What is predictive dialer and what is Click To Call ?

Predictive dialer is such smart automatic telephone dialer system which dials out a telephone number from a list of telephone numbers in order to reduce holding time for both agent in call center as well as the person who is called from it. Though there are various techniques to implement predictive dialer, the basic aims remains same :-
1. Called party should not kept on hold;
2. Agent in call center should not waste time in hearing RBT ( Ring Back Tone) of the called number.

Click To Call and Predictive Dialer

Click To Call Service is a one to one conference where the called party ( as in above Predictive Dialer Definition) initiates the call and speaks to human agent immediately! So the immediate purpose of reducing wait period for both called party and agent is automatically achieved!

Now, does that mean that Click To Call service would (should) replace predictive dialer in order to maximize use of finite and costly resource like outbound telephone call charges as well as time of human agent ?

The first consideration is predictive dialer is not used just as a call back service where some user or web visitor will register their phone number (submit their phone number by filling up a form) expecting a call back from the website or some call center of the company who owns the web site.

Also, predictive dialer can dial from any phone list, not necessarily gathered from web site visitors, but also from off-line registrations, manual phone number collection, collecting phone numbers by door to door marketing etc., not to mention collecting of phone numbers when a user provides his phone number when registers for service, like a DTH ( Direct to Home) TV service, registering for credit card, bank account etc.

While click to call service essentially collects numbers from website visitors only. Apart from traditional Click To Call service, now a days, smart implementation of click to call where a call is imitated as soon as a web form is submitted website visitor, which acts as an additional feature of immediate call back service on an existing registration form! ( Niche Tech Service private Limited provides such customised Click To Call service. )

So, most probably, it will not be possible that Click To Call Service would replace predictive dialer!

Both Predictive Dialer and Click To call service can have options to choose the time when a person expects the call back from the website or call center.

Predictive dialer is also used to make scheduled outgoing calls which is not either standard function in a Click To Call service or available only at extra cost or when a Click To call service with IVR ( Interactive Voice Response) functionality! But now a days, many Click to Call service providers can provide complete IVR functionality or solution in a Click To Call service too.

So, a click to call system, along with smart and customizable IVR at the back end of it, can be surely a next generation of Predictive Dialer and can potentially dethrone it from future call center!

Another important point to consider is, predictive dialer can no longer be used to blast out calls to random numbers after strict implementation of “National Do No Call registry” ( NDNC) in order to stop unsolicited calls. Click To Call service facility eliminates the requirement NDNC registry before making calls. But then, spammers can surely misuse Click To Call!

I had posted about possibility of replacing predictive dialer with outbound IVR, and now I feel, and and IVR system with outbound feature and Click To Call functionality can surely replace aging predictive dialer and bring in cost saving as well as ‘Cloud Telephony’ in Call Center world!

While outbound IVR systems are being widely used now a days for many promotional activities, but outbound IVR potential as smart predictive dialer is still to be tapped.

While many acknowledge that, outbound IVR has many advantages over predictive dialer, call centers still deploy predictive dialer for making outbound calls and then transferring the calls to human agents.

History of predictive dialer shows, it came to be used in call centers for increase efficiency of human agents, as well as effective monitoring by supervises. Predictive dialer increase productivity by automating the dialing, then detecting answering machine, FAX tone or human answering and then connecting to human agent. Any outbound IVR with small computation power using CPA ( Call Progress Analysis) can achieve these and much more!

Another major advantage of outbound IVR ( or any IVR for that matter) is its availability in both on-premise and hosted environment. Hosted environment provides many advantages like low initial cost as well as sudden spike in call volume! Predictive dialer are normally on premise and sudden spike of calls can only be served by increasing number of ports in it.

So, why call center owners are still having separate predictive dialer and not using their inbound IVR as predictive dialer in outbound IVR configuration ?

As I had interacted some call center owners as well as few vendors for call center industry, I think, in India, only two reasons for not using outbound IVR as predictive dialer :-

1. Lack of information
Not many people are aware that IVR can be used for making outbound calls and then transferring it to human agent along with call whispering or agent pop up with the connected call. Many call center owners include inbound IVR, but they are not aware or made aware that the same IVR could be used for making outbound calls as well as it can eliminate predictive dialer all together.
IVR being based on a PC, it has many options for monitoring, accessing data from various sources as well as present status of calls and activity of human agents.

