Answering Machine Detection
At the risk of upsetting a few people, here's how it is.
If you want to implement answering machine detection and ensure that your agents always get the first hello from live calls, you'll be disappointed, since it can't be done. Most first hellos come at the agent pretty fast; too fast to give the answering machine detection time to do its stuff, though with practice, you might get some of the fall of the Hello i.e. "..lo" from live calls in time for the agent to hear, but these are likely to be very few.
If you try to improve upon this, by speeding up the detection process, there is a hidden and real danger, even at modest levels of detection, that in the rush to get at more of the (first) hello, the detection stuff doesn't have enough time to run its algorithms properly, and chances are that you'll terminate some calls that are in fact live ones.
So what use is answering machine detection?
Well, if getting the first hello (and perhaps the second as well!) doesn't matter to you, and you are not bothered to have an agent leave a message, then consider doing it. The time taken to do decent detection, and not mistake live calls for answering machines, will probably be the length of the first hello, and then some. And, depending whose answering machine detection you are using, you'll probably get between 50% and 85% of all answering machines being screened out by the dialer, with the rest being put through to agents, as unidentified, or unidentifiable calls.
And that's why we give you the ability to classify answering machines as being detected by both agents and the dialer on the same campaign.
The increasing use of answering machines in all states and countries, means that sometimes a majority of all calls will in fact be answering machines.
So what to do?
If you don't want agents to handle these calls the only thing you can do is to use answering machine detection, and accept that you will miss the first hello, if you do it right. Many call centers in the US and elsewhere have trained their agents to do precisely this.
If you reckon that you can screen the majority of answering machines out, using detection algorithms, and still get the first hello, then you are quite likely dropping live calls, and not treating them as abandoned calls. If you have a dialing equipment vendor who tells you that this is not so, our advice is to ask him to show you otherwise - and to be upfront in telling the industry about it as well. Our researches tell us it's not possible, but we would love to be proved wrong, and to see the industry better served, in this respect.
Note
In some countries, over-use of answering machine detection by dialers has led to a backlash that you should consider. Many consumers simply don't like being kept waiting while a dialer decides whether they are live voice or not, so they just hang up. Or by the time that an agent comes on the line, their blood pressure has gone up a little because they've been kept waiting.
See also Answering Machines - The Good News