Oceanic®

Answering Machines - The Good News

There is lot of reason for being upbeat about the spread of answering machines, even if answering machine detection by dialers may not be as good as you might like.

Consider the following:

Imagine a campaign, where all the call outcome data remains the same except that no answers are replaced by answering machines, let's say being detected by agents. And the called parties are genuinely out. Options are:

• The agent may drop the call immediately without leaving a message and go back into wait state. What do you think happens to overall performance, compared with no answers? Unless the agent takes more than a few seconds to drop the call, it will go up (unless the ring times you specify for the two kind of event are the same). Try it for yourself, and look for an improvement in talk time per hour.
• Or the agent may choose to leave a message (assuming local regulations and practices allow; see Dialing Rules); short and succinct, and then go back into wait state.
  • If you don't get called back, then little unproductive time has been spent on the call.
  • If you do get a return call, then it is likely to be from someone who wants to hear what you have to say to them.

If you take the view that called parties will use answering machines to screen out unwanted calls, then that too can be good news for the call center. You'll save the agent time spent in making the unwanted pitch, and even if you retry the number several times, you are likely to still be better off in terms of overall performance, because of shorter ring times for answering machines compared with no answers.