What to Look For | Outdialing Systems

• Databases. The dialer must connect to your host system to access your call lists. It’s got to switch between lists and campaigns and it’s got to reschedule callbacks for busies and no-answers.

• Continuing improvement in software and applications. With a clear focus from the vendor on integrating the dialer with inbound switching and with the total customer management software infrastructure. It’s not going to do you much good if a sales person works from one isolated island of information, and the customer service department works from another.

• Call blending. You don’t have to divide agents into inbound and outbound pools anymore. Once, it was necessary. But why should you have outbound agents rushing through a call list while inbound agents sit idle?

What happens when an automated outbound center starts to receive callbacks from the people not reached on the first call? (That happens a lot in collection environments.)

If the ACD and the dialer don’t communicate well, the calls could go to an inbound-only group. But you may want the same agents to handle inbound and outbound. Or a particular account may belong to an agent or a group.

Intelligent features are available for blending inbound and outbound calls on the dialer. You adjust for peaks and valleys by dynamically switching agents from one group to another. It reduces staffing inefficiency and maximizes agents’ talk times more than ever before.

There are two kinds of call blending: reactive blending, where agents are switched around when the system detects an overflow; and predictive blending, in which you predefine when the pools are switched.

• Computer/telephony integration. Dialers should be linked to the host telephone switch, as well as fax and voice mail systems. Monitor ACD activity through server-based connections to the switch. These reports help control workflow in a call blending situation. All this information is vital — how many calls come in, how long they are on hold and when the call center is busiest.

• Business-to-business impact. Predictive dialers are great when you have large lists of customers or potential customers. But they don’t work well when you have to call businesses.

  That’s because companies almost always answer their phones, even if the specific person you want to reach is not there. You lose the efficiency gained by screening out no-answers and busies. The same problem applies to people whose job it is to screen calls.

  If you need to do this kind of calling in conjunction with consumer telemarketing, consider a dialer that lets you shunt several agents into a separate campaign, then run that campaign with the predictive features turned off. Lots of dialers let you do this.

  If you do this kind of calling exclusively, try a sales management software program that controls your lists, feeds the sales person the phone numbers, but lets them keep control of the call from dial to hang-up. This is called preview dialing and it’s common to most contact management or sales automation software programs.

• Do a 30-day test of the dialer with each vendor you’re considering. With a 30-day test, managers will experience not only what the system can do but what impact it will have on your people.

• Make sure the system supports the number of users you need now and in the future. Take a close look at the stability of the company — those that made just dialers in the early ‘90s have been dropping like flies.

• It’s important that there is at least one person within your company whose primary job is to see the project through. This shouldn’t be just a part of their job but a major function of their job.

• Beware of slow transfers. If the prospect has to say hello three times before the call reaches the agent, you might lose the sale before you’ve made the pitch. Your system should transfer the call fast enough for the agent to hear part of the first “hello.”

• Beware of call abandonment. Some lower-end predictive dialers hang up on 20% or more of prospects. The last thing you want is to generate complaints: for people with Caller ID to be calling your center, or calling the phone company, or the state regulators. List owners who receive complaints may stop renting you their lists. Try to buy a system capable of a zero abandon rate. This is a necessary precaution in case future regulations require it.

• Get a system that’s capable of inbound/outbound call blending. That’s the ability of every agent to handle both incoming and outgoing calls from the same station. This leads to higher list penetration and more sales. The outbound agent can leave a message explaining what the call is about. Calls that come back in based on that are more likely to end in a sale. Likewise, inbound-based agents can handle outbound calls during slow periods.

• More leads can mean a lower sales conversion. Perversely, when the supply of fresh leads is unlimited, agents sometimes don’t try as hard for the sale as they do when the supply is limited. Especially with very little wait time between calls.

• Get call tracking and custom list loading. Your system should keep a record of call attempts to be certain that each attempt is at a different time during the day and on different days. Some weaker systems have no call tracking abilities at all, and every time you load the dialers the same people are always called first.

• Keep transition times short. Predictive dialing should reduce the after-call work time (that time between when your agent hangs up the phone and when they are back on the phone) at a given low abandonment rate, say, 2%.

