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PREDICTIVE DIALING  

Predictive dialing offers the greatest return on investment from automated dialing systems. The underlying technology is complex and is almost always described only superficially by most vendors. Because of the high levels of automated dialing, what really takes place is not easy to determine. This may be the reason that while every dialer vendor claims to have the best predictive dialer, independent and objective evaluations are not available.

With predictive dialing, we are able to achieve very high rates of operator productivity by reducing the time between each collection call. The dialer has traditionally been able to do this by setting up a group of collectors in a "pool" and then placing more calls than there are agents, knowing that there will be a percentage of calls such as the busy's and no answers that do not have to be transferred to an agent. These unconnected calls are documented in the system, and management is able to act on the results just as they would had the agent placed the call themselves. But because the entire process is automated, there is no effort expending in dialing the phone and no time is wasted on managing or documenting the unconnected calls. With the appropriate "pacing" technology, the dialer is able to predict the availability of agents and deliver connected calls with as little idle time as possible between each call...... (more)