Predictive Dialer: What is it? And what have a dialer to do with prediction?
If you ever wondered what is the predictive
part in a predictive dialer, here is an explanation, and read all the way to the end, as when it comes to predictive dialers, Six telemarketers are quarter of Twelve telemarketers, not half
as you may think...
Keep on reading, and find out why...
So, picture a room with say 20 telemarketers that are talking with prospective clients, and every 1 minute 10 of those telemarketers are hanging up their calls.
Now picture that there is a guy with many phones under his control, who knows how many times the telemarketers are hanging up their calls every minute, so he can place enough calls for ten prospective clients to pickup their phone every minute, and transfer those calls to his telemarketers.
Off course you know that if you want order to get ten customers picking up their phone, you'd have to place many more calls simultaneously, thirty or forty would make sense, because only few human would answer - the rest of the calls will be answering machines or disconnected numbers...
That is where the predictive dialer comes in: It considers the rate in which the telemarketers that are hanging up their calls, and calls enough prospective clients every telemarketer who hangs up a call will have the next client on the line soon as possible.
OK, you say, and what does this have to do with predictive?
Well, once a call is placed, it takes about twenty five seconds to get results - human answer, answering machine ETC.
So the dialer needs to predict how how many calls needs to be placed, so telemarketers' idle time is minimized.
To achieve this, the predictive dialer must apply sophisticated calculations that are taking in consideration the number of agents, the rate of human answer of the total calls placed and many more parameters, including the desired idle time between call that the owner set.
And now, that we understood the statistic
nature of a predictive dialer, it will be possible to explain why (when it comes to predictive dialers) Six is only quarter of Twelve, not Half as you may expected:
When a contact center has in it twenty telemarketers, the dialer can get a much more accurate statistics and thus reduce idle time while placing less calls per telemarketer than for a room with only eight telemarketers.
To draw it boldly, while a contact center with twenty telemarketers would place say 500 calls per day per telemarketer at a ratio of 8 lines per telemarketer, a contact center with only ten telemarketers would only make 180 that same day at a ratio of 12 lines per telemarketer.
Perhaps you can now check the illustration above and get better understanding about predictive dialer.