The Ins & Outs of Agent Dialing – Part IV: Predictive Dialing

In this series, I will explore the benefits of automated dialing technology for organizations looking to upgrade their customer service strategy. Whether progressive, power, or predictive, the addition of a dialer can greatly maximize agent utilization and prove financially beneficial to a contact center. Acqueon Technologies will guide this comprehensive look at each dialer option to help determine which is best for your unique customer service strategy. 

Predictive Dialing is similar to Power Dialing but instead of a manually set dialing ratio (1 to 3:1), the system predicts the likelihood of a target answering the phone and adjusts the dialing ratio to minimize abandoned calls while maximizing agent productivity.  The primary drawback here is that agent count is critical and a small population of agents can often mean worse performance than Power Dialing.

This method provides all of the benefits of Power Dialing with a smaller likelihood of Abandons assuming a relatively large and consistent agent pool.  In the correct environment productivity increases can be close to 20% but in the wrong environment they are less than Power Dialing.

THE FINANCIAL BREAKDOWN:

With this understanding of what an automated dialer can do and how it affects the day-to-day process of an agent in a contact center, we can extrapolate value based on some very conservative assumptions.

1. An agent’s fully loaded value to the contact center is $800 per hour.  This means that not only what they cost but also what they bring in for the company through sales/retention/collections.
2. The agents are full time dialer agents, or 8 hours per day
3. This contact center is open 252 days per year

With a productivity increase of 12.5%-17.5%, you can calculate your annual benefit based on the number of agents in your contact center and their value per day. Automated dialing saved crucial, valuable seconds in each call, amounting to a shocking amount of time and money saved over a year’s time.

Be sure to take a look at the previous posts in this automated dialer series to see a comprehensive look at preview and power dialing.