  Only a few predictive dialers can achieve list penetration level of 50% with daytime calling, while maintaining an average wait time between calls of nine to 20 seconds at a 2% abandonment rate.

• Get full branch scripting. The best scripting systems allow data and calculations to be performed in the script and the screen routing is based on the answers given.

  Also when an agent hits a key to change screens, it must be instantaneous, no matter how many people are on the system. A multiple-second wait time is unacceptable. The system should also provide function keys for access to questions most likely to come up at each specific place in the script.

• Ensure campaign flexibility. There should be no limit to the number of campaigns or number of projects that can be called. Every operator should be able to call a different campaign at the same time.

  Make sure it’s expandable. What if your company becomes a big success? Plan for future growth. (I always have to say this, but it’s true.)

So Predictive Dialers Head For Software... | Outdialing Systems

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

But Wait - Aren’t They Complicated? | Outdialing Systems

Yes, and no. The story of dialing in the last few years has been one of a technology that matured, and then was overrun by changes in technology outside the box.

By that I mean that the basic functions involved in predictive dialing (or any other dialing, for that matter) were long ago created and encoded into software. The rest of the cost of a predictive dialer was the cost of the high-powered dedicated box needed to make it happen, and to integrate it into the list system, and to the agent desktop.

It wasn’t so long ago that predictive dialers were a simple purchase — you bought the one that gave you the most talk time per hour, or the one that had the best answering machine detect. What you looked for in a dialer was dialing features. That’s changing immensely.

Like most other hardware technologies, predictive dialers are responding to changes in the nature of the call center. Nowadays you want more flexibility with your agents, inbound or outbound. You want to link your hardware systems together: switches and computers, dialers and voice systems.

More than anything else, you want to choose the software applications that make sense for your business, and get cost-effective hardware to run them. Decoupling the software apps from the hardware is the most impressive development to come along in years.

Predictive dialer vendors, like PBX and ACD vendors before them, have been forced to adapt to a changing world. People are less inclined to choose a standalone system they can’t program and that can only be connected to a limited range of compatible peripherals.

Predictive dialing has always been a software application. It required a great deal of processing power, so vendors put their specialized software onto high-powered computers, most of them with a closed architecture. But the research and development was always geared to better dialing algorithms, more sophisticated call tracking features, and better database management — essentially software apps.

What started as a great idea for outbound telemarketing and collections — fire out more calls than necessary to maximize agent productivity — became the platform on which software companies continued to refine and develop new features for handling calls.

It was such a good idea that companies in other areas (telemarketing software, especially) began adding predictive dialing modules to their systems. The logic was good: if dialing features are mainly software, and powerful generic processors are available to run them, there’s no reason not to create a whole new category of product — the PC-based (or at least client/server-based) dialer.

The traditional hardware/dialing vendors are now changing to match. Several of them have taken their core technologies, enhanced them, and are presenting them to call centers in a new light. They are creating systems for managing all aspects of the call flow. They let agents make calls in predictive mode, and receive incoming calls as well.

To facilitate that, dialer makers have incorporated a technology to blend agents; this allows a single station to handle either incoming or outgoing calls. And although it’s not used widely yet, it’s growing. The dialer is steadily losing its identity as a purely outbound object. It’s got to act like, and interact with, inbound call routing systems. Because it’s increasingly unlikely that a given center will be doing all of one kind of calling, or all of another. Recent information from Datamonitor suggested that the market for outbound dialers was actually expected to increase in the next few years.

Since few call centers are now dedicated to outbound traffic, integration with inbound is the highest priority for the vendors of high-end outbound dialers. Their strengths is clearly in the software that routes the calls, downloads the lists, tracks the results and coordinates the customer information on the back-end. If this sounds an awful lot like the new CIS software, you are right. If it sounds like computer telephony integration, you are also right.

The most successful predictive dialer companies right now — the ones making the most interesting and useful technology — are the ones that have rethought the logic of the outbound call center and recast their dialer as an indispensable component of the inbound and outbound center. For all of them, the selling point is not the power of the dialing engine, but the value-added capabilities of the companion software.

