A phone interview template to streamline CATI surveys
Manage computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) from initial contact through follow-ups with this user-friendly phone interview template.
What's in this phone interview template for CATI surveys
Setting up a workflow for computer-assisted telephone interviewing requires you to manage lots of different moving parts, from spreadsheets of respondent phone numbers to missed and rescheduled calls. And that doesn’t even touch keeping track of data collectors, monitoring data during collection, or dealing with the constraints of low-resource settings, like lack of laptops or devices.
That’s why we designed this phone interview template to be as flexible as possible, so you can meet your project’s unique needs. With this template, you can:
- Apply our case management solution to track phone interviews by respondent, aggregating data as well as reducing errors and data cleaning
- Combine SurveyCTO’s enumerator management tools with case management to link respondents to data collectors
- Track up to 5 phone numbers per respondent
- Call respondents directly from within the survey on a mobile device
- Make multiple contact attempts in the same form, whenever a call is unsuccessful and there are other phone numbers
- Reschedule calls to a specific date and time
- Track the number of contact attempts made so far
- Filter out non-responses after a set number of missed calls (when using case management)
- Use a step-by-step guide showing you how to use, customize, and deploy the workflow
Deploy this template to use as-is, or edit further in SurveyCTO’s online form builder or in a Google Sheet or Excel.
The sky's the limit for CATI surveys that use this template
- Keep your questionnaire’s language and content as simple as possible. If you are used to creating surveys for in-person interviews, think about what’s missing in a phone conversation–facial expressions, body language–and how that could increase misunderstandings.
- If possible, collect multiple numbers for respondents. Keep in mind that in developing or low-to-middle-income countries (LMICs) changing phone numbers happens more frequently, so don’t rely on only one number per household if you don’t have to.
- Choose your survey software wisely–they are not all equal! SurveyCTO lets you handle phone calls within our Collect app, streamlining the process of calling respondents, and also lets you connect to external tools like Zapier for call-back scheduling, or Exotel and Twilio if you want to use different platforms for voice calls,
- Consider remote work! While you can use our phone interview template and CATI features for call-center-based surveys, you can also run surveys based on this template from home offices with only mobile devices (that’s right, actual laptops are not required here).
- Get up and running with your CATI survey faster than ever with this phone interview template, designed to streamline your processes while improving data quality!
What's included in this phone interview template:
- Questions to gather data for all the phone numbers connected to this respondent
- Privacy protections for respondents, like the ability to hide numbers from data collectors, while remaining visible for survey administrators
- A preferred number for each respondent, and a list of other numbers they can be reached out
- Ability to easily add a new number for a respondent
- Questions for gathering standards respondent information (name, household, occupation, etc.)
- Easily customizable fields that can be edited to fit any type of use case
