Dialer System (Collections)_

[Tony]

Anyone use Magellan???


Anyone use Divine (formerly e-Share)??

Further, what type of measures do you use? In my dept we aim for 3 main measures; Abandonment Rate, Right Party Contact Rate, & Promise To Pay.

the Last one is relevant as it is a Collections Call Center for a major financial institution.

I was wondering what other criterion you people use?

I have recently encountered a new one (for myself at least) Right Party Contact per FTE (Full time employee),....


anyone else familiar with such stuff? what criterion do you use & measure

[csteven]

Tony,

We're a collections call center looking at dialers right now. We like Divine & Concerto (both software based dialers) and Avaya (hard dialer). They all have their pluses & minuses. Divine has agent & group pacing whereas the others just have group. But Divine has had service support issues in the past. I'm also finding companies who have Divine dialers but are now replacing them. Still, for a dialer in a collections environment it looks OK. Concerto is also good & I don't see much difference between it & Divine except Concerto doesn't use a "call cancel" feature that Divine uses, instead it just doesn't dial the last digit on the phone number, thus you don't have to hang up on customers, you just don't make the call. I also find the reports easier to read via Concerto.

Avaya has the #1 dialer for the collections industry, but it's also the most expensive. It's a powerful Rolls. This is backed up by Frost & Sullivan. Avaya can prove they have the highest rate of right party contacts. They also have a feature called "virtual agent" that the others don't have. The problem with Avaya is it is likely harder to inter-link it with other operations in your company that may want to use your dialer as it's a hardware based dialer. If your company has the money & says the dialer is only for collections, then I suggest you give it a strong view. I've used one in my old work environment & we are still with it 10 years later.

Overall, any of the 3 can handle your needs, but some can just handle them a bit better than others. You need to decide based on your needs.

For your dialer measurements, I'd look at right party contacts, % ptp per campaign (this is dependent also on the quality of the campaign you create), delay between when the agent hangs up to when the dialer provides the next call, ease & speed of creating campaigns, ability to edit campagins "on the fly", ability to run multiple campaigns, ability to run different campaigns with the same team of collectors. A hard dialer will be a bit faster & more accurate than a soft one.

Good luck. I was initially sold on Avaya, but at my org, various non-collection depts also want to use it, so now I'm looking at 2nd best solutions for me, but maybe best solutions for my org.

Steve

[Dan-Duffy]

Tony,
I also work in a collections environment, for a top 100 company. We use Avaya, and will stay with it.
As far as measuring tools, I am not sold on Right Party Contact as a proficient measurement tool. But it depends on the type of Campaigns you are looking to perform. We break our Collections Department into 2 main categories, under 30 days past due and over 30 days past due. We found that by aggressively pursuing the Unders, the over 30s droppped drastically. We also tested a predictive dialer - Optimizer from Avaya, for about $500k, and found out something interesting. Our goal for the under 30 day past due was not to actually contact the customer, but to leave a message. Leaving a message takes about 30 seconds, as opposed to talking to a customer, which could take up to 5 minutes. We found that by continually talking to our customers on an outbound basis, our campaigns were not finishing, and our deliquency rose for that group, and thereby for the over 30 group.
So basically, for the under 30 day accounts, we measure the number of outbound calls, along with Quality Assurance goals.
Just a thought I would share.