| Agent Productivity as Measured by Talk Time
What defines success for a campaign?
When planning or expanding an outbound operation, this is a key question in choosing effective technology and deploying it for maximum business benefit. Users and vendors alike will attest to the fundamental role of increased talk time in bringing success to their operations. This article places the dramatic gains in agent talk time into the total value chain, and lays out the key factors that impact agent productivity as measured by talk time.
Predictive dialers provide high levels of agent productivity, typically measured as a percentage of an agent's time spent talking to members of the targeted audience. Agent talk time is generally a valuable metric to use in defining the success of a campaign, and is particularly popular due to its general applicability across all types of campaigns. Whether conducting welcome campaigns, debt collection, sales promotions or surveying customer satisfaction, dramatic increases in agent talk time enable more contact per agent hour. They make existing applications more cost effective, and lower the barrier of entry for new applications.
Predictive dialers also present both challenges and opportunities to the effectiveness of agents' dialogues. Side effects of predictive dialing, such as abandoned calls and silence on the line, may reduce your agents' success in engaging your targeted audience in dialogue. However, dialers can also place relevant information at the agent's fingertips, helping to personalize each dialogue and provide the right answer at the right time for each person called. Dialers can improve not only the quantity of contact, but also the quality of contact.
While agent talk time serves as a valuable means to define campaign success, the true business benefit comes not just from increased contact, but from effective contact. As such, it's often valuable to have business level metrics which represent the actual business benefit, such as total sales for a sales promotion, or completed surveys for a customer satisfaction campaign. It's good to understand the extent to which the increased agent talk time will bring this business benefit.
Agent Productivity as Measured by Talk Time - Increasing the Quantity of Contacts
Automated and predictive dialers provide high levels of agent productivity by taking over various portions of an agent's manual activities, such as lookup of call data, dialing, call disposition and retry scheduling. Predictive dialing techniques automatically disposition many of the unsuccessful dial attempts, such as busy or no answer, without any agent involvement.
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Balancing Quantity and Quality
Predictive dialers provide tremendous opportunities to increase agent talk time. While high agent talk times increase the value of a campaign, pushing them too far can impact the quality and effectiveness of your campaign calls. Fundamental decisions need to be made in the planning of each outbound campaign, to achieve the ideal balance between quantity of contacts and quality of contacts.
Agent talk time is largely determined by the choice of pacing algorithm. If predictive dialing is chosen, the specific techniques such as overdialing then play a major role in determining the exact tradeoff between quantity and quality of contact. Dialers typically provide means by which these tradeoffs can be more finely controlled. Other factors may play a significant role under some circumstances.
When selecting a dialer, it's important to understand how it will perform for the campaigns you will be running. What pacing algorithms are offered, how can they be controlled, and what performance can be expected with your choice of tradeoff between quantity and quality?
If you would like further information on services to leverage predictive pialers in your overall customer contact strategy, please contact SoftReach Services in the US at (408) 846-8184 or email brian.mccutcheon@SoftReachServices.com.
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