Time for a Rethink on AMD?


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Justin Hamilton-Martin shares his experience of balancing Answering Machine Detection (AMD) with regulatory compliance.

2016 could be a defining year for the industry. Following an Ofcom ruling, telemarketing companies will be required to display their telephone numbers during outbound calls. As such, contact centre regulation is very much in focus in the media.

The use of automated outbound diallers has already been under scrutiny, following the 2015 publication of a joint action plan to tackle nuisance calls and text messages. The action plan was produced by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and Ofcom. Ofcom is also running a consultation on its ‘persistent misuse’ policy, which closes on 24th February.

These reviews have put the spotlight back on nuisance or ‘abandoned’ calls and how contact centres manage their outbound dialling without infringing Ofcom guidelines. In turn, this is refocusing attention on the effectiveness of AMD solutions in outbound dialling, originally introduced to improve efficiency.

The development of AMD

The use of automated outbound diallers and over-dialling to enhance contact centre efficiency has grown over the past two decades. Using predictive dialling to increase the chances of connecting to the maximum number of customers has upsides and downsides.

On one hand, automatically connecting agents to more customers helps to streamline the whole outbound process; on the other hand, the more calls an operator makes, the greater the chance they will connect to answer machines. The outcome is often call abandonment from mismanaged over-dialling or traditional cadence AMD technology.

Cadence AMD is hampered by the inaccuracies of a machine assessment of whether a call has been answered by a human or machine, within the two-second window permitted by Ofcom. This complexity coupled with the detailed testing, monitoring and reporting required by Ofcom has meant that the productivity gained with this type of solution was often offset by the amount of time spent reporting.

This is one of the reasons many organisations stopped using cadence AMD or chose to use it in a very selective way in order to remain compliant with Ofcom’s rules. The good news is that AMD technology has advanced considerably in recent times, and call centres can achieve both efficiency gains and regulatory compliance.

AMD history – a recap

So what is AMD and how do contact centres use it? The technology has been around in various guises for over 20 years. “AMD amounts to listening to the telephone line after it’s been answered to determine what is on the end of the line and whether it’s a live individual,” said Dave Nicholls of DJN Solutions, a UK  expert on outbound dialling.

The aim of this is to present agents with as many ‘live’ call recipients as possible. AMD also allows increased ‘over-dialling’, which enables more outbound calls to be made.

“When AMD was first introduced, it only looked in one direction: to prevent answering machines from reaching agents. If at the same time it was incorrectly detecting live individuals as answering machines, that wasn’t factored into the equation,” Nicholls went on to say.  

“That’s what Ofcom would call a ‘false positive’, where a live individual is hung up on.”

All this changed at the beginning of the 21st century, when the use of automated outbound diallers increased and Ofcom had to respond to growing numbers of complaints about nuisance calls. This led to the introduction of a set of rules by Ofcom designed to reduce the number of abandoned or silent calls.

Rules around AMD

The challenge was that call volumes began to increase and there was a realisation that AMD would inevitably generate silent calls, “Which led to further rules around the false positive rate and the fact that while you could use AMD, you had to meet certain criteria. You have to pass a live call to an agent within two seconds, which limits how long AMD can take. If the AMD decides that the live call is a machine and hangs up, that’s a silent call,” continued Nicholls.

“This requires companies to test their systems to estimate how often this would happen and that gets subtracted from their abandonment rate. So if you have a situation where current rules say you can run a 3% abandonment rate and you estimate your false positives to be about 1%, you would have to run your dialler at 2% in order to compensate for that.”

Looking to the future

So where does that leave us today? Clearly, it is impossible to predict the outcome of Ofcom’s consultation, but AMD technology has developed enormously, enabling a far greater precision than before. Instead of trying to detect every answering machine, the technology now available is accurate enough to be able to only filter out a call if it is completely certain of an answer machine outcome and without the call delay. By doing so, it reduces the number of abandoned calls and enables contact centres to stay well within Ofcom guidelines.

Regardless of the outcome of Ofcom’s consultation, the need to balance those two imperatives – call centre efficiency and compliance to protect both consumers and the industry – is not going away any time soon. It will be interesting to see what happens in the industry over the next few months.

With thanks to Justin Hamilton-Martin at Ultracomms

Author: Megan Jones

Published On: 10th Feb 2016 - Last modified: 18th Dec 2018
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