Dialing Rate Asynchrony

When there is an asynchrony between the dial rate and the available agents, you have a situation with two possible outcomes:  

1) There are more live parties on call attempts than there are agents available. 

2) There are more agents available than there are live parties on call attempts.  

Usually, when you have a situation like that, both situations occur intermittently.  

If we have more live parties on call attempts than there are agents available to take those calls, the dialer will disconnect or delay distribution of calls that cannot be distributed to an agent. This is known as a silent call or a nuisance call. The called party hears only silence when the predictive dialer does not at least play a recorded message. 

The experience for the clients who receive a silent call can be very unsatisfactory when we have an appreciable period of silence before a call is routed to a sales representative. This annoys people and also gives them a chance to hang up. A high rang-up/dropped calls rate is a clear indicator of asynchrony between the dial rate and the availability of agents. This is a big problem and we should be aware of the following facts:  

1) A very small percentage of the mailings are actual clients, and reaching them and then having no way to treat them is very disappointing from the company perspective. 

2) The client gets upset for getting a silent call. 

3) These calls have a cost which, depending on the hang-up rate, can be very significant. 

Some countries even regulate the number of silent calls that a company can make within a certain time frame. A good reference point on this problem is that a maximum of 3 percent of the calls, measured as a percentage of live calls made, may be dropped. More than that, and you may have a problem.  

In some countries there are regulations defining the need for a mandatory abandon message to be played when no agents are available and there is an obligation to inform the caller ID.  

If you have more agents available than there are live parties on call attempts, you will have agents idle, which reduces your productivity.  

Therefore, it is important to keep in mind that the asynchrony causes problems in both ways. If your predictive dialer is not able to adjust the dial rate properly, you will have moments in which you will have more calls than agents (silent calls and hang-ups/dropped calls) and moments with more agents than calls (low productivity and idle agents).  

It is worth mentioning an aspect, which, although operational, tends to have a big impact in the dialers’ productivity: if you mix databases of numbers already used several times (in which the concentration of bad numbers tends to be higher) and new databases in the same campaign, the results tend to be worse than if you keep them separated.