Case Study: Tata Stays on Track for Abandon Targets

Jamie Stewart, Sytel’s Marketing Manager, interviews Ankush Gangwani, Associate Vice President and GM of Cloud CCAAS at Tata, to learn about his customers’ experiences with Sytel’s outbound software.

Jamie: Welcome, Ankush. Can we start please with an overview of how you are deploying our product.

Ankush: Thanks, Jamie. For some years we have been running campaigns in the BPO market across a number of countries deploying the campaign manager and the predictive dialer from Sytel Limited. The customers cover all sectors, but principally finance, with around 1500 concurrent agents.

Jamie: Give us a quick view of how your customers feel about the product.

Ankush: Usually everybody in the outbound business blames the dialer for all of their problems. But to be honest we get very little day-to-day feedback, which is a good thing.

The dialer delivers great business performance for all sorts of shapes and sizes of customer and our customers have come to trust that the dialer will ‘just work’.

Jamie: What changes has it brought from an operational perspective?

Ankush: As most people familiar with predictive dialers will know, all too often supervisors are required to tell dialers what to do.

With the Sytel dialer you simply set a target for abandoned calls and leave it to get on with the job of dialing. Supervisors were suspicious to begin with but realise that this makes their jobs a lot easier and allows them to focus on other tasks.

Jamie: What impact is compliance having on productivity?

Ankush: Compliance mainly affects customers dialing into the US and UK. Even under compliance, for most workloads customers get great performance.

Where things are really tough – for example in collections, calling aged debtors with low balances (typically 2-3% live call rates), compliance limits reduce performance a bit but we still know that the pacing will deliver the best possible results.

The Sytel dialer is the only dialer we know that can deliver profitable outbound operations under strict compliance regimes.

Jamie: How does the dialer cope in practice with different campaign sizes?

Ankush: The number of agents on a campaign will fluctuate according to shift patterns, when agents go on break and so on. Our customers’ experience is that the dialer reacts to these changes immediately, always staying on track for abandon targets. This means it never has to slow down because of overshooting the target.

Jamie: Can we talk about how your users handle customer lists with the dialer?

Ankush: Sytel’s campaign manager allows us to deliver for customers who do list import and export, and makes it easy to work with existing back-office databases. When you have a user base with widely-differing inventory needs this saves a lot of work.

The inventory scheduling approach in campaign manager delivers real benefits in terms of maintaining connect rates; it is sometimes a challenge to get customers who are used to legacy approaches to work with Right Time To Call and intelligent retry scheduling, but the results are always worth it.

The other point to make about list management is that configuration is dynamic. Data can be imported on-the-fly and list selection criteria changed without having to suspend operations.

Jamie: Outbound campaign performance can fall away once you’ve dialed your lists exhaustively. What is the experience of your customers?

Ankush: Well, customers always have the option of bringing in fresh lists, but these too can run out at some point. As it becomes harder to connect to people, the dialer ups its dialing rate, but in the experience of our customers, it doesn’t do this at the expense of lots of abandoned calls.

And there is minimal impact on performance. This is pretty unique in my experience and well appreciated by our customers.

Jamie: Thanks for all the positive comments on the dialer and how it deals with lists. Do you have any other comments on the data management side?

Ankush: Well, remember that we have many customers, so wide and easy connectivity with CRMs and back-office systems is very important. You deliver on that, and when it comes to moving data around there is no messing about with manual uploads and downloads. Everything is automated.

Jamie: To wrap up, is there anything we can do better to improve the product for your customers?

Ankush: Yes, there is. Some better visibility on detail inventory decisions, and the ability for our more advanced customers to build their own business intelligence into data selection and retry rules would be good. On the dialer itself – no. It works, don’t mess with it!

Jamie: Thanks. Point well taken. I’ll ask our account team to reach out on the inventory points as there is a lot of extension capability in the current release of SCC. And many thanks too for all the positive feedback.

Ankush: It’s a pleasure, Jamie. We have some very demanding customers and your product just delivers!