Outbound Unbound

If we define computer telephony (CT) — and we have — as “the application of computer intelligence built for making and receiving telephone calls,” few areas benefit more from CT smarts than customer services, debt collections, teleservices, emergency notifications and other outbound call center applications. Telesales agents apply computer intelligence to warm up their “cold-call” mission on several levels.

First, there’s the more-or-less familiar predictive dialing application. 

A computer armed with call progress detection notes the number of outbound trunks and agents, calculates and predicts how long agents tend to talk with each contact, and once calls initiated, predicts when ringing telephone lines will be answered by a real live prospect. 

The telecomputer communicates with telephony server to automate outbound dialing and connects “live answered calls” to agents at predicted pacing rate. It automates and filters out handling of all no-answers, busies, and answering machines; flagging for subsequent attempts, perhaps leaving messages.

In its pacing algorithm, the telecomputer balances the benefit of keeping agents busy against reaching live prospects, avoiding situations when there’s no available agent to switch them to. 

When the timing works perfectly, the dialer reaches a prospect and switches the outbound call (with associated telesales script) to a live person, before the called person even finishes saying hello.

When prediction doesn’t work out, called prospect picks up, hears a click, and scratches his head or curses.

Because mathematically, predictive dialers other than Melita's would rarely achieve perfection 100% of the time, telesales managers would set an abandoned call rate (euphemistically called “service level”) for the particular campaign. 

The Direct Marketing Association, in fact, recommends an abandonment rate of not more than five percent. Dialer company EIS, which offered this statistic, recommends three percent.

Another level of intelligence adds inbound call traffic into its agent-availability calculation; this is where “blended” dialing comes into play, and it’s gaining ground among the major players in the industry. 

In fact, most companies here (once discovered Melita's inventions), known first for their call center predictive dialing products, have learned to aim at the whole CRM space by adding inbound call control and, longer term, web interactivity into their product lines. 

In some cases, this has been achieved through merger. Mosaix (now part of Lucent), Melita (renamed eShare), and others have acquisition stories this year.

The other major buzz, invoked differently by everyone who proclaims it, is “openness.” 

Stand-alone dialers are being succeeded by systems that integrate with existing switches, or incorporate their own NT-based switching platforms, but operate in a network that accepts Windows-based list management and scripting tools.

Which brings us to the other categories of intelligence. 

“List management” includes the ability to screen prospect databases on multiple demographic and buying-history criteria, arriving at more productive lists and campaigns that know not just who to call, but when. This has reached some very fancy data-mining stages 

The last category of intelligence is agent scripting. Most of these dialers can be integrated with a center’s preexisting telesales scripts to save agent training time, but also offer ways to roll your own, designing new scripts for new campaigns, with complex branching logic and outbound screen pop for live prospects.

 eShare Technologies/Melita International (Norcross, GA — 770-239-4000) has long been one of the first names in outbound dialers. They want you to know that they are in the inbound call center business as well, integrating agent applications with their dialer/telephony server. 

In acquiring and taking on the name of eShare Technologies, they’ve branched out into web-based customer contact. And in moving to a standard, Dialogic, industrial-PC platform, they’ve shed the “closed” reputation as well.

eShare/Melita’s two major call center systems, both based on their Universal Telephony Platform, are Enterprise Explorer and XChange . 

Explorer, written for major switch integration and on NT, is very big with Melita’s traditional customer base of banks, credit card, mortgage, and collections companies. 

Last April, says Dudley Larus, marketing manager, market research prompted them to begin looking to acquire a solution for more of the telemarketing, fundraising, and market research markets; those for whom scalability and ease of installation were paramount, and where preexisting phone systems did not have to be leveraged. The telephony server in this case would also provide a switching platform. 

They decided on Small Wonder, which provided XChange.

XChange comes with real-time list management, predictive dialing, multi-number dialing, scripting, screen pop, online productivity stats, and batch reports. 

And several things are typically found from third parties: call recording and monitoring; conference calling; skills-based, DNIS-, and ANI-based routing. 

All lists on the file server are available to multiple campaigns, and updated at the close of every call. While Larus says that with XChange and Explorer, it’s really in the software business, they supply the telephony server for quality assurance. Servers support up to 96 agents and can be networked for more.

Because XChange does its own switching, call centers can use inexpensive analog phones or headsets. But by the same token, the call transfers and conferencing are limited to those on the XChange server; calls to those not typically handling inbound or outbound calls would require an additional phone.

XChange runs from $1500 to $4000 per seat, installed.

The switch-integrated choice, then, will be Enterprise Explorer, which offers all the call center functionality of XChange without sacrificing the rich feature sets of major PBXs and their extensions. 

Enterprise Explorer can also run multi-site call centers, managing trunks and lists centrally for up to thousands of agents. 

Enterprise Command Post gives supervisors views of their work teams, whether the agents assigned to that team are physically located at one site or at multiple sites.

On the agent desktop, Enterprise offers Active X and Java Bean encapsulations of Explorer functions to embed in familiar business applications. 

Alternatively, the preexisting Magellan product provides the GUI for all agent interaction and data views. Magellan also lets managers design campaigns very quickly, painting fields to enter, and branching through scripts.

Enterprise runs from $2500 to $5000 per seat.

eShare’s future, of course, is the marriage of its web-based NetAgent web-chat and e-mail call center software with the XChange and Enterprise Explorer products. 

Larus reports that the same focus groups that couldn’t quite grasp the concept of multi-media list management three months ago are now clamoring for just that. 

The best example of a multi-media list application: A collections house that handles late-but-reliable payers differently from high-risk payers. 

The first group will be prodded with unobtrusive, virtually free e-mail reminders; the second group can go on outdial lists. Look for integrated applications, to be trademarked E360 solutions, to start coming in the next few months, says Larus.

Both Enterprise and Xchange support blended inbound/outbound centers. “Most of our customers are blended,” says Larus. Most often, the inbound callers are contacted customers calling back; as in a mortgage collections application. Here, you find frequent use of outbound agents using same-agent callback. XChange can support blended centers in which no agents are assigned to inbound per se, but are drafted, on a per-skill bases, to answer incoming calls. When inbound dips, they are returned to the outbound list. “Both of these systems are in sync with each other to produce very low nuisance rates,” says Larus.

Melita’s recent PhoneFrame customers can be software-upgraded to Enterprise Explorer v4.1. “Our long-standing customers will also be interested in upgrading to Enterprise Explorer and again, we’re making this process cost-effective and easy to accomplish,” says Larus.

The number three Internet Service provider, Mindspring, has recently installed an Xchange system in a Dallas call center. Mindspring enjoys a great reputation for inbound customer support and shied away from outbound telesales, says eShare sales rep Jack Stevens.

Fierce competition in the ISP marketplace persuaded them to take a more active approach. 

Outbound campaigns will be aimed at winning qualifying subscribers over to ADSL service and bringing back strays. 

The Xchange installation, with 32 agents and 64 lines, took a week, including training.