semi-auto diallers

Firstly, what are your current call costs for UK and Landline over your existing system and what is your internet speed (I know, cheeky questions, but it does have a bearing on my answer, honest)

What you want to do can be arranged a number of ways.

Firstly, You're not just restricted to your Alcatel equipment and existing telco arrangements. You can choose whether to interface with the existing infrastructure or use a seperate VoIP ITSP often with much lower rates.

Secondly, you have the choice of progressive, predictive and other kinds of dialling. Predictive is useful as you can set targets and the dial rate will adjust to keep your agents busy even when 90% of your prospects are not at home. On top of this there are AMD options such as wether you want to screen out Answering Machines or perhaps voice broadcast into them automatically whilst giving the waiting agents more productive calls.

You also have the choice of a free inhouse dialler, an expensive licenced dialler or a third party outsourced dialler. To be honest there is no reason to NOT go with a free inhouse dialler provided you're a bricks and mortar callcentre.

In its simplest and cheapest form a progressive dialler can even be added as a macro into your excel sheets or other office products. This gives you a click-to-dial capability and reduces fatigue, missdials and cycle time, but being progressive your agents will spend a lot of time listening to ring-no-answer calls for much of the day.

Finally, there's the gateway and interface. A dialler can interface with your alcatel, with your phone itself in some cases (BT Falcon is a classic example) or with a seperate VoIP gateway. Also you can use your existing telephony or a softphone (such as x-lite eyebeam) as the agent interface.

So many options...

It all starts with asking what exactly you want from your dialler and, unfortunately, my cheeky questions at the top of the post too : )

-Gary