Call Durations are a major factor in determining agent productivity.

The role of a dialer is to connect available agents with members of the targeted audience.  By doing this, the dialer increases agent productivity by taking over portions of the manual activities required to establish connections.  The measure of a dialer's effectiveness is actually the amount of time an agent typically waits between calls.  If, for example, a particular scenario provides an average of 15 seconds wait time between calls, productivity would be around 67% for calls with an average duration of 30 seconds.  If however, the average call duration is 2 minutes, productivity would be close to 90%.

A related consideration is the extent to which call durations vary, and the impact these variations may have on the performance of a given dialers pacing algorithms.  The relevance of this consideration may vary dramatically, depending on the implementation details of a particular pacing algorithm for a given dialer, as well as the campaign dialogues and targeted audience.

Variations in Call Durations

In the real world, your targeted audience will spend varied amounts of time with your agents.  These differences may be dramatic, with trends typically related to the details of the campaign's dialogue.  A sales promotion will show a distinct spike of short duration calls with the "not interested" crowd, and a less distinct typical duration of calls with those who engage in conversation.  Debt collection, on the other hand, will have a variety of typical durations for differing circumstances, ranging from the short "check is in the mail" calls to the longer calls in which payment plans may be re-negotiated.

The impact of differing call durations may vary dramatically, depending on the implementation details of a particular pacing algorithm for a given dialer.  Pacing algorithms are generally fairly sophisticated in their details, to substantially increase agent productivity without excessive amounts of abandoned calls.  Some techniques, such as pre-dialing, may be more susceptible to variations in call duration, depending on the details of the vendor's implementation.

When in doubt, look for real world performance data for a particular pacing algorithm under similar profiles of call durations.  You can also gain insight by examining lab or test data, empirical data, or analytical techniques.  Or consider a phased implementation, with an initial pilot phase before committing to a major deployment.