Is Your Dialler as Efficient as It Should Be?

Martyn King looks at the issues that influence dialler efficiency and how to overcome them.

There are lots of factors that contribute to the success of an outbound campaign, and each call centre will take a slightly different approach. But for those who use an outbound dialler, it’s very important to consider its efficiency. After all, if a dialler is not working at its optimum, even the most sophisticated campaign will suffer reduced productivity.

There are a number of factors that affect dialler efficiency, like the quality of your call data, or the number you choose to display to recipients. But in many ways, the buck stops at the network level, and this is because if the network you are routing your calls through is unable to handle the load, it will only be able to connect a proportion of the calls.

Not paying attention to how your traffic is being routed can also result in a large percentage of your calls being rejected by the network. Many call carriers impose CAPS limits (Call Attempts Per Second) to the call traffic that comes from your dialler. Even if you have a 500-seat call centre with a highly sophisticated predictive dialler, your agent talk time will be reduced if there’s a limit being imposed at the network level.

Find out about your carrier and their stance on dialler traffic

If you’ve not done so already, get some information about how your network provider handles dialler traffic. You may well find that there’s a limit to the frequency of calls you can make. Some providers will actually cut you off, preventing you from making any calls if you go over their set limit.

If your communications are SIP based, your technical team should be able to identify any capacity limits by looking at the SIP responses returned from the network itself. Certain SIP responses are the network’s way of saying ‘sorry, you’re trying to make too many calls at once so we can’t connect them all!’

What if I’m using a hosted solution?

Hosted call centre solutions will most often use a third-party company for call termination. In fact, there can sometimes be a chain of resellers who pass their services down to you, leaving your call centre a few steps away from the network.

This can make it harder for you to find out about the company that provides the calls, but you should be able to identify the firm by contacting your account manager and requesting the information.

Once you’ve identified the network, find out what they specialise in, and what their stance is on high-volume outbound dialling. Some communications providers are actually built from the ground up to deal with high-volume, short-duration outbound call traffic.

Which factors determine the capacity of a network?

Whether a call provider can handle large volumes of outbound calls will depend on the quality of the infrastructure and what it’s specialised for. Each network will have different systems in place to process the call requests that it receives, and these will usually differ based on the kind of call traffic the network is built for.

For high-volume, short-duration (HVSD) traffic (often created by outbound call centres), the network will require extremely effective call processing capabilities and the ability to handle the spikes in traffic that a dialler can produce.

In a network built for this environment, high CAPS call servers are a must, together with the ability to handle the call attempts across many customer connections, prior to Session Border Controllers then taking the shaped traffic on to carrier gateways, and ultimately the Public Switched Telephone Network.

What should you do if you think your calls are being blocked due to network limits?

One option to prevent your whole campaign being limited by your carrier is to spread your traffic out among distinct call providers. But you will still need to make sure that you’re always within each provider’s traffic limit, even during peak hours.

It’s worth noting that some carriers impose much more strict limits on call frequency than others. In fact, some carriers will only impose soft limits, working with customers to ensure that their diallers are not hindered.

If you only use one carrier and find that they are placing a hard limit on your CAPS, you may need to reconsider your provider.

With thanks to Martyn King at Nexbridge Communications