During the 2020 Census, the Census Questionnaire Assistance (CQA) program provided telephone support in the form of answering frequently asked questions, helping callers fill out the census questionnaire, and completing questionnaires over the phone via an interview between the caller and a customer service representative.

Unique toll-free telephone numbers provided dedicated support for callers in English, Spanish, and 11 non-English/non-Spanish languages: Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), French, Haitian Creole, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. CQA also provided support for callers originating in Puerto Rico (English and Spanish), callers who were deaf or hearing impaired and used telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD) or teletypewriter (TTY) technology, and group quarters administrators. Calls to the English and Spanish language lines connected to a front-end Interactive Voice Response system where callers could obtain information by selecting from a series of menu options before transferring to a customer service representative, if needed. The CQA phone numbers were available for live customer service representative support from March 9 to October 15, 2020.

In addition to the inbound call capabilities, CQA conducted the outbound Coverage Improvement (CI) telephone operation, which aimed to resolve potential coverage-related issues that occurred during the initial census data collection. For example, when a respondent indicated that their child lived part of the time at “College,” the Coverage Improvement interview aimed to collect information, such as the address of the college, to ensure the child was counted only once, and in the correct place.

This assessment documents aspects of the CQA operation related to the performance of the program and provides recommendations to consider in the next planning cycle in support of the 2030 Census.