Outdialing Systems

As an outbound call center manager or supervisor, you get more than a little annoyed when your agents can’t reach the people on their call lists. You know it’s not your agent’s fault. Much of their time is taken up trying to get through to a prospect to make a sale or collect a bill, and the longer it takes them to do their job, the more it costs.

Even if you have a small call center, a typical agent only reaches 25 to 35 people per 100 attempts, which could take hours. Enter predictive dialing: automation provides the same 100 calls in about 90 minutes, routing your agent only the ones that reach a human voice.

Today’s dialers are much more sophisticated than they were fifteen years ago. Predictive dialing automates the entire outdialing process, with the computer choosing the person to be called and dialing the number. The call is only passed to the agent when a live human answers.

Predictive dialers screen out all the non-productive calls before they reach the agent: all the busy signals, no-answers, answering machines, network messages, and so on. The agent simply moves from one ready call to another, without stopping to dial, listen, or choose the next call.

True predictive dialing is merely one kind of automated dialing — there are others; but predictive is the most powerful and the most productivity-enhancing. True predictive dialing has complex mathematical algorithms that consider, in real-time, the number of available telephone lines, the number of available operators, the probability of not reaching the intended party, the time between calls required for maximum operator efficiency, the length of an average conversation, and the average length of time the operators need to enter the relevant data.

Some predictive dialing systems constantly adjust the dialing rate by monitoring changes in all these factors. The dialer is taking a sort of gamble: knowing that these processes are in motion, and knowing that there is a certain chance that a call placed will end in failure, it throws more calls into the network than there are agents available to handle them, if all the calls were to succeed.

Sometimes the prediction is wrong, and there are fewer failures than expected. In this case the called party will pick up the phone, say hello, and be hung up on when no agent is available. One of the intricacies of predictive dialer management is fine-tuning the aggressiveness of your dialer’s algorithm.

Predictive dialing has been nothing short of revolutionary in the outbound call center. When agents dial calls manually, the typical talk time is close to 25 minutes per hour. Most of the rest of that time is non-productive: looking up the next number to dial it; dialing the phone; listening to the rings; dealing with the answering machine or the busy signal, etc. Predictive dialing takes all that away from the agent’s desk and buries it inside the processor.

When working with a predictive dialer, it is possible to push agent performance into the range of 45 to 50 minutes per hour. I’ve heard of centers going as high as 54 minutes per hour. (You can’t really go higher than that, taking into account post-call wrap up time.)

There is more to the technology than just the pacing algorithm. Predictive machines excel at detecting exactly what is on the other end of the phone, including the ability to differentiate a human voice from an answering machine. They typically decide that the call has reached a person within the first 1/50th of a second — the start of the word “hello.”

Here are just a few of the important ways predictive dialing systems can help you.

• They completely automate outbound consumer calling. That includes the actual dialing, assigning agents and controlling the list you call from.

  You can run multiple inbound and outbound campaigns, and you can specify names on a list not to call. It also schedules automatic callbacks for nonproductive calls. Dialers let you set the parameters for the dialing algorithms to meet the needs of a particular campaign, like the percent of overdials the system sends out.

  With collections applications, for example, you may not care if the dialer has to hang up on a “customer” if there is no agent available. You’ll trade the customer’s good will for a higher volume of calls. But for a sales promotion, you’d want to keep those hang-ups to a minimum.

• You can manage your call center more effectively.

  Standard features include real-time statistics about how each agent, group of agents or list is performing. Also, trunk pooling, which reduces operating costs by processing both inbound and outbound over the same trunks.

• They reduce agent burnout and turnover. Just imagine all the tedium they avoid: finding the phone number, typing it in, waiting for the phone to connect and the number to ring.

  The dialer makes sure that the only calls an agent has to deal with are real calls, with a live customer on the other end. No busy signals, no endless ringing, no answering machines.

  Cutting out that stalling doubles the time spent talking on the phone. Talk time, which is about 20 minutes an hour without a dialer, jumps to 40 to 50 minutes with one. Agents like their jobs better when they don’t have to wait around for the phone to be answered.

• Reach more people in less time. You penetrate lists more deeply in a fraction of the time.

Predictive dialers adjust the balance of agents from one list to another, taking into account factors like list performance, time of day and the success of particular agents.