At a Glance
Highest known performance boost over progressive dialing
Instant response to changing conditions
Automatic compliance – no supervisor involvement
Best possible agent utilisation
Automatic handling of non-live calls
Precise retry mechanism to maximise success
Proven Excellence In Predictive Dialing
The predictive dialer within Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) offers world-leading predictive dialing performance, while complying with the UK guidelines/ US regulations for abandoned calls.
The Sytel AI Dialer™ is used around the world in many call center industries, including Market Research, Collections, Sales and Telemarketing.
It is white-labelled by many contact center vendors, confident in the knowledge they are offering their customers a proven premier product which is a global leader from a software house they trust.
The Sytel AI Dialer™ handles non-live calls automatically so that agents don’t have to, maximising agent talk time. Our world-leading algorithm predicts the right dialing rate to keep agents busy at all times.
Predictive Dialing – Staying Profitable and Legal in 2023
The landscape for predictive dialing has changed massively in the last 20 years. There are five elements that are key to a profitable outbound predictive dialing operation in 2023.
Virtual Event Machine (VEM)®
The real key to good predictive dialing lies in the quality of the dialing algorithms and excellence in dialer design requires huge effort. Sytel has put many man-years of development into its dialing engine, known as the Virtual Event Machine (VEM)®. It is a specialist simulator engine that was designed specifically for the outbound call center market.
All the user does is to specify a maximum target for abandoned calls and leave the rest to VEM®. It then achieves, continuously, the maximum dialing efficiency for that rate of abandoned calls. No calls left in hold queues, no other bad habits such as hanging up quickly on unanswered numbers. The supervisor gets on with managing the campaign itself and just ignores the dialer which manages its own pacing, with no outside interference!
VEM® continuously monitors all events that are part of the dialing process. It continuously reruns its calculations to update the dialing rate. Because of the power of VEM®, simulating at up to 50 million calls a second (yes, a second) this happens in milliseconds only.
Figure 1 and Figure 2 show examples of how VEM® responds immediately to changes in campaign conditions
Call progress detection
This software is available with the Sytel AI Dialer, and its rated performance is as good as any in the industry. But proceed with caution since the time taken on detection is the time that you are expecting a person to stay on the line, wondering who is trying to call them. If call quality really matters, then this kind of detection may be best turned off.
Outbound dialing regulations and compliance
Sytel has led the world for many years on compliance with outbound dialing regulations. It has worked with the regulators in many countries to help bring in responsible controls for dialers and even today is the only vendor to actually enforce compliance in its product. This means for example, that if you are dialing under rules set by either the FTC in the USA or Ofcom in the UK, then Sytel enforces compliance and you don’t have to worry about non-compliance.
Predictive dialing the Sytel way adds 15 extra minutes agent talk time in every hour. Using their AI Dialer has been a turning point for our business.
Measuring predictive vs. progressive
If you are paying good money for a predictive dialer, then remember that what you are really paying for is predictive gain – the extra talk time per hour that predictive can produce over progressive dialing. It is entirely reasonable to ask any vendor to give you a free trial or take you to a site where you can measure this. Any dialer worth its salt can easily switch between progressive and predictive modes so that you can measure the difference. Until you can see this test carried our properly, there is a good chance that you don’t really know what you are buying.
But the catch is that if the design is anything less than excellent, then only a small part of this gain will be achieved, because the dialer will quickly use up its small quota of allowed nuisance calls and then have to revert to dialing progressively.
As well as understanding the ‘predictive gain’, you need to be sure how it was achieved. Were dialing rules complied with?
Make sure you know your local rules, or what best practice rules are and then ask some searching questions. Look for clear evidence that rules are actually followed. For example, are abandoned calls measured in the right way? If you are not sure how to check compliance or what your rules are, then always feel free to ask Sytel.
Just remember that unless you can be quite sure that predictive dialing rules are being complied with, you will have no way of doing a proper evaluation.
Did you know?
