There are many terms for how a dialing technology call or contacts a customer.
It is easy to get confused by the terms and what they mean. If you run, manage or own a call centre and you are calling people then you need to understand some basics.
How fast is your car “dialing” ?
It is a little like comparing cars – They all have engines, use fuel and have wheels. However if your car is fuel injected it performs better than the same car with a carburetor. No ‘if’, ‘and’ or ‘but’s. Doesn’t matter if there are different names for it – direct injection, naturally aspirated etc – one of these is superior to the other.
It is similar in the automated calling world – you need to know if you have a true dialler (aka dialer, auto dialer) and if it has the best technology (instead of a fancy name for the inferior technology.)
Three (3) Things you need in your dialing system
Here are 3 absolutely critical things you want to make sure your automated calling system can do:
1 – Can it call predictively?
2 – Can it adjust its speed dynamically?
3 – Does is share all its lines between all of the agents?
What do these mean? Let me take you through the basics.
1. A predictive call will occur when your system is smart enough to anticipate your agent is going to be free. Calling at just the right time before the agent is free saves a lot of time. It is a little like a rolling stop in your car – You will get there faster if you cross the lights doing 45kph because you paced it properly instead of having to take of from a standing start.
With a true predictive dialer your call will be connecting to your agents sooner.
2. Dynamic pacing means that you can set a target – for example to manage an overflow or abandon rate. Then as your dialer runs it will speed up or slow down to make sure you are always at this optimal rate. If your system can’t automatically speed up and slow down then its time for an upgrade. Its like having a speed cruise control in your car – It won’t let you go too fast so you don’t get speeding tickets, but neither will it let you go so slow that your trip time is impacted. Make sure you have dynamic pacing in your dialer.
3. Its easy to get confused on this one – but its important. If your dialing system does not share its line resources in a pool then you have a real problem. It is a little like having a V-8 engine in your car – and then dedicating the power of only two cylinders to each tyre. Crazy right?
Imagine you had 4 agents in your centre and you had 8 lines on your dialing system. Two lines per agent – seems ok. Now say two of your agents – Ruth and Trixie were in the middle of a great sale – so that 2 lines busy.
If your auto dialing technology used a shared pool of lines, that would mean that the 2 agents that are waiting – say Dan and Fred – now get to use all 6 lines. So they get the maximum available horse power.
However, it is surprising how many dialing systems I have seen where this is not the case – each agent has ‘dedicated’ lines – so Dan still gets only 2 and Fred only 2. (It is actually worse than this but I won’t try to explain it in this short article).
Just remember – make sure your system shares its lines resources across all your agents.
If you remember to check/confirm these 3 simple things when looking at your dialing platform you will end up with a high performance dialer system.
That’s it for now.
Javier Llora
Developing Dialing