Do You Know What Your Predictive Dialer is Doing?
How many senior managers, responsible for their contact centre operations, actually know what their predictive dialer is doing?
Everyone of course!
Wrong answer!
Judging by some recent experiences we have seen, not that many sometimes – and it matters.
Three things to watch out for:
1. Abandoned calls made by your predictive dialer
Maybe 3%, maybe 5%. Sounds low, but consider how they are measured. There is only one way and that is as a % of live calls achieved by the dialer. Do you know if your dialer adopts this measure or are your abandoned calls being measured as a % of all calls? It matters. If the live call rate is 20% and you use the all calls measure, then the true measure of your abandoned calls, at a 3% level, is 3% x (100/20) = 15%! Do you want to inflict this level of nuisance calls on your customers?
2. Use of hold queues
For an inbound call, if no agent is available it goes into a hold queue. Consumers expect this and don’t mind if the wait is not too long. But hold queues are not meant for outbound calls. This is the most widespread kind of nuisance call in the marketplace. Do it and the consumer you have called will not appreciate it. Not the way to have happy customers.
3. Click to dial
This is where a free agent clicks a button to dial the next number. Click once and you are fine. But in some countries, predictive dialers have got a bad name through irresponsible use. Nothing new about this. As a result, regulators in some market situations have pulled the plug, and said no more. No automatic dialing machinery! But humans are OK. They can only dial one number at a time! Humans can of course dial many numbers at a time, any time an agent becomes free; actually, becoming a poor man’s predictive dialer. This can lead to high numbers of unwanted abandoned calls. If you care about being compliant, just check what your human dialers are actually doing.
Sorry to be a killjoy, but there’s good dialing and bad dialing. Contact centers have choices.
If you are not sure about the best choices, just talk to us.