2. Lack of confidence in IVR applications
While predictive dialer is a proven product, but many consider IVR applications to be just add-on and stand-by arrangement in India. Most probably, this has to do with technology adoption problem! Also, many people cite example of ‘hard coded’ IVR applications and lack of support and maintenance by IVR companies. Most of the IVR companies in India uses CTI boards APIs to develop IVR applications instead of open standards or tools. It may create problem in upgrading the application as well as maintenance.

So, it looks like outbound IVR will not be able to replace predictive dialer as preferred ‘smart dialer’ in call center in near future in India.

The biggest reason why people hate IVR is for the following scenario :-

User calls to IVR number and he gets to hear an welcome message and asked few options. After that the user is put on hold saying ‘All our customer care officers are busy, Your call is important to us, we will transfer the call to a customer care executive as soon as free. Thank you’ and this continue for 10 minutes, may be more! End result, caller disconnect, after few curse may be.

Most probably, many of us has faced this situation while dialing to Telecom customer care numbers (specially in India). But this kind of irritation and frustration can be reduced considerably by using a simple predictive dialer! Yes, instead of keeping the caller on old for many minutes, he should be given a simple option to press a number,saying press 2 if you want our executive to call you back as soon as they are free! Thank you!’ And let predictive dialer take care of the rest!

One must, specially call center owners, realise that people calling their call center or customer care, are also busy and need a quick solution to their problems. They should not be kept on hold for 10 odd minutes by playing messages informng how important their calls are! Better, they give him a call back. The customer care executive should have all the information which the caller entered in his previous IVR call. These features can be implemented using smart IVR software with built in predictive dialer.

How can an IVR application help ?
IVR can be used as very smart predictive dialer as I have posted earlier. Now same IVR can open a new thread or process which will get activated as soon a request for a call back by a caller is registered. This process will start monitoring any free customer care executive as when it finds one, it will immediately occupy seize the line and dial out the previous caller mobile.
As soon as the previous caller picks the phone, it will connect to the customer care officer and pop up the caller details as per his chosen options in his previous IVR call.

Advantages of this arrangement:

1. This will surely improve only customer satisfaction. Customer will not require to hold the line frustratingly.

2. This will increase efficiency of customer care executives as well as throughput of the call center.

3. Customer will be less irritated as they are no longer kept on hold for long time. Customer care exceutive will be less stressful as they will face less number irate customer.

4. Toll free numbers are paid by the call centers as per usage basis. While keeping a caller on hold, the minutes of usage increases for the call center organization. Even if the call center may belong to a telecom company, it still uses up precious finite resources, voice channels and decrease utilisation. So, IVR with predictive dialer can reduce cost of running call center.

Few enhancements :

An automatic SMS could be sent to the caller if he called form a mobile number informing he would receive a call from customer care with approximate time. Caller may be presented a request ID for the call back request.

I believe, this kind of a smart IVR with built int intelligent auto dialer feature will enhance customer experience of IVR and will help reduce hatred towards IVR.

Donjin DN300 is equivalent of Dialogic D300-JCT board. It has one E1 connection ( RJ48 ) and 30 voice resources. Recently, I had an opportunity to test a DN300 board with our EPABX of Coral make DX2000. We used our Predictive Auto Dialer Application, written for Dialogic Digital CTI boards.

Donjin DN300 Board

1. Much like its Dialogic counterpart, it has one E1 with RJ48 connectivity for 30 voice resources and built in signaling protocols.
2. It supports ISDN PRI ( widely used now a days), R2MF. It also supports SS7 ( MTP, TUP, ISUP, SCCP) good enough for any voice portal or intelligent IVR applications.
3. It can work with any other voice boards. For example, it can work with Dialogic boards installed in the same machine. It can be very advantageous for upgrading a system with existing Dialogic boards with new Donjin boards.
4. It is quite cheaper than Dialogic equivalent board. Its market price is around Rs. 120,000/- only and if some one buys from www.ivrsworld.com, he will get another 5% discount. You may buy Donjin DN300 Board from here.

We were provided one DN300 board by Donjin India distributor Sunshine Telesoft (P) Limited, Mumbai. We used Coral DX2000 EPABX with E1 ISDN PRI (EURO) protocol.

