Talk:Predictive dialer

Predictive dialers were not developed from auotdialers! Predictive dialers did not emanate from autodialers.

Forget about the number of rings. That is relatively meaningless since the calling end does not and cannot know how many rings the called end is making, and the advance of time in the progress of the call is in continuous time. Instead of number of rings, it should be the duration of the call attempt. Don't say number of seconds, either. Time is measured; it is not counted!

Yeah this page has so much redundancy. The whole throttling concept gets explained like 54234535 times. I did a little cleanup.

The pros and cons also have some confusing and non-sensical language.

A Predictive Dialer is devised to predict or rather anticipate during the call process to ascertain availability the next representative or agent will be free and when the next hello will be detected. It is an intelligent outbound call processing mechanism employing complex mathematical algorithms to predict when to dial next. The working of a Predictive dialer takes place in following manner. In a call centre a predictive dialer that can be a hard as well as soft dialer happens to be attached to a network server that stores the information related to the numbers of people and businesses to be called are stored in a network server. All agents are linked to that server. In the dialing process when the server or dialer stars calling the number it is predictive dialer that manages the calls. In a situation while calling there is no response or silence from other side the dialer hangs up. From the other calls, the dialer will screen out busy, unanswered, and answering machine calls. Only the live calls are put through to the agents. As soon as the agent gets connected to a call he can view all the information related to the call on his screen. The biggest advantage with predictive dialer is that it can adjust to calling patterns depending on various factors.

• Total number of rings while a customer picks up a phone.
• On the calls which are answered
• On the length of talk time, in case calls are short the predictive dialer adjust to dial more numbers
• On the basis of available agents if fewer agents are available predictive dialer set the calls to be dialed less frequently.
• Desired abandonment rate, under this a person who hangs up before the dialer switches the call to a free agent will not have a live telemarketer available to talk to.

Keeping all the factors in focus a predictive dialer dynamically manages the pace at which to dial out, to keep all agents talking. While managing it ensures waiting period of the agents to be minimum at the same time keeping abandoned calls down to acceptable levels.

minor edit

Moved paragraphs 2 & 3 from previous version to beginning of "Introduction", following the breif definition and table of contents. --Petiatil

Reverted Mlegs edits

Removed link. See User talk:Mlegs

Merge Hosted predictive dialer recommendation

Most of the information on Hosted predictive dialer appears to be written like a product feature list from an advertisement and is not unique to hosted predictive dialers. The topic of hosted predictive dialing could easily be incorporated into the Predictive dialer article as another type using the provided description, including the Pros and Cons section. Recommend merge with PD. Calltech 23:04, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Merged

Merged hosted predictive dialer article into Types section. Any improvements and suggestions would be appreciated. pgaz 14:42, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Various comments

Smart Dialer: I have never come across this term before. Is it in widespread use?

Also, voice broadcasting is not legal in the UK unless prior agreement from the recipient has been obtained. The relevant law is the Telecommunications Act 2003, under which OFCOM (the regulator) has the ability to decide what constitutes "persistent abuse" of the network. Voice Broadcasting is considered "persistent abuse".

There are also several regulatory issues affecting the use of predictive dialing technology in the US and UK. The article does not discuss these. Should it?

The article defines silent or nuisance calls as calls where no agent is available to talk to a connected call. These are normally termed "abandoned" calls, with the term "silent" or "nuisance" call being used to include mis-classified answer machines (the person called cannot normally tell the difference between a call that was hung up because no-one was there and a call the system decided was an answering machine).

In the UK, regulation can be summarised as:

(1) If a predictive dialler has to abandon a call because there is no agent available, the dialler should play a brief recorded message stating the name of the business and a telephone number the call recipient can ring. This must be done within 2 seconds of the call being answered;

(2) These abandoned calls should not exceed 3% of all the live calls made within a 24 hour period;

(3) All calls should ring for a minimum of 15 seconds before being disconnected and classified as “no answer”;

(4) All calls must present a Calling Line ID (CLI) to which a return call can be made.

Davidgroves 10:32, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Soft dialers !!!

I believe with advent of host based processing answering machine detection and voice processing are easy to do now. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.246.33.54 (talk) 07:11, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Please sign all comments here on the talk page using 4 tildes (~) as is recommended at the top of this page. Removed the AMD comments per your recommendation. Calltech 11:23, 16 April 2007 (UTC)