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
Figure 1: Number of agents available
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.
Figure 3: The kind of ‘predictive gain’ that the Sytel Dialer produces on a typical telemarketing campaign with 20 agents
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
