Dialling on automatic - March 2007

Unleashing the potential fo automatic outbound diallers

Contact centre managers are always on the look out for new technologies and best industry practices in order to survive the many challenges in optimising their business activities.

By using automatic dialling functionality, contact centres will experience increased productivity and revenue, improved service competencies, lower operating costs, as well as realise a faster return on investment.

Agent productivity is enhanced by means of proactive predictive dialling solutions and campaign management capabilities, such as the identification of busy, no answer and fax machine tones when making calls. No time is wasted on these unproductive call attempts, as only when a call is successful will the system connect it to an available agent. Should the call be unsuccessful, the system will automatically place the dialled number back into the database queue and attempt to call the next number on the list - agents thus handle significantly more interactions per hour than ever before. Diallers also offer scripting capabilities, where companies can input relevant information to guarantee their agents say the right things and ask the right questions. Good scripting enables the agent to deliver the appropriate message to the called party and has a substantial impact on agency productivity. Scripting tools offer the ability to segment the sales process, affording contact centre managers the ability to identify the most and least successful stages in a call.

By building efficient and effective campaigns using a pre-integrated solution with powerful campaign controls and provided the quality of an organisation's contact database is relatively clean, diallers show a return on investment within a few short months. As an example, one of our customers is involved in the subscription business and has memberships that expire on a monthly basis. Before using the dialler, old memberships ran up to 270 days without follow ups and renewals. Using a predictive dialler, our customer received a substantial financial return in the first month, was able to clear up all arrears to current within three months and as an added benefit, clean its database.

In order to unleash the potential of an automatic outbound dialler, it is vital to understand the campaign objectives and to be able to define the "value" of the call. Knowing this information will assist in finding the appropriate time of day, week or month to make calls.

Whether used for telemarketing, dept collections, fundraising or relationship management purposes, an automatic outbound dialler has the potential to considerably boost the performance of any contact centre, enhance the organisation's bottom line and produce remarkable results.

About the author: Dawn Wood is a business executive for Interactive Intelligence at ATIO Corporation.