Our customers love the power to design and run polls exactly the way they want. So today we’re excited to announce several new features that provide more control over running polls:

1. Control callbacks
   If we’re not able to reach someone (there is an answering machine, busy signal, or no answer), what should we do? We used to only give you two options: give up, or try every hour up to 3 times. But we learned this is sometimes not enough; sometimes clients want to retry only one time; or clients want to retry at the same time tomorrow. You now pick how many retry attempts (1-5), and the time between retries (from 30 minutes to one day). Use this to maximize the value you get from your phone list (if they aren’t answering now, they might a little bit later).
2. Set how quickly we make calls
   By default, we run as fast as possible, making tens of thousands of calls an hour. But suppose you want to call a list of 1,000 people between 6-8pm; if you ran at full speed, you’d be done a few minutes past 6pm, which could introduce possible bias regarding who-is-at-home-when. Now, you can specify a rate like “make no more than 500 calls an hour”.
3. Define what a “complete” is in more detail
   We’ve also tidied up the notion of whether a call counts as “complete” or not. You can now create a survey so that the call is counted as complete if the survey finishes “normally,” OR if a particular question is answered. For example, suppose you want to know the caller’s stance on a particular issue, but want to weed out answers from people who are not registered voters. You would ask “are you a registered voter, yes or no?” And then you’d ask the registered voters what their stance is, and mark that question as being the survey-completion criteria. The non-registered voters would never get a chance to answer that question, and so their responses wouldn’t be counted as “complete” (though you can of course look at their answers, if you want to).

We hope that these new features will give you more control over the surveying methodology, and help you get the most out of your sample. Please let us know what you think, and tell us what other features you’d like to see (the features above started as a request from a customer!).