Outbound Call Centers and Predictive Dialers | Call Center Technology

Predictive dialing is a technology used in call centers for outbound dialing, usually telemarketing. Predictive dialers are inexpensive and can be used by even the smallest companies.

Predictive dialers automatically outdial phone numbers from a pre-defined list. The calls are made (from a database or callout list) by the predictive dialing software and passed to a live agent only once a person has answered. This saves the agent from dealing with wrong numbers, answering machines, and calls that are not answered.

A predictive dialer can manage all the tasks associated with making a call. They can queue new calls by using statistical averages to predict when an agent will complete the current call. This technology enables the dialer to begin dialing a new call before the current call is finished.

Predictive dialers can further increase your business’ efficiency by simultaneously delivering the voice call to a telephone (or headset), and that consumer’s record to an agent’s PC. This increases the average productive talk time per agent, per hour.

Scaling Issues | Call Center Technology

A conventional phone system (PBX) lets a large group of people share a smaller number of CO lines. The assumption is that everybody isn’t going to be talking on the phone at the same time.

An ACD - a call center phone system - makes the opposite assumption. You want everybody to be talking on the phone all the time, which means you’ll need at least as many trunks as you have agents. You’ll also need to queue calls and keep them on hold until an agent becomes available. There are several ways to do this.

The simplest way is to rent more trunks than you have agents; and buy premises equipment that can terminate these trunks, queue the calls they provide, play clever on-hold messages to keep callers from hanging up, and offer automated facilities (voicemail, IVR, etc.) to let some callers help themselves.

This works fine when traffic to your center is relatively constant - buoyed up by frequent catalog mailings, regular advertising, or other publicity.

But heavy seasonal variation, promotional campaigns, the need to blend inbound and outbound calling, serve callers from multiple time zones, etc., can throw a wrench into your ability to predict traffic and provide facilities for dealing with it. If you anticipate this kind of situation, it makes sense to explore call center systems that leverage the public network to provide greater call handling flexibility.

At the simplest level, both digital Centrex and ISDN service let a single line manage multiple call appearances. When you set up a Centrex- or ISDN-based ACD system, inbound calls can be held at the CO until agents are available. Waiting calls can be polled, played messages and music, and given the chance to transfer to IVR, voicemail, or other facilities - all without you shelling out for extra hardware, physical ports, and trunks to your premises.

At a more global level, you can use specialized CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) and network services to create a “virtual ACD” that distributes calls among multiple physical call centers according to different criteria: availability, time of day, the call’s point of origin, or other variables. The most obvious benefit of this approach is that it lets you tie remote agents together for a seamless-appearing center, while saving money on overhead.

Given the choice between waiting in a hold queue and writing email, people often opt for the latter. But those “info@” or “support@” addresses on a Web site are seldom monitored efficiently.

Over the past year or so, however, a number of companies have created a major breakthrough. They’re building software that routes inbound email around a call center and queues, prioritizes the traffic, lets agents respond to emailed queries using semi-boilerplate messaging, and keeps stats on the whole process.

Here are some things to know about inbound call centers:

Routing Models | Call Center Technology

Which call goes to which agent? Choosing the right routing strategy is crucial to obtaining high quality of service and managing staff.

The simplest kind of routing sends the oldest call in queue to the next available agent; a strategy that works fine if traffic is very uniform and agents are equally efficient in handling calls. Otherwise, this “next available agent” (NAA) queuing will overburden your most efficient people.

An improvement on NAA entails sending the oldest call in queue to the longest-idle agent, a slightly more intelligent strategy that helps balance call loads. Basic ACDs support both strategies.

The next step up lets you establish groups of agents with a common purpose and similar skills. You can send calls to each group separately, based on choices the caller makes. Inbound calls are sorted through an auto attendant or IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system.

An improvement on this is called fallback routing. Calls awaiting a particular group become accessible to a more general pool of agents, so as time passes, callers don’t have to wait if their particular agent pool is busier than others are.

The most intelligent routing is “skills-based” where multiple criteria play a role in matching callers to qualified agents.

Here’s how it works: a call comes in and finds that all agents are busy. Instead of getting to a traditional first-in-first-out queue the call waits in a pool of calls.

When an agent become available, the ACD looks at the pool of calls and decides which one should be assigned to that particular agent. The assignment can be made based on the importance of the caller to your business, the caller’s willingness to wait, a skills match between the agent and what the caller needs, or a combination of these and other criteria.

Callers are identified by their telephone numbers, the number they dialed, or by a pin number they enter into an IVR front end.

Managing an installation setup around skills-based routing is tough because you have to worry about staffing. How do you schedule agents who are “experts” rather than interchangeable?