Outbound technology … what is it anyways?

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.