By Jamie Warter, Vice President Product Marketing, Communications Platforms
Wikipedia defines a predictive dialer as "a computerized system that automatically dials batches of telephone numbers for connection to agents assigned to sales or other campaigns." New legal and regulatory restrictions such as the national Do Not Call Registry and the need for tightened identify verification of financial and medical information disclosure are driving the need for much more sophistication in the technology driving these systems.
Predictive dialers are primarily used by telemarketing and customer service organizations involved in B2C (business to consumer) calling as it allows their sales representatives to have much more customer contact time. Predictive dialers may also be used by market survey companies and debt collection services that need to contact and personally speak to a lot of people by telephone. Increasingly, predictive dialers are being used as a quick and easy way to automate all sorts of calls that would otherwise be made manually by a call center, such as welcome calls for new customers, customer service call backs, appointment reminders, or even for the automation of large numbers of ad hoc calls that might take place (such as by a taxi company or parcel delivery service, etc.). A predictive dialer can dramatically increase the time an agent spends on communication rather than waiting. Recent studies indicated an increase in talk time from twenty minutes per hour to almost fifty minutes per hour when a predictive dialer is used.
Another emerging trend is leveraging VoIP capabilities within the contact center and into predictive dialing. Many telemarketing organizations are deploying distributed call center resources in areas where labor costs are cheaper and using home-based agents helps to broaden the labor pool. VoIP-based solutions are also used to reduce reliance on traditional T1 and E1 lines, allowing telemarketing companies to lower costs even further.
Given the productivity gains and the need to adhere to various telemarketing laws, an interactive response system that does not include some predictive dialing capabilities limits the wider opportunities presented for interactive voice response systems.
NMS Communications supplies media processing boards and servers to a number of companies that sell and support predicative dialing systems. One example is Ontario Systems (www.ontariosystems.com), a technology leader in collection software solutions. Ontario is using NMS’s Vision VoiceXML Server as part of its Verified Contacts solution. Verified Contacts uses dialing and interactive voice response technology to increase right-party contacts. As the predictive dialer senses an answer on an outbound call, the interactive voice response functionality uses pre-recorded messages, in conjunction with the Vision VoiceXML Server’s ability to process text-to-speech technology, to ask for the account holder or party responsible for the debt. With this functionality, Ontario Systems’ applications can quickly validate that the right person answered the phone, meeting the tightened identity regulations without reducing the efficiency of the predictive dialing system.
SoundBite Communications (www.soundbite.com), is another market innovator using NMS’s technology in their predictive dialing application. With more than a half billion customer messages delivered, SoundBite is one of the industry’s leading providers of on-demand customer communications solutions. SoundBite’s applications allow companies in the financial, healthcare, and other industries to achieve their customer contact goals, while eliminating the need to invest in costly on-premise systems and software. SoundBite is using NMS’s Natural Access IP and SIP technology to move its speech-based solutions to VoIP, which will allow SoundBite to maintain cost-competitive pricing and, equally important, to provide even more features and capabilities to drive customer satisfaction and grow their businesses.
Developers of predictive dialers have a broad range of technology options when working with NMS. Our Open Access boards and software give developers flexibility and a range of platforms and tools that make it easy to respond to industry trends and build new dialing algorithms from the ground up. Our Vision VoiceXML Server, with its support of open scripting languages such as VoiceXML and CCXML, leverages a web-based model to manage delivery of customer contact information, as well as rapid call transfer to appropriate live agents.
For more information on either of these products, contact your NMS sales representative or visit the NMS web site at www.nmscommunications.com/DevPlatforms/default.htm.