We were also informed that it we just need to recompile our Dialogic C++ application using Library files of Donjin NADK SDK. So, first we tried to recompile our Dialogic Application! And wow, we got almost 2500 errors! On investigation, we found out that Donjin NADK does not have any C++ header files for its Library files (They use Dialogic header files only)! Also it uses different names for its Library files than Dialogic ones! Technical support team from Sunshine Telesoft has been quick enough to point me out my mistakes and correct them. And next instance, our code for Predictive Auto dialer Application were rebuilt successfully for Donjin board! It took hardly one day!

Next task was to integrate Donjin DN300 board with DX2000 EPABX! It took pretty long time but it was not fault of Donjin DN300 board, but a fault from EPABX. Finally after many days ( almost 40 days), EPABX guys could find a small programming error due to which calls were getting disconnected! Finally they agreed with our ISDN trace ( Donjin has very powerful and easy to use ISDN trace logger, unlike difficult to use Dialogic tools). Changing parameters like CRC status, Trunk mode/Network Mode in Donjin DN300 boards are quite easy compared to that of Dialogic Boards! Once Donjin DN300 with successfully integrated with DX200 EPABX, we run our application for 48 hours.

It made total 600 outgoing calls. Purposefully we made 10 destination numbers busy, 10 destination numbers which did not exist, 10 destination numbers with CRBT(Caller Ringback Tone), 10 numbers on call waiting. Donjin DN300 board could give all status 100% accurately! So we were very happy with Donjin DN300 performance.

Many people may be skeptical about quality of Donjin boards for it is being priced low or it is a Chinese product, but I did not find any problem when it worked for 48 hours. According to me, if it works for 48 hours, it could work for 48 days together. Very soon, we hope to deploy one predictive Auto Dialer System with Donjin DN300 board and would like to update this post with my experience with it.

Contact address for Donjin Boards, in India :-

Manager (Sales)
Website:www.sunshinetelesoft.com
Sunshine Telesoft (P) limited
Suite # 513, Laxmi Mall, New Link Road, Andheri (W), Mumbai, India – 400053.
Tel: +91 22 40 365 365.
Fax: +91 22 40 365 300.

Predictive dialer can be termed as smart auto-dialer.  Auto dialer dial out telephone number and handover or transfer the call to human agent in a call center.  Once the dialed number answers, the call agent or telemarketer starts speaking as per the outbound call center function.

Now there can be many situations where the process as described above may not go as expected. For example,

1. The dialed number may be busy. In that case, call agent will hear busy tone and disconnects wasting precious time of the call agent who is paid by the hour.

2. The dialed number simply does no reply. Poor call agent will listen the dialed number ringing and listening it over! Wasting precious time as well as patience.Though now a days, the dialed number may play a hit number of the season thanks to CRBT ( Caller Ring Back Tone), but that is not why a call agent is employed.

3. The dialed number turns out to be a FAX or a voice mail! Another miss!

4. The dialed number simply choose to disconnect the call. Yes, if the dialed number is a mobile number, they can disconnect a call and it was not possible for land line number though! Another miss by call agent!

5. What if auto-dialer dials out a number successfully, but no call agent to take to call ? This time the cursing will come from the dialed number.

6. With NDNC ( National Do Not Call) registry in place in almost every country ( even in India) in the world by now, one can not dial out to any telephone number! What happens if the dialed number is listed NDNC ? Hefty fine as well as few curse from the dialed number.

Predictive dialer tries to solve all the above problems! This obviously will increase call time by call agents or tele-marketer in a call center manifold! This will increase efficiency as well as profitability of the call center.

So, predictive dialer is the smart auto-dialer which can increase agent talk time thereby increasing productivity as well as efficiency. It allows higher utilization of resources in call center and higher profit.

Now, how about an IVR system for smart auto dialing job ? have a look at the call flow attached below :-

IVR as Smart Auto Dialer or Predictive dialer

I am pretty sure this ( outbound IVR) can replace traditional predictive dialer or auto dialer which will be much cheaper, feature rich as well as scalable.

Few enhancements:-
1. Once call is connected, it can announce to the caller in the sweetest voice possible, what is the call is about and ask if s/he is interested to know more and then transfer the call to telemarketer or call agent. I am sure it will screen dialed person and increase conversion ratio!
2. Outbound IVR as predictive dialer can also get feedback.

Finally, I would say, it is time for you to switch to outbound IVR from your predictive dialer. Or, if you were a call center owner and wanted to have a predictive dialer, re-think and seriously evaluate outbound IVR. you may contact me.