Waiting time!

[maghnath]

Hi! I am a manager in an international outbound center in India. We are true dial based and are facing a weird problem. There are 10 agents working on an outbound sales process. The problem is with the wait time. It never remains constant,at times touching 150secs also.

This has affected productivity and the performance of the center. When consulted with the IT Department they say that it has to do with the database provided to us, another explanation that is given is that since the agents are less the wait time is high since no. of outdials cannot be increased as it would result in an increase in the hang ups. This theory is unbelievable cause it has never happened in the past.

Can anyone give a proper explanation and a solution to this problem.

Musham

[Steveo]

Your issue can be caused by several situations. Poor quality of the phone numbers, dialing when customers are not available, but most likely it is simple statistics. If all agents are talking to a live voice then the dialer must stop or slow dialing. As agents become available to take more calls the system should start to increase the frequency of attempts which will demand more time and calls to locate a live voice. To statistically reduce this situation you will need to add more agents. This will allow more agents to become available at any given moment in time and will actually reduce the speed at which the dialers burns through your list/campaign. Depending upon the dialer you are using, you should check the algorythm settings which can be adjusted to allow dialing based upon agent pool/staffing.

[spatten]

Outbound dialing is an economy of numbers. Are you predictive dialing? If so, you will gain efficiency with every agent you add to the dialer. The more agents you have the more lines the dialer can dial out on. Also can you increase your line to agent ratio or decrease your target percent connect? This will speed up the calling, but you have to be careful not to go too fast or you will abandon a great deal of calls.

Something else you should check on is the dialer disposition codes in the database after you make one pass through your data. Your dialer should give you a code for each record that tells you if the number was bad or if you got an answering machine or if nobody was home at that number etc. Are you filtering out answering machines? That could add to the problem.

If your database is bad, then you will need to subscribe to a valid area code list and do some better data preparation. One thing I've found is that IT won't take the time to properly research the issue for you. You'll have to force them to do it or do it yourself.

Good luck