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How an answering machine is detected

Every outbound survey call listens to the first words of whoever answers before it says anything (see Gatekeeper). Voicemail detection is built in and always on. It recognises mailbox greetings such as “You’ve reached Sarah, leave a message after the tone”, “I can’t take your call right now” and carrier announcements that the call is being forwarded to voicemail. Voicemail is checked before anything else, so a mailbox greeting is never offered a callback or asked the consent question. A hold message that turns out to be a mailbox (“please hold or leave a message after the tone”) is also treated as voicemail.

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Choosing what a machine gets

You choose on the Gatekeeper → Outbound pane, in the Screening group, with two fields: A summary line under the group shows the result of what you have entered:

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The spoken message

The message is spoken exactly as written, once. The interviewer waits for the mailbox greeting to finish and for a short moment of quiet before speaking, so the message is not talked over by the beep. A good message says who called, why, and how to reach you, in two or three sentences. For example:
Hi, this is Alex from Northside Research. We’re running a short community survey and would love your views. You can call us back on this number at any time. Thanks.
If respondents call back, they reach whatever the number is assigned to — assign the survey’s script to your outbound number to have the survey answer them (see Running a survey). Inbound callers hear the Inbound introduction and consent question from the Gatekeeper.

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The SMS

The SMS text is sent to the number that was dialled. Keep it short, say who you are and why you called, and give a way to take part or opt out. If the SMS cannot be sent, the call ends without leaving anything. When no SMS is set, Readiness shows the warning “The gatekeeper has no SMS — an answering machine gets a silent hangup.” When a spoken message is set, the message is left as usual. The warning is a reminder only: hanging up on voicemail is a common choice for research calls, and it does not block compiling or publishing.

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How voicemail is recorded

A voicemail ends the call straight after the message or SMS. There is no closing text and no farewell, because nobody is listening.
  • The outcome is no_contact.
  • No survey session is filed, so the call does not appear under Results Responses or in the export. It is counted as Voicemail under Not connected in the Results Contact funnel (see Results).
  • The call’s survey.gatekeeper.result custom variable is voicemail, and survey.gatekeeper.status records what the machine got:
All are text values. See Survey variables and piping for the full set. Whether voicemail calls are retried is decided by the batch the survey runs in, not by the survey — see Calling Rules & Retries.