An outbound call center is the one where call center agents make calls to prospective customers for selling a product or service. In addition to sales, the calls may also be for renewal and payment reminders, debt collection, surveys, market research, informing about the delay in delivery, booking, and confirmation of appointments.
Let us take a look at a few terminologies associated with an outbound call center:
Agent (Executive)
An agent is an individual who is responsible for making calls and answering prospects.
Predictive Dialer
It is a system inbuilt in an intelligent call center solution that is responsible for automatically calling a list of telephone numbers in a sequence. It filters out the disconnected lines, busy numbers, and calls that are not answered.
Agent Status
It refers to the agent’s work status at a particular point of time. e.g. Busy, Available, Unavailable, On a call, etc.
Average Wait Time (AWT)
It refers to the average time an agent waits on the predictive dialer while using the intelligent call center software between two calls. Once a call is completed by an agent, he/she is ready for another call. In simple terms, it is the amount of time they have to wait.
Dropped Call Rates
It is the number of live answered calls that have been disconnected due to no agents being available to answer them. For example, if the predictive dialer in the intelligent call center software is making calls to 10 different leads at one time for 4 agents and the 5th prospect answers the call at the same time, the dialer will hang up the call because there are no agents to answer the call. This results in a dropped call.
Factors that play a key role in having a good average wait time and low call drop rate:
Availability to Agents
The higher the number of agents available to answer calls, the more efficient the predictive dialer will be in transferring calls to an available. This will lead to reduced call drops.
Quality of Leads
If calls to many leads go unanswered or there are many out of service numbers, the dialer in the intelligent call center software takes a longer time to find a live person. If the same leads are being recycled and used again and again, the chances of a prospect that could not be connected at the first instance picking up the call the second time are very less. Hence, the freshness and constant updates related to leads are very important.
Auto-dial Level
It refers to the number of lines that a dialer in the intelligent call center solution uses at a given time per active agent. A higher auto dial level can result in increased call drops if a sufficient number of agents are not available to answer too many live calls made by the dialer.
Available Only Score
It is an option available in the call center solution to determine whether or not the dialer should continue to dial lines for