• A number of agents will all be logged into the same campaign, consisting of hundreds and possibly thousands of records, containing the telephone numbers of the people or businesses that are going to be called. This information will be held on a network server, with links to all agents.

• The network server will also have a link to a predictive dialing engine, which may be a physical device (hard dialer) connected directly into the Public Switched Network (PSTN), or it may be a piece of software (soft dialer), possibly located on its own dedicated server, with links to an ACD either directly or through the network server.

• As agents become available, the server and/or the dialer decide what order to dial the campaign numbers in, and calls are then initiated either directly through the ACD, or managed directly by the dialer itself.

• If there is no answer after a defined number of seconds the dialer will cause a hang up. For all other call outcomes, it will strive to screen out everything but live calls, and put just these outcomes through to agents.

• At the same time as a live call is being picked up on the agent's headset, the application sitting on the network server will screen pop the details for the called party, on to the agent's screen.

• Smart software in the dialer will be monitoring the results of all calls, such as the percentage of no answers, busies and so on. It will also be measuring agent performance in terms of average talk time and variances in it. This information will (should!) be used to recalculate how many trunk lines the dialer should be dialing out on, every time there is a change in campaign parameters, e.g. in the number of available agents on a campaign. At high no answer levels, this should mean at least several trunks being dialed for each agent who is either waiting, or about to finish a call.

• Dialing in this way will clearly keep wait times between calls for agents down. If not controlled, it will also lead to lots of abandoned calls. So the role of the smart software in the dialer is to achieve low wait times by use of its smart dialing algorithms, while keeping abandoned calls down to acceptable levels at the same time.

Warning

Some folks call their dialers predictive, when all they do is to offer a predial capability. One test is to ask them what they are measuring and predicting and basing their algorithms on. Alternatively print them a copy of this document!

Note

The very best predictive dialing results are obtained when those responsible for compiling calling lists for campaigns ensure that the data is reasonably uniform. Where this is not the case, and where sudden and marked changes keep occurring, especially in connect/non-connect rates and talk times, the dialer may have to rein in the dialing rate, and wait times may rise as a result.


(Reproduced from Sytel's website)