Call Center Predictive Dialers

An evolved form of automated dialer are called predictive dialers. In addition to automatically dialing a list of phone numbers for customers or prospective customers, as traditional dialers do, the predictive dialers execute two sets of activities, which increase enormously the productivity of the dialing process: 

1) Screens out no-answers, busy signals, standard information tones (SITs), and fax/answering machines, only sending calls that reach a live person to a sales agent. Here it is interesting to note that to be able to screen such things it is necessary to have a fine tuning between the public network signalling and the device. That means lengthy installation times and a very high level of sensitivity in any shift of trunks and operators. 

2) Using intelligent algorithms, these devices can detect when an agent is wrapping up a call; they’ll then begin dialing the next number and send the call to that agent as soon as a dialer reaches a live voice on the other end. These algorithms are also capable of detecting the number of available telephone lines, available operators, and average length of each call. Therefore, these devices predict the dialing rate in order to match it with the number of available agents. 

While the basic autodialer merely automatically dials telephone numbers for call-center agents who are idle or waiting for a call, the predictive dialer uses a variety of algorithms to predict both the availability of agents and called-party answers, adjusting the calling rate to the number of agents it predicts will be available when the calls it places are expected to be answered.  

By using a dialer to filter out these unproductive calls and to spare the agent from having to wait (adjusting the dial rate), call centers can improve productivity enormously. Agents can now spend on average around 80 percent of their time talking to customers and only about 20 percent of their time waiting for the next call.  

Compared with the conventional dialer (known in some countries as autodialer or power-dialer), predictive dialers have shown increases in talk time from twenty minutes in the hour to almost fifty (25 percent to 85 percent). However, predictive dialers are more suitable for low-quality mailings and large numbers of agents, and we should be aware that an unexpectedly high contact rate can overwhelm the system, leading to a high rate of call abandonment. We should be aware that the ability to identify bad numbers, answering machines, and fax machines isn’t what defines a predictive dialer—sophisticated power-dialers may do those things also—but rather it is the ability to use this information, plus the average duration and available agents, to adjust the dial rate.  

In operational terms, we have to understand that before running a campaign, the call list data (this is usually called a mailing or campaign), is loaded into the dialer. Then, the dialing process starts, and statistics are kept about what is happening. Most predictive dialers generate reports that indicate call attempts and unsuccessful calls by type. Unsuccessful calls are often analyzed to determine if the number called needs to be called back later or needs special treatment, such as a manual or autodialed call by an agent to listen to an answering-machine message.  Some companies adopt the practice of what is called “cleaning the mailing,” which consists of using dedicated dialers to call the numbers very quickly. The call duration is just enough to check if the number is valid (whatever the reason) and separate it from the mailing. Only after performing this cleaning are the separated numbers loaded in production dialers. Usually, the devices used for cleaning the mailing lists are connected to service providers whose charging granularity doesn’t exceed 18s as the minimum time charged per call, regardless of the real duration of the call. This practice maximizes the productivity because it allows the separation of the different kinds of situations in a more dedicated form. As examples, fax machines may receive a predefined fax message, and answering machines may receive a prerecorded message. Of course, it could be done by the same dialer in the first place, but very often infrastructures are not uniformly built and, depending on the situation, this strategy may be very useful