I found one company that put together a custom installation, using their own programmers, with a software-based predictive dialing system and Dialogic boards. It may not be the best system for everybody, but it is definitely possible to get predictive dialing for less than you expect.
Dialing is by definition software. It always has been. For years, the predictive dialing vendors (rightly) competed with one another on features — answering machine detect, speed of answer, and fundamental algorithm — that were software. The boxes were of secondary importance. They were proprietary because you needed lots of processing horsepower to drive those software applications.
Nowadays you want to have more flexibility with your agents, inbound or outbound. You want to link your hardware systems together: switches and computers, dialers and voice systems.
The logic behind it is overwhelming: if dialing features are mainly software, and powerful generic processors are available to run them, there’s no reason why they can’t be part of an overall inbound and outbound call routing system on a client/server platform.
So what should you be thinking about when buying your predictive dialer? Integration — with every other piece of hardware and software in your call center. Mostly software.
What’s happening in the call center now is the marriage of voice and data. Call centers are using open dialing platforms to take advantage of other niche technologies in the call center. It’s a powerful means of taking the benefits of predictive dialers even further.
Why is integration important to call centers? Primarily because of the increased control call center managers have over their technology. Essential call center equipment like ACDs, PBXs and predictive dialers now work in concert, allowing for greater efficiency and productivity.
Companies are driven to make better use of their resources. There are so many technology directions that companies can easily fritter away resources and not really improve the service they provide or the bottom line that they protect.
Smaller centers have basically three options:
-
Buy a turnkey system (which may be proprietary) and build a telecom and computer system around it. This is good for companies that want to dump older equipment.
-
Go for an integrated solution, combining the power of PCs and LANs with software or hardware dialing processors and a phone system.
Using off-the-shelf parts, you can put together inexpensive solutions. You can grow into it slowly, without sacrificing the dialing features you need: swift answer detection and screen transfer.
-
Or lay a dialing solution on top of the existing telecom and data infrastructure. Your best option here: talk to the vendors who make your existing equipment and software. Chances are you might find a dialer maker among the vendors of your ACD, VRU or call management software.
Software-driven predictive dialers integrate into the call center environment because they’re based on multipurpose minicomputers that let users run other software and because they employ industry standard computer-telephone devices to perform predictive dialing.
Besides predictive dialing, many dialing systems let call center agents perform preview dialing where agents call up data and review it before the call is placed. Preview dialing mostly benefits small call centers making business to business calls.
As for the future of predictive dialers, most agree about the importance of integration. For some call centers, integration means less dependency on mainframes, while others see it as a way to tie dialers into a national database of people who don’t want calls. Even more adventurous is the theory that full function predictive dialing will be possible from an agent’s home phone.
Regardless of what happens in the future, one thing is true: forward thinking has turned a once limited piece of hardware into a versatile and vital piece of technology. As long as that persists, its value in today’s (and tomorrow’s) call center remains undiminished.
No comments:
Post a Comment