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Contact centre technologies – issue nine
Hello, from Aculab call central.
In this post, the ninth of not a few, I’ll take a more general look at diallers and their uses. You’re welcome to post any questions in the comments section below.
Recap
In the last post, I summarised how several important factors that impact on the effectiveness and success of outbound dialling campaigns fit together in a coherent model. Those factors are: i) tones detection accuracy; ii) live speaker detection accuracy; and iii) call connection time. This time, I’ll take a look at the use of diallers in general.
One way or the other
Notwithstanding the variety of pacing algorithms for predictive diallers, the key question is not so much “How many calls do I have to make to get a live connect?” as it is one of when to dial in order to be able to present a new connect to an agent as soon as they s[he] is free.
If you are choosing a dialler, this sequence of blog posts may help you to compile and present some searching questions to the vendors on your short list.
If you are developing your own dialler, the information in this sequence of posts may help you to choose the right technology partner.
Dialler benefits
No customer relationship strategy or collections agency would be effective without the ability to proactively contact customers, prospects or debtors. For outbound applications, speed and accuracy in detecting network tones and identifying a live speaker are important, both for sound, competitive business reasons and in order to comply with strict regulations.
Increasing the amount of time agents can spend talking to live contacts (reducing wait time) and meeting the target for abandoned calls set by the user are the common goals.
Other strategies
Inserting intermediate steps, such as contact verification, can be beneficial to the contact centre. The idea is to enhance the effectiveness of the application by only providing verified, ‘right-party’ contacts to an agent or account representative.
That can be achieved by using interactive voice response (IVR) and speech technologies – text-to-speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR). Telephony resources on voice boards or via host media processing gives you access to such features and functionalities.
When a system is connected to a real person, an IVR uses a combination of pre-recorded messages and TTS to announce the contact's name and ask for the account holder. That activity is used as a means of verifying that the correct person is on the call.
Apart from credit/debit card activation, emergency broadcasts, and medical and other appointment reminders, using ‘outbound IVR’ or interactive voice messaging (IVM) can also be used to cost-effectively get answers to non-revenue generating questions, or to set up payment arrangements with some account holders. Isn’t technology wonderful?
And there’s more – don’t miss it
Check back next week for another instalment in this sequence of posts. Bye for now!
- Joeb Logger