Sytel has never lost a head-to-head predictive dialer performance trial. Our simulation and AI-based approach to predictive dialing is unbeatable. We believe this holds true for agent utilisation in a blended inbound/ outbound multi-channel/ multi-session setup as well, but since it is a bit more costly for end-users to run a champion-challenger setup for a multisession ACD, you’ll have to take our word for it …
Other dialing modes
The Sytel Ai Dialer™ can also be used in a number of other modes:
Mode |
Description |
---|---|
Progressive | One number is dialed per free call center agent. As the number is being attempted for a specific agent, the screen pop information can be sent to that agent as soon as the number is being tried. |
Preview | The agent is ‘screen popped’ details of the next number in the cache. The agent then has the option of continuing to dial the number or skipping to the next number in cache. |
Manual | SCC can enhance manual dialing by recording calls from launch, preventing the dialing of wrong numbers, and enforcing limits on ring time. View our resource on software support for manual dialing (SSMD) here. |
See also …
Sytel AI Dialer™
Best-of-breed predictive dialing under any compliance rules
Softdial Campaign Manager™
Comprehensive configuration and control for outbound campaigns
Sytel Global Compliance™
Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer
Dialing resources
Learn more about predictive dialing …
Predictive Dialing – Staying Profitable and Legal in 2023
Rules and Compliance for Predictive Dialing in the US
Compliance Guidelines for Predictive Dialling in the UK
Optimising Performance with Call Disposition Codes
Optimising Ring No Answer
Explore more of SCC’s capabilities:
Case studies
Kantar (Global) – Fully Managed, Multi-Tenant CCaaS Solution
BVA Group (France) – Ready-Made CATI/ Dialer Integration Drives Expansion
GDCC (US) – Cloud Hosted Deployment Driving Multiple CATI Platforms
Abt (US) – Cloud-Based Deployment Serving Multiple Sites
EMRS (Australia) – Cloud Deployment with CATI Integration
IFF Research (UK) – Cloud-based Deployment for Work-at-Home Interviewing
What We Offer
Sytel Limited develops and supplies Softdial Contact Center® (SCC) – multimedia, multichannel, fully blended cloud contact center solutions.
Available by subscription as CCaaS, fully managed and supported by Sytel, or for quick and easy deployment by partners and enterprise users.
All Sytel cloud components are secure, resilient and scale seamlessly from 10 agents to 10,000+, whether local, mobile or remote.
Flexible Contact Center Software
Softdial Contact Center™ – rich functionality, all-in-one, designed to deliver at scale
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Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
CCaaS for subscribers – global service, with no upfront costs
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Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners
Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software
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Contact Center Platform – Enterprise
High performance platform to drive contact center productivity – cloud, on-premise or hybrid
Blended Media Desktop
Fully customisable, multi-channel, multi-session workspace
Work Anywhere
Browser-based tools, no software installation required
Customise, Localise, White Label
Design all user interfaces to individual requirements
Integration via APIs
‘Swap out’ components and integrate with 3rd party apps
World Class Development
Continuous evolution pushing technical boundaries
Capabilities
Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) is designed to be flexible, extensible and scalable, integrating with any legacy equipment, and meeting the most complex of requirements.
All Media Channels
Voice, chat, email, social, etc – fully integrated and blended
Agent Multi-Tasking
Work with multiple live contact sessions of any media channel
Dynamic Workforce Management
Optimise agent usage and balance workloads in real-time without human intervention, across all media channels
Predictive Dialing
Best-of-breed performance under compliance
Optimised Inbound Routing
Smart rules and ‘best-available’ decisions to drive great customer service
Agent Scripts
Help agents achieve and maintain excellence
Voice and Screen Recording
See and hear exactly how agents are interacting
Analytics and Data Feeds
Measure and evaluate performance at every level
IVR, Bots & Conversational AI
Design effective automated flows or integrate with 3rd party providers
Customer Journey Tracking
Stored customer contact history, to aid routing and add context to conversations
Modules
Drive operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction & improve agent performance
Softdial One™
Highly flexible unified web UI for agents, supervisors and administrators
Softdial Scripter™
Create complex process flow scripts for agents, IVR, chatbots and other applications
Sytel AI Dialer™
Maximum predictive dialing performance, under any compliance rules
Softdial Pathfinder™
Precise routing rules for ‘best available’ connection
Softdial Media Server™
Core telephony functions to manage all inbound/outbound SIP calls
Softdial Reporter™ 5
Fully customisable performance stats, charts and reports, across all channels
Softdial Publisher™
Comprehensive data output to build your own reports
Softdial Recording Monitor™
Audio and screen recording of agent activity to ensure the highest standards
Softdial Campaign Manager™
Automation to optimise any outreach strategy
Softdial Repository™
Central storage and configuration of common resources
Sytel Global Compliance™
Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer
Solutions
Performance and efficiency for a wide range of business applications
By Business Type
Enterprise
A full featured contact center software solution, designed for optimum performance at scale
Small/ Medium Business
Options for SMBs to subscribe to our full-featured cloud service managed and hosted by either one of our partners or by Sytel themselves
By Industry
Customer Service
Connect quickly to well equipped agents
Market Research
Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration
Debt Collection
Automated inbound/ outbound blending integrated with any debt management app
Sales & Telemarketing
Maximise agent productivity with best-of-breed predictive dialing
Healthcare
Secure, highly-configurable multichannel communications for excellence in patient care