Benchmarking Dialers
If you have a predictive dialer, chances are that you are pretty happy with it, and the last thing you may want to start doing is comparing its performance with other dialers. But it is an entirely reasonable thing to want to do, especially if you are contemplating a major upgrade to your systems. So what to do?
There are no agreed benchmarks in the industry, but Oceanic® can help.
Since the algorithms in most dialers are dark secrets, the only way you can measure their real effectiveness is to run live campaigns with them. It's tempting to think that in a tender document you can ask vendors for a list of all the things they measure and include within their algorithms, and that's enough. But even if the response is 'everything', that tells you little about the way in which the data is crunched by the dialing algorithms.
Two approaches to live benchmarking
There are two approaches to live benchmarking:
- If the size of your business warrants it, you might want to organize a live shootout on site, with two or more predictive dialers running the same kind of campaigns. Not cheap, even if you get the vendors to pay for it. It will take time - your time - and time is money.
- The alternative is to get vendors to show you sites running campaigns with similar characteristics, and preferably like those you intend to run yourself.
Guidelines for benchmarking
Here are some guidelines for both kinds of benchmarking:
| Guideline | Action | |
|---|---|---|
| Use Oceanic® to understand and specify all the elements of your benchmark | If you work through the Campaign Wizard, it can act as a checklist of events to measure. Where possible, try and make sure that the event values are the same. For example, times to No Answer are under dialer control, and ideally should be the same. | |
| Use Oceanic® to assess any differences | Where events have different values, between the sites, use Oceanic® to compare differences in talk and wait times. For example, you have two similar sites, but the talk/ wrap times and the no answer times are different. | |
| Evaluating differences in event times | Set up benchmark campaigns, with the same values throughout, but different ones for the these two events, corresponding to the values on the two sites. Run Oceanic® and the differences you will get in talk and wait times, will be a good measure of the differences to expect in practice, for two dialers of equivalent dialing efficiency. | |
| Check out any dialing rules | The two biggest sources of variations in dialer performance in practice are probably the quality of the algorithms and the type of dialing rules being used. So if serious benchmarking is your aim, check out that the dialing rules are comparable as well. And don't forget to ensure that the method used for measurement of abandoned calls is the same. | |