This article is written like a manual or guide.(February 2017) |
Automated telephone surveys is a systematic collection a data from demography [1] by making calls automatically to the preset list of respondents at the aim of collecting information and gain feedback via the telephone and the internet. Automated surveys are used for customer research purposes by call centres for customer relationship management and performance management purposes. They are also used for political polling, market research and job satisfaction surveying.
An automated phone survey applies the interactive voice response system is any telephone system that interacts with callers without input from a human other than the caller. More specifically, interactive voice response, or IVR, is the technology that automates telephone contact between humans and machines.
assessing the efficiency and achievement of the government by investigation
Provide a dial-in number, and ask participants to call in to give their feedback after a conference session. Make participation open to all, and eliminate paper forms and manual tabulation.
Survey employees in companies and get know what they want and need, then make changes in human resource management and welfare system, which help to retain the staff.
Remind people to pay their utilities automatically
Establish a comprehensive customer satisfaction survey system to get feedback about what they want and subsequently offer the better services.
Educational institutions including colleges and universities rely on phone surveys to get the feedback from the students and parents. [4]
Use of automated phone surveys is common in polling during political campaigns, where it is frequently referred to as robo-polling. It is a low cost and quick way of generating data but it has been criticized because of this. Mike O'Neil of O'Neil Associates Public Opinion Research called this method "cheap and untrustworthy" and news organisations such as CNN, the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Wall street Journal and the Washington Post will not use results from automated polls. [5]
Compared to the conventional questionnaires, it saves times and money to conduct the automated telephone survey. It only requires the time to record the questions beforehand. [6]
The survey is based on the computer system, which leads to a faster way to process, analyse and store the data gathered from the phone interviews. In addition, the data is rapidly renewing. [7]
It is sure that there are more people getting access to telephone rather than other methods (email, TV). Sitting in front of the computer screens monitor and calling people to complete the survey is more convenient than face-to-face interviews. Besides, it is more efficient than mailing out the surveys without response. Therefore, the automated telephone survey is ideal for data collection since it regards anyone from the population as potential respondents. [7]
Well-trained interviewers will record the questions in a uniform manner in advance, which means there is little or no biases towards the respondents. Since the data is gathered from a considerable number of people, it means the sample is random and less self-selective. It indicates that the statistically significant results can be collected. [8]
The process is conducted anonymously, which means the respondents are able to keep their answers private and confidential. This facilitates the privacy in responses for some controversial and sensitive topics. [6]
The caller identification system is available for more and more people, and some of them may just answer the phone they expected. When they see the unfamiliar numbers, they may not decide to answer or hang up immediately. Approximately two thirds of people in the USA refuse to take part in them. [9] People who have unlisted numbers or have registered on a do not call list will be automatically excluded. Others may choose not to answer by screening calls with answering machines or caller ID. The fact that only a small percent of the population is willing to participate can lead to biased or unreliable results. As they are conducted over the phone, they are also disadvantaged a lack of body language or visual observations. [10]
The key of high respondent rate is to control the time of survey. The interview may disrupt the personal time of respondents because they may be involved in other activities, such as eating dinner or watching television. It is necessary to create closed-end questions. [7]
[11] [12] Therefore, the respondents' personal information may be disclosed.
A call centre or call center is a managed capability that can be centralised or remote that is used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of enquiries by telephone. An inbound call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product or service support or information enquiries from consumers. Outbound call centres are usually operated for sales purposes such as telemarketing, for solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection, market research, emergency notifications, and urgent/critical needs blood banks. A contact centre is a further extension to call centres telephony based capabilities, administers centralised handling of individual communications, including letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and email.
An automated call distribution system, commonly known as automatic call distributor or automatic call dispatcher (ACD), is a telephony device that answers and distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals or agents within an organization. ACDs direct calls based on parameters that may include the caller's telephone number, the number they dialed, the time of day or a response to an automated voice prompt. Advanced ACD systems may use digital technologies such as computer telephony integration (CTI), computer-supported telecommunications applications (CSTA) or IVR as input to determine the route to a person or voice announcement that will serve the caller. Experts claim that "the invention of ACD technology made the concept of a call centre possible."
Telemarketing is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits prospective customers to buy products, subscriptions or services, either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or web conferencing appointment scheduled during the call. Telemarketing can also include recorded sales pitches programmed to be played over the phone via automatic dialing.
Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows telephone users to interact with a computer-operated telephone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input with a keypad. In telephony, IVR allows customers to interact with a company's host system via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which services can be inquired about through the IVR dialogue. IVR systems can respond with pre-recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed. IVR systems deployed in the network are sized to handle large call volumes and also used for outbound calling as IVR systems are more intelligent than many predictive dialer systems.
A voicemail system is a computer-based system that allows users and subscribers to exchange personal voice messages; to select and deliver voice information; and to process transactions relating to individuals, organizations, products, and services, using an ordinary phone. The term is also used more broadly to denote any system of conveying a stored telecommunications voice messages, including using an answering machine. Most cell phone services offer voicemail as a basic feature; many corporate private branch exchanges include versatile internal voice-messaging services, and *98 vertical service code subscription is available to most individual and small business landline subscribers.
