Predictive Dialing

Immediate pacing response to changing conditions

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

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.