Call Centers didn’t have much variation or flexibility up until recently, they were brick and mortar facilities with aged, clunky technology and typically weren’t any more savvy than a home office telephone setup – just a multiple of them.  With the onset of VOIP technology, companies have expanded options in establishing their contact center.  For instance, it is now possible for a call center to be of the home-based variety, where callers may use a hosted web based solution on their computer and a headset in order to fulfill an organizations contact center needs. 

Further, inbound and outbound options for maximizing call center agent efficiency have grown.  Typically biggest roadblock for call center agent efficiency is Talk Time. Predictive Dialing has changed all that, ensuring agent productivity of up to 300%.  Predictive dialing is the perfect technology to increase agent productivity by maximizing a teleworker’s “talk time”. It addresses the problems faced by TeleWorkers in handling outbound Telemarketing to consumers- low contact rates. Low contact rates are a waste of the payroll investment in your TeleWorkers, and also lead to agent boredom. Manual calling typically results in 15-20 minutes of talk time by the TeleWorker doing consumer calling because of no answers, busy signals, bad numbers, answering machines, and the time it takes to dial.

Predictive Dialing uses

an algorithm which 'predicts' the answering sequence and therefore the agent talk time. With Predictive dialing, it is possible to increase this talk time by 45 to 48 minutes per hour. The technology works by creating an algorithm, a mathematical formula which is agent specific and job specific. For instance, on a particular job, it might take typically 5 minutes from the beginning to the close of the call for a particular agent. So, the system will dial a pre determined number of lines say four minutes and twenty seconds into this call, so there is a very high probability that within 5 seconds of finishing the first call a new call will be served up to the TeleWorker.  The system begins to dial the next batch of calls with while the agent is still on the prior call in order to keep the talk time rolling.  You can be certain your agents are maximizing outbound efficiency. 

Between VOIP technology and the virtual call centers, which have sprung up to provide VOIP in a call center environment.  Add to this the advancement of Predictive Dialing and the tools are in place for a tightly run telephony campaign whether inbound, outbound, sales, customer service, the list goes on and on.

Giovanni Castro works at Freedom TeleWork, a company that provides hosted call center solutions and services such as progressive dialing, inbound call center, chat, predictive dialing, CRM call center, and many more.