Telesolutions Calls

Telesolutions Calls

By Patrick Barnard

It often seems that the predictive dialer is the “unsung hero” of all the pieces of equipment that make up the contact center hardware ecosystem. The dialer just sits back there, in the server room, doing its thing, and no one ever seems to really pay much attention to it -- that is until it comes time to load it up with a new set of numbers for another outbound campaign.

A lot of people don’t realize it, but the efficacy with which a predictive dialer is used can actually make or break a telesolutions business – especially one which is reliant on outbound campaigns to stay alive. A dialer which is “overloaded” can end up connecting too many calls and overwhelm a call center, leading to high abandonment rates – while a dialer which is used too conservatively might not connect enough calls to keep all agents in the center busy (and there’s nothing worse for a company than having a bunch of agents sitting around, on the clock, doing nothing). If a company has a direct competitor which is making better use of its dialer system for automating outbound campaigns, chances are it will only be a matter of time before the difference in approach shows up on the bottom line. So, it is not only a matter of reaching your target customers faster, and more accurately, than your competitor, but also how effectively the dialer is used within the framework of your organization

These powerful dialing systems save call centers tons of labor, as agents no longer need to manually dial numbers on the telephone keypad or computer keyboard. The advantage, in terms of sheer volume, is self-evident: a predictive dialer telesolution can dial thousands of numbers in literally minutes, whereas this could potentially take all day with a contact center with a few dozen agents.

This also equates to an inherent advantage in terms of simple attrition: Out of all the calls made, typically about 25-35 percent connect to a live person. Of the rest, a large percentage (roughly 40-60 percent) won't be answered at all, around 10 percent might be answering machines, faxes, modems or other electronic devices; another 5 percent would be busy; and the rest would fall under the “other” category. For call centers that need to make large numbers of outbound calls, the advantage is obvious: It enables the agents to spend the majority of their time talking to customers, as opposed to dialing and dialing. In fact, in most manual dialing environments, a given agent will spend around 80 percent of his or her time dialing, and about 20 percent of the time talking to customers. Using advanced algorithms, these workhorses are used to predict both the availability of agents and called party answers, adjusting the calling telesolutions process to the number of agents it anticipates (or predicts) will be available when the calls it places are expected to be answered. In this sense, the predictive dialer serves as the “load balancer” for the call center.

Today’s predictive dialers have become sophisticated to the point where they can actually detect how each call is answered. If the line is busy, the dialer moves on to the next call, but it keeps a record of that busy signal so that it can call that number back in a specified period of time. Similarly, if an answering machine or fax machine picks up the line, the dialer detects this, makes a record of it, and tries connecting the call again later. Interestingly, some of today’s dialers include a speech recognition component which can detect whether the person answering the call is male or female. If the campaign involved specifies targeting only females, then the dialer will disconnect if a male voice answers the call and move on to the next number (some will argue that this is unethical, because it creates an annoyance for the called parties -- and for the most part it is undocumented how many organizations engage in this questionable practice).

Today’s predictive dialers “balance” the load for the call center through the use of dialing algorithms. The key is to find the perfect balance between the number of attempts and calls connected with the number of available agents. Today’s dialers base the number of attempts on how many agents are “on line” at any given time and take into account the average time it takes for an agent to complete a call. The telesolutions dialer dials ahead of the agent, so that another call is waiting for the agent each time they wrap up their current interaction. That way, as soon as the agent becomes available, there is another call waiting for them. In essence, the dialer works to maximize agent productivity. Considering the labor is the biggest piece of any contact center budget pie, it’s easy to see how dialers have assumed an important role in keep call centers “profitable.”