‘varname’ variable is used where ‘varname’ is not a 'TelephoneNumber' variable, it could accept a number included in the Blacklist.
3) When executing a regular "Dial" operation from the console when the Blacklist was changed AFTER the interview was sent to the console.
Opening the Blacklist
Go to the Resources object tab then choose Telephone Blacklist. The right frame displays a table containing any numbers already included in the blacklist. If the blacklist does not contain any numbers, the table will be empty.
Figure 1 - The Telephone number blacklist displayed in the right frame