Survey dialing

Survey dialing is a VICIdial campaign mode where the system places calls, plays a recorded message, and then waits for the person to press a key to respond. Nobody on your team has to be on the line for the first part of the call, which is what makes the mode useful for reaching a lot of people quickly. The recording does the talking, and the keypad does the answering.

It works a lot like press 1 campaigns and overlaps with broadcast dialing: a recording goes out, and the keys people press decide what happens next. The difference is that survey dialing is built to collect answers across several questions, not just to hand off interested people. You can branch the call — press 1 for yes, 2 for no — and send each branch somewhere different. A real survey might walk a person through three or four questions before it ever offers to connect them to a human.

Where the call can go

• Straight into an ingroup so a live agent picks up when someone wants to talk.
• To another recording that asks a follow-up question, building up a short chain of prompts.
• Onto the do-not-call list, if someone presses the opt-out key — always give them a clear way to do this.

Because survey dialing reaches people without an agent ready, the same rules that cover robo dialing apply. You still owe a safe harbor message when a machine answers and nobody can connect, and you set all of this up inside a campaign just like any other dialing mode. The compliance side is not optional here — running a recorded message to a list of people carries the same legal weight as a robocall, so plan your opt-out and your timing carefully.

It matters because it lets a small team run a polling or screening job that would otherwise need dozens of people. The trade-off is that you have less control over how the call feels, so keep your recordings short and your opt-out key obvious. People hang up fast on a robotic voice, which means your first sentence has to earn the next few seconds of their attention.