Conclusion

Polly is happy with most of the assumptions that she has made so far, but knows the results she is getting can't be right, and suspects that the calling done on this campaign is not typical. It may well be that the agents have found a way of picking off the easy calls. Upgrading to a predictive dialer looks like a foregone conclusion. She sets herself three basic tasks

1. She wants to look in detail at how the calling lists have been put together, to see if they are representative of the numbers GTI are committed to call for The Home Handyman company. If not, then she knows that she may have to rethink the approach on this campaign, and even renegotiate on price.
2. But she is upbeat. She has come to GTI with a track record in motivating and training agents. She thinks she can help the GTI agents do better, and wants to factor an allowance for this into her business plans.
3. With a move to predictive in mind, she needs to establish how typical this campaign is of GTI's business, and build up some projections of the improvements in cashflows that a move to predictive would bring

Oceanic® can't tell her how to do the rethinking on the assumptions that's required, but she knows it will help her to analyze her data and de-risk her business decisions, as she works through these tasks.

Tom recommends that she speak to some of the predictive dialing companies. Sure they'll try and sell her a dialer, but this is an exercise they will have been through many times before, and there will be a lot of wisdom in what they have to say.

Polly is still not sure about her decision to go for answering machine detection. She knows that it is more talked about than used by call centers, and asks Tom if he can help her identify some reference sites, where she can check out her assumptions.

Polly hasn't got her own investment model for looking at the overall payoff from predictive dialing, but the outline for one is included in The Investment Decision.

Polly didn't get this far since she still has work to do! But you may like to produce a work schedule for her at this point. You can use all of the help topics to familiarize yourself with the Work Scheduler and tailor Polly's schedule to mirror the way you yourself might work in practice.

The methodology used in the demonstration is very typical of the thinking that many outbound managers go through, but you should be careful in your own thinking and planning to use assumptions that mirror your own circumstances, rather than just take those we have used here as gospel. In particular you should remember that answering machine detection by dialers, especially outside North America, is often more discussed than used in practice.