Comparing Dialing Methods
Oceanic® is designed to illuminate the world of outbound dialing. We know that some users may use it to justify a particular stance, or bolster a particular point of view.
We have our own prejudices as to what methods and practices are best in outbound dialing, but hope they haven't intruded (too much!) on the analysis.
You'll have spotted that when we discuss the different dialing methods we do so in a particular order, with predictive dialing at one end of the scale, and manual dialing at the other. This is deliberate, in that it reflects the ranking of the different methods, in terms of talk and wait times performance - though note the special case of power dialing (and standby agents)
As a reminder, when you interpret your own output from Oceanic®, bear in mind the following:
Check your received wisdom
Some of you may have received views about the best performance that can be obtained from particular dialing methods. Ones we have spotted include talk time per hour of
- 25 minutes if manual
- 35 minutes if auto preview
- 55 minutes if predictive
It all depends upon the assumptions you make. Depending on the data you enter, it's quite possible to show a campaign where auto preview does better than predictive dialing.
How to compare dialing methods
See the section on Upgrading Your System .
Predictive v. power dialing
Don't be surprised if predictive and power dialing give the same results sometimes, on the same campaign data. This may happen for several reasons, including the fact that the optimum dialing rate calculated by Oceanic® for predictive dialing is similar to that chosen by you for power dialing. The real issue at stake in the comparison between these two methods is that predictive dialing is highly adaptive to dialing conditions in practice, power dialing much less so. See Predictive v. Power Dialing.
How to assess the impact of predial
If you want to dial with just a predial algorithm, without the assistance of an overdial algorithm, you can get satisfactory results under some conditions, but see especially Sober Thoughts On Predial and Comparing Overdial and Predial.
Predictive dialing results in the stratosphere
Outbound suppliers have a good story to tell about productivity improvements. You'll routinely come across claims of 200% to 300%. And there was one in an Internet telemarketing forum in the 90s, claiming up to 600%, yes seven (not six!) times your current results. And there is that other great attention-getter, the headline claiming that a predictive dialer can do 'a day's work in one hour'. What does it all mean?
Only rarely can you associate these kinds of performance improvements with just talk time per agent. If that's being claimed, then you can probably suggest that the claimant goes back to redo high school math, unless they've managed to get the Greenwich Observatory, or whoever is in charge of those kinds of things to redefine the hour, extending it from 60 minutes up to say 100 minutes!
So what do these claims mean, and can they possibly be true? Usually they are alluding to productivity improvement not in dialing setup time, or live talk time, but in results achieved per unit time, in credit card collections, charity pledges and so on. And very significant improvements can be achieved for call centers moving to good scripting systems and updating their dialing methods. You can probably be a little skeptical about some of these claims, but if your call center is rudimentary, expect a pleasant surprise at what can be achieved by upgrading, and you won't necessarily have to buy a predictive dialer.