A dialer or dialler is an electronic device that is connected to a telephone line to monitor the dialed numbers and alter them to seamlessly provide services that otherwise require lengthy National or International access codes to be dialed. A dialer automatically inserts and modifies the numbers depending on the time of day, country or area code dialed, allowing the user to subscribe to the service providers who offer the best rates. For example, a dialer could be programmed to use one service provider for international calls and another for cellular calls. This process is known as prefix insertion or least cost routing. A line powered dialer does not need any external power but instead takes the power it needs from the telephone line.
In telephony, an automated attendant allows callers to be automatically transferred to an extension without the intervention of an operator/receptionist. Many AAs will also offer a simple menu system. An auto attendant may also allow a caller to reach a live operator by dialing a number, usually "0". Typically the auto attendant is included in a business's phone system such as a PBX, but some services allow businesses to use an AA without such a system. Modern AA services can route calls to mobile phones, VoIP virtual phones, other AAs/IVRs, or other locations using traditional land-line phones or voice message machines.
Computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) is a telephone surveying technique in which the interviewer follows a script provided by a software application. It is a structured system of microdata collection by telephone that speeds up the collection and editing of microdata and also permits the interviewer to educate the respondents on the importance of timely and accurate data. The software is able to customize the flow of the questionnaire based on the answers provided, as well as information already known about the participant. It is used in B2B services and corporate sales.
A dialogue system, or conversational agent (CA), is a computer system intended to converse with a human. Dialogue systems employed one or more of text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures, and other modes for communication on both the input and output channel.
Voice broadcasting is a mass communication technique, begun in the 1990s, that broadcasts telephone messages to hundreds or thousands of call recipients at once. This technology has both commercial and community applications. Voice broadcast users can contact targets almost immediately. When used by government authorities, it may be known as an emergency notification system.
Enterprise feedback management (EFM) is a system of processes and software that enables organizations to centrally manage deployment of surveys while dispersing authoring and analysis throughout an organization. EFM systems typically provide different roles and permission levels for different types of users, such as novice survey authors, professional survey authors, survey reporters and translators. EFM can help an organization establish a dialogue with employees, partners, and customers regarding key issues and concerns and potentially make customer-specific real time interventions. EFM consists of data collection, analysis and reporting.
Audience response is a type of interaction associated with the use of audience response systems, to create interactivity between a presenter and its audience.
Call avoidance is a strategy businesses use to reduce inbound call volumes to contact centers in the customer service industry, particularly in the consumer market.
An exit interview is a survey conducted with an individual who is separating from an organization or relationship. Most commonly, this occurs between an employee and an organization, a student and an educational institution, or a member and an association. An organization can use the information gained from an exit interview to assess what should be improved, changed, or remain intact. More so, an organization can use the results from exit interviews to reduce employee, student, or member turnover and increase productivity and engagement, thus reducing the high costs associated with turnover. Some examples of the value of conducting exit interviews include shortening the recruiting and hiring process, reducing absenteeism, improving innovation, sustaining performance, and reducing possible litigation if issues mentioned in the exit interview are addressed.
Call management is the process of designing and implementing inbound telephone call parameters, which govern the routing of these calls through a network. The process is most prominently utilized by corporations and the call centre industry and has its highest effectiveness when call logging software tools are used. Calls are routed according to the set up of calling features within the given system such as Call queues, IVR menus, Hunt groups and Recorded announcements. Call features provide a customised experience for the caller and maximize the efficiency of inbound call handling. Call management parameters can specify how calls are distributed according to an operator's skill level in relation to a call, the time and/or date of a call, the location of the caller or through automatic routing processes.
Mode effect is a broad term referring to a phenomenon where a particular survey administration mode causes different data to be collected. For example, when asking a question using two different modes, responses to one mode may be significantly and substantially different from responses given in the other mode. Mode effects are a methodological artifact, limiting the ability to compare results from different modes of collection.
With the application of probability sampling in the 1930s, surveys became a standard tool for empirical research in social sciences, marketing, and official statistics. The methods involved in survey data collection are any of a number of ways in which data can be collected for a statistical survey. These are methods that are used to collect information from a sample of individuals in a systematic way. First there was the change from traditional paper-and-pencil interviewing (PAPI) to computer-assisted interviewing (CAI). Now, face-to-face surveys (CAPI), telephone surveys (CATI), and mail surveys are increasingly replaced by web surveys. In addition, remote interviewers could possibly keep the respondent engaged while reducing cost as compared to in-person interviewers.
Voice Elements is a Microsoft Cloud Service and Calling Plan for Microsoft Teams. Voice Elements was released by Inventive Labs Corporation in 2008, based on their original CTI32 toolkit. Software developers who use C#, VB.NET or Delphi use Voice Elements to write telephony-based applications, such as Interactive Voice Response systems, voice dialers, auto attendants, call centers and more.
Computer-assisted survey information collection (CASIC) refers to a variety of survey modes that were enabled by the introduction of computer technology. The first CASIC modes were interviewer-administered, while later on computerized self-administered questionnaires (CSAQ) appeared. It was coined in 1990 as a catch-all term for survey technologies that have expanded over time.
Voice-based marketing automation (VBMA) refers to software platforms designed for marketing, sales, and support departments to measure, manage, and automate their phone conversations. Marketing departments, sales teams, and support agents use VBMA to initiate, manage, monitor, track, route, record, and report on sales and support phone conversations.
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