Predictive Dialers - Overview
Introduction
A predictive dialer is a computerized system that automatically dials batches of telephone numbers for connection to agents assigned to sales or other campaigns. A true predictive dialer is the cornerstone of your success. The most significant task done by the predictive dialer is to predict, which means always making an effort to get a live call to the available agent with the shortest amount of wait time. Most important benefit of a predictive dialer is it reduces expenses for your company over a period of time since you do not need to buy and deploy a complex and sometimes extremely expensive PBX system. For any call center today, a predictive dialer is an indispensable tool. Because it automatically dials calls and connects them with an agent only if a live person answers, a predictive dialer is a real productivity booster.
- The first step in choosing a predictive dialer is to count how many phone lines and agents the call center is able to support.
- The second step in choosing a predictive dialer is to determine if the call center system is Windows-based or Linux-based.
- The third step in choosing a predictive dialer is to find out if the system automatically leaves a message when it is greeted by a answering machine or voice mail.
- The fourth step in choosing a predictive dialer is to test the solution in the call center setting.
- The fifth step in choosing a predictive dialer is to determine how fast the system connects to an agent when there is a live answer.
- The sixth and final step in choosing a predictive dialer is to test how many mistakes the system makes on average in terms of predicting live answers.
Predictive Dialers
Predictive dialers are widely used in call centers. Predictive dialer systems are commonly used by telemarketing organizations involved in B2C (business to consumer) calling as it allows their sales representatives to have much more customer contact time. Predictive dialers may also be used by market survey companies and debt collection services who need to contact and personally speak to a lot of people by telephone. Predictive dialers can be thought of as supercharged autodialers. Predictive dialer is an automated dialing system that empowers call centers so that they can spend 50minutes of each hour talking to live prospects. Predictive dialing software must track the dead air time on all predictive calls, enabling users to comply with the record keeping requirement and provide actual abandonment rates. Predictive Dialers learn to anticipate when an agent will become available, and then accelerate or decrease the outbound dialing rate accordingly. Predictive dialing can result in 33-75% productivity gains. Most predictive dialers can be configured so it will never abandon any calls. Compared to manual dialing, Power dialing has been shown to regularly double productivity and provides a quick ROI (return on investment) at a fraction of the price of predictive dialing.
WHY AUTOMATED DIALING?
Most of us have experienced the benefits of automated dialing without thinking about it when we use the "speed-dial" or the "redial" feature on our phones at the office. On a larger scale, the objective of most automated dialing equipment is to relieve the user of tasks that can be handled either unattended or more efficiently by a computer, making the time spent on the phone more productive. As a stand-alone solution, the predictive dialer offers three powerful advantages over manual dialing:
- With the exception of interactive conversation, a predictive dialer can manage all the tasks associated with making a call while involving a telemarketing service representative (TSR) only when a "live" person answers.
- The predictive dialer can also queue new calls by predicting when an agent will complete a call, based on statistical averages, and actually begin dialing new call attempts before the current call is finished.
- The ability to coordinate the delivery of the voice call to a telephone (or headset), and information about the called party to a data terminal--at the instant the system detects a human voice has answered. The benefit of allowing the dialer to handle non-productive tasks and to "dial ahead" is to boost the average talk time per agent per hour to more than 50 minutes compared to an average of 15 to 20 minutes in a manual environment.
HOW IT WORKS
The most nonproductive aspect of making a large volume of calls is dealing with those that result in a busy signal, no answer, bad number, etc. Predictive dialing systems recognize the various signals and intercept tones returned by the telephone company and automatically process them. Current techniques that monitor the progress of a call are quite sophisticated, provide a high degree of accuracy and are capable of distinguishing between "live" voice and answering machines. This is done through pattern analysis of the cadence and frequency of the audio signal or voice energy. Predictive dialing systems not only dispose of no-contact call attempts by monitoring the line after the number is dialed, but can also schedule the numbers to be recalled, depending on the result. For example, call attempts resulting in a busy signal can be scheduled for an immediate recall, while call attempts resulting in no answer can be rescheduled for thirty minutes or an hour later. The system tracks and reports on the result of each call attempt, so the user can manage and update the calling list.
Because some percentage of all calls are unsuccessful (result in no contact), the predictive dialer is designed to initiate call attempts on multiple lines, simultaneously anticipating some attempts will not get through. The number of simultaneous calls it initiates depends on the success rate, or "hit" rate at that moment in time. For example, if an average of only one out of every two calls resulted in a contact (50-percent hit rate), the system would generate two call attempts for every agent.
The concept is similar to methods used by airlines that over-book flights knowing that historically there is always some percentage of no-shows. As with the airlines, there is a science to "overbooking" call attempts so you don't find yourself with too many passengers and not enough seats. This is one area where predictive dialing vendors try to establish product differentiation. The key is to maximize productivity while minimizing potential nuisance calls (a nuisance call is when a contact is established, but there is no agent available, so the system must terminate the call).
Conclusion
Conference Call Center You can understand this way, a Predictive Dialer is devised to predict or rather anticipate during the call process to ascertain availability the next representative or agent will be free and when the next hello will be detected. One strong advantage to a predictive dialer is that operator efficiency can be increased by as much as 300% over automatic dialing and yield talk times of 45 to 50 minutes per hour. Business Benefits Dynamically adjust to business conditions without the need for highly technical resources Increase customer satisfaction by providing a consistent experience across multiple channels Improve agent productivity by enabling them to toggle between campaigns without having to log in and out of multiple systems Leverage your existing infrastructure. Predictive Dialer is a comprehensive outbound customer contact solution that improves your contact centers effectiveness while seamlessly integrating with your existing voice and data systems.
If you have ever done your research about the Oracle Contact Center Anywhere call center solution, you may have heard about the Predictive Dialer call center technology which is a key feature of this call center software package. What do we need to know about Predictive Dialer call center technology then?
First of all, there are other contact center software out there which do use the predictive dialer technology too. Basically, a predictive dialer is used nowadays for various call center tasks such as collection of payments, confirming appointments, conducting surveys, and doing telemarketing (among others.) Predictive dialer works by accessing the list of phone numbers (each of which belongs to a specific prospect or contact) then proceeding to eliminate unanswered calls, busy signals encountered, calls answered by answering machines, and disconnected calls. At the same time, the Predictive Dialer Call Center Technology will be able to make a reasonable estimate when a human caller can take the call.
But Promero has a different Predictive Dialer Call Center Technology in use when you opt for their Oracle Contact Center Anywhere call center solution. This Predictive Dialer Call Center Technology has additional features that other call center software do not have, including the Do Not Call function; duration per ring; percentage of the Drop Call Rate; any frequently asked questions regarding how campaigns should be worded; the campaign-based out-pulse ANI; the Reporting predicting drop rate; and the real-time numbers regarding answer rate based on campaign used. Predictive Dialer technology is basically automation of the system so that multiple agents (or multiple users) can be connected to the same contact center infrastructure.
The main advantage of using the Oracle Contact Center Anywhere call center solution is so that agents need not scramble around looking for the next prospect or contact to call ?which is particularly useful for the outbound call center tasks. With this call center technology, the contact center can deploy less agents with more outbound calls assigned per agent. This smart technology permits outbound phone numbers to be dialed in order to anticipate when a telemarketer (or contact center agent) is free to handle the call. It should be stressed that a Predictive Dialer differs from ordinary automatic phone dialers or preview dialers, since a Predictive Dialer is supposed to anticipate when a phone number should be dialed next so that the agent will have another call in queue for him to handle after he finishes his first marketing call.
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Improving Contact Center Service and Performance
