better control and more features

The latest released versions of CfMC's Survent for CATI bring greater efficiency and functionality to the most robust CATI tool on the market.

Users adopting the newest release of Survent will realize gains in productivity when adopting webCATI, equipped with webSuper, your online management tool for managing and reporting on CATI interviewing operations.

WebCATI users can manage projects, sample, and quality from anywhere - and on one central server. Your resources are now scalable.

NEW white paper: Reasons to Upgrade to Version 8.3

Now Available in Survent v8.3: The Celeus Predictive Dialer

• Power and predictive dialing
• Audio and visual monitoring (terminal and web-based)
• Dual-stream audio recording – partial or whole interview - with playback features
• Dashboard, operation and productivity reports
• Answering machine detection

More Celeus information | Download the Celeus primer

Survent knows no limits

Survent allows you to perform almost any operation without worrying about how big a study can be or how many of answers are allowed. Most users will appreciate these size advantages

• concurrent sessions: up to 1,800 webSurvent, up to 1,500 webCATI, and up to 3000 terminal-based Survent sessions allowed (per server)
• sample size: up to 10 million records
• timezones: 24 timezones available
• quotas and markets: You can now have approximately 1,000 markets and the quotas that go along with them instead of the previous limit of 150 triple quotas and 250 markets.
• question size: up to 1 million questions per study

II. interviewing features

• New: efficient and scalable predictive dialing with the Celeus dialer
• webCATI: WebCATI allows you to run interviewers in a browser-based environment.
• enhanced modes: Change Interviewer mode, Debug mode, Practice mode, and View mode all have been enhanced.
• better screen movement/displays: Move on code lists based on the response text (move to item), use new key combinations for paging, begin and end. Complete rotation control of code lists on the screen, larger lists, nicer displays with enhanced screens (eg. Duplicate lists and Study choice) in many places.
• more operational information available: Time between questions logging, current time displayed on screen, and the response to the previous question on current screen now available.

III. operational features

• do more without paying a license fee: programmers can work at home without a software key, and we provide a copy of Mentor to run reports without a software license.
• every answer is logged and the data file is automatically backed up after each interview.
• update partial completes rather than write multiple records
• a new save-data option in case of operation failures: If a terminal gets disconnected, the software attempts to save the data and sample record. If a “blow” error occurs due to programming problems, the software performs in the same way. In addition, the suspend data is backed up automatically.
• better Survent summary logging and reports have been added; it is easier to write your own reports; you can log anything you want into your own customized log file.
• total support for long and case-sensitive filenames in UNIX

 

IV. enhanced supervisory features

• webSuper: manage quotas, activate and report on interviewer activity, and much more with a few clicks of the mouse.
• new VIEW mode added for review and/or alteration to completed interviews.
• a market (quota) summary screen has been added to see how many numbers are available in open markets.
• review a particular sample record's information.
• control the total study with one command instead of using a list of stations on the study.

V. programming features

• better error checking: the software will not allow data overlapping and quota name mismatches. The software provides a new error summary at the end of compiles so you can see the types of errors and warnings found. Unlabeled questions are labeled so you can find them more easily.
• easier to make column-free questionnaires with a new WORK data location that assigns questions to the next available location in the work area.
• easier graphics - it is now much easier to program graphics on screens with defaults for various display features across questions.
• all question types have a blank option (allowing questions to be left blank).
• question code lists can be rotated in any fashion , much like groups of questions.
• languages can be separated onto separate code lists within questions.
• new functions: In particular, date-time functions to return differences and various formats, a function to find text, new counting functions, etc.

VI. improved utilities

• improved and reorganized utilities; there are now fewer utilities that have more features. Web versions of some utilities are available now and the rest will be available soon.
• Web output is available in all utilities
• the reformat utility supports Triple-S (XML), export of code text, SQL, and more

VII. webSurvent/webCATI

• pass variables into and out of webSurvent or webCATI.
• run multiple questionnaires that access the same study.
• control the display of complex grids with simple !HTML control commands that apply to all parts of the questions.
• rotate grids; you can have color control across rotated grids.
• data is saved when you back up.

VIII. ODBC support

Survent supports ODBC-compliant databases. You can read from and write to the database during live interviewing from Survent, webSurvent, or webCATI or by using Mentor's IO for tables or data processing.