There are two categories of needs in outsourcing. Outbound and Inbound. For current discussion we shall focus on outbound only as I believe it is more relevant for SME Call Centers.
Outbound is when you reach out to the customer. (B2C when general ppl and b2B when businesses)
In Ancient times people used to call using manual dialling. Which means you take an internet connection and a media g/w. Attach your normal phones and tell your agents to dial.
This idea had few flaws:
- you never knew if your agent is talking to a client, or his new found g/f in the US
- you had no way to track how is your process performing as doing the whole thing manually was a waste of time
- 50% of numbers dialled were answering machines and hence time wastage again.
Which brings us to a Q? What is actual mesaruable parameter for a outbound technology.
Answer is … How many minutes in an hour is your agent doing productive work.
The other is how effectivly cam you measure agent performance and optimize it.
Thanks to computers and CTI … came a concept of a progressive dialer.
here a computer used to engage an agent and then dial out a number from a DB. Along with a connection came a CRM popu where agent gets to see who is he talking to. Efficient and clean. but this still had flaws. the Answering machine problem was not solved and the agents were waiting for calls to be connected.
Then came the mother of all solutions. Predictive dialer.
The idea is two critical functions:
a) Answering machine detection: which means the computer can detect whether the other side is a human being or an answering machine.
b) Prediction: Based on what has been happening in past … dialer predicts when agent is gonna be free.
So what a PD does is … it throws calls to customer side first and then routes the calls to the available agent. If no agent is available it hangs up the call (Abandon rate) which needs to be controlled by the dialer.
phew.
will write more … this is the basic which you need to know as a bare minimum.
May 26, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Dear Forum Amin…!!
It seems you don’t like to keep other ppl views on the forum. What they think, whats their experience, their practical knowledge etc..
I had posted a nice information on outbound dialer in a well & practical manner which was focusing in a technical aspect too. But still you had deleted it. Can I know the reason?
Do you think the information provided by you is enough for newbies…??
If you really don’t want other ppl post their opinion then remove this “Leave a Reply”
section from all pages..
Sameer.
May 28, 2008 at 10:14 am
Dear Sameer
Indeed I would like people to present their views on needs and technology requirements. Even perspectives are welcome. I am also making a section for commercial discussions.
The only problem is lately there have been discussions which were not pertaining to the objective of that section so had to remove them.
Anyways you might wanna post it again and if its adding value to the information I assure that it will stay.
I have already entertained a few requests and edited list of dialers etc so suggestions / comments are always welcome.
May 29, 2008 at 9:07 am
Dear Admin…
Thanks a lot for your reply. I knew there was some kind of wrong publicity stunts was made to publish certain dialers, I opposed such type of posts time to time if you had seen my posts on this. I would appreciate the step you’ve taken.
Anyways, the info which I had posted in this forum was bit too long so it would take me some time but, I would definitely post that again for readers because that post was out come of my 4 years of tech support experience for more than 45 call centers Inbound, as well as outbound.
Cheers..!
Sameer.