TelOnline PREDICTIVE DIALER
A Must-Have Tool On Todays 1:1 Communications World
No doubt Contact Centers are one of the most sensitive issues when marketing meets sales; even the name has morphed from the simple, yet powerful, Call Center, through Service Desk, End User Services, Support Center, to the most sophisticated Customer Relationship Center. They are sensitive because they can make or break a company; just look at the flack some big companies have been getting thanks to their call center operations and practices. That got me thinking about the importance that we assign to any call we receive, whether wanted or not. On the age of the cellular, another name for personal communication device, all calls that you receive are personal; and this is the main point of communications. Today, we live in a one-to-one communications world, and when we place a call we are “ringing” a person, not a place. This has a big effect on the Contact Center and the tools it utilizes to allow for this type of interaction. Whenever your company sets up a campaign to call customers or prospects using a legitimate data base of contacts, the company will be accessing the person at the other side of the call.
Because this is powerful, it has to be managed with gloved hands so as to not become a nuisance to people we want to recruit their good will. By definition, a Contact Center is where a company manages its customers communications; it is where calls are originated (outbound campaigns) and where calls are received (inbound traffic) for whatever inquiry customers may have about the company, product, or service. How to staff and manage the Contact Center is a fascinating topic, but today I want to dwell on a technical aspect that in my own company has been the center of analysis and attention for a long time: how to help Contact Center Agents to make contact.
This is the world of the dialers, those fascinating tools that allow for dialing calls based on a data base of contacts and subject to a set of rules that define how to deal (dispose) of a call based on the result. There are several categorizations of this tool. I’ve always had a mental classification based on the amount of control the Agent has over the origination of the call. A separate category would be Click-to-Dial or Click-to-Call which happens when a user is visiting our website and clicks on the live chat icon; or the humble Auto-Dialer, that works against a list of numbers, identifies the correct answering tone, and plays a pre-recorded message to the receiving party. All others, barter with the Agent for control over the call, as with a Preview Dialer or a Power Dialer, where the first allows the Agent to see the contact data and then decide if to proceed with the call or the next contact, while the second, also called Progressive in some of its flavors, shows the contact data for some predefined time before initiating the call, so the Agent has no saying on placing the call. In a class of its own we find the Predictive Dialer; this is the winner, no doubt about it.
A Predictive Dialer (PD), has a built-in intelligence that allows for some simple but powerful decision making. This type of system works against one or many contact data bases and provides service to multiple Agents on multiple campaigns, a campaign being a contact activity designed to promote something. A PD screens out the response at the other side of the connection and provides for efficient routing of such response. If it is a fax machine or a disconnected tone, it will mark the call accordingly; if an answering machine is reached, then the PD may leave a pre-designed voice message; on busy signals, marks the call for future action (repeat the call); and if it is a human voice, it sends the call to the available Agent at lightning speed or, if all Agents are busy, plays a pre-recorded message. A PD provides all the necessary reports for Agents, Supervisors, and Managers, giving full visibility over the operation and its performance. This is a very simple overview of what a PD can do, but suffice it to show what a powerful tool this is in delivering the message and producing a peak performance on the Agents. Agents are, at the end, responsible for the human touch of this one-to-one communication business of achieving a successful campaign without being a nuisance to the customer or prospect.
It is not my style to add a commercial note to my blogs, specially when it refers to my own company’s products or services, but I cannot refrain from telling you our experience in this area. Some weeks ago, as an outcome of our efforts to develop a robust and efficient PD for our company, and after many years of intense use in all our Contact Center operations , our engineers decided that it was ready for prime time; their expression “forged in our crucible and tested in combat”, really hit me. So our Marketing people got onto it and prepared a beautiful product that we call TelOnline Predictive Dialer – yes, not the most imaginative of the names, but descriptive and very well to the point –, that I invite my readers to review at http://goo.gl/vXGNJ5. So let this last paragraph be an homage to our engineers and our marketers, who did a fantastic job on this most useful tool for any company engaged on today’s one-to-one communications world.
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