Cloud Provides New Opportunities for Outbound Dialling

Robert Bates discusses how cloud technology will help the industry adapt to Ofcom guidelines.

There is far more to outbound diallers than just increasing call volumes. This is particularly true of the new generation of cloud-based outbound diallers, which can contribute towards a more efficient, economic and compliant contact centre environment, while also improving the customer and employee experience.

These new features help contact centres to take a fresh view. Rather than just focusing on call minutes, they instead look at productivity and the quality of the call. For instance, recent technology developments have made answering machine detection (AMD) a far more exact science than the hit-or-miss cadence solutions that contact centres have been using for years.

Ofcom’s recent consultation on its ‘persistent misuse’ policy has put the spotlight back on nuisance or abandoned calls, placing pressure on contact centres to review how they can best manage outbound dialling without infringing Ofcom guidelines. In turn, this has led to a re-examination of the role of AMD.

Originally, AMD was introduced as a means to improve efficiency, although this has not always been the real-world experience. The conundrum caused by traditional cadence AMD systems was that while automatically connecting agents to more customers helped to streamline the outbound process, it also increased the chances of being connected to more answering machines and was fraught with inaccuracies. This, together with the testing, monitoring and reporting required by Ofcom, outweighed any potential productivity gains, thus leading many organisations to cease using AMD altogether.

However, advances in AMD are making it easier to increase the number of outbound calls that reach real recipients, while staying within Ofcom’s guidelines and without onerous testing and reporting processes. This new algorithm-based technology has accuracy rates of 99.99% and can enable staff productivity uplifts of over 10%, since agents reach fewer answering machines and have more meaningful conversations with real people.

Call blending in the cloud

Call blending is another area that is not new but has gone through something of a transformation, in this case due to cloud technology. This has removed the challenges of sharing workloads between diverse departments and different locations.  With cloud-based call-blending solutions, the geographical limitations of remote management are removed while complete control of customer experience and advisor activity is retained.

Contact centres have the flexibility to deliver both inbound and outbound calls to appropriately skilled agents, based on call traffic at any time. When inbound call volumes are lower, the dialler will generate more outbound calls, depending on the number of available agents. When inbound traffic increases, the dialler will automatically reduce the number of outbound calls in order to ensure agents are available to take inbound calls.

Algorithm technology can help support this. The dialler’s complex algorithms adjust to the flow of call traffic dynamically, enabling contact centres to increase agent productivity by using the same teams to handle both inbound and outbound calls. This can help to improve customer service by reducing call queuing and provide a more varied and challenging experience for the agent, as well as reducing operating costs for the organisation.

These are just two examples of development in outbound technology that are helping contact centres to improve the way they work, have more valuable conversations with customers, improve the agent experience and reduce wasted expenditure.

With thanks to Robert Bates at Ultracomms