Predictive Dialling – Staying Profitable and Legal in 2023

The landscape for predictive dialling has changed massively in the last 20 years.

Years ago, there was the opportunity for large-scale outreach with simple propositions and relatively responsive customers. In 2023, outbound is characterised by extremely low response rates in all sectors, lots of small, targeted lists and tight regulation.

Here are five elements that are key to a profitable outbound predictive dialling operation in this brave new world:

1. Predictive Pacing

It is a lot harder for a predictive dialler to keep its balance and not generate lots of nuisance calls at extremes: low connect rates, small agent pools, unresponsive customers.

You need a predictive pacing engine that can maintain outbound performance at these extremes, while keeping its balance and keeping the regulators happy.

2. Effective Inventory Management

To schedule dialling inventory effectively, you need a 360-degree view of the campaign, agent resource availability, and intelligent interpretation of campaign goals is necessary when.

Automation which uses intelligent and adaptive scheduling to deliver the right calls at the right time, while adapting constantly to changing conditions, allows customers to define the rules and does the work for you.

This ensures best possible performance and frees supervisors from the burden of constantly having to check and adjust strategies.

3. Built-In Compliance

Footprint compliance should be built in to the inventory process, so that scheduling automatically takes account of all facets of the compliance regime.

A rules engine needs to be coupled with a ‘big data’ history service which allows customers to model all possible compliance rules.

It also enables cross-campaign inventory rules to be set, to avoid bombarding customers who are targets of multiple outbound campaigns.

4. Understanding Contact Value

Transcripts of conversations, call/chat history and line-of-business data can all feed in to a better understanding of the value of and opportunities with each customer contact.

Out-of-the box delivery of historical data in real-time allows value decisions to be made, either as part of the inventory process or as a natural adjunct to call processing.

5. Integration With 3rd Party Services

You need API access to make real-time use of 3rd-party best-of-breed or preferred services and solutions, such as generative AI, speech to text, speech recognition or industry-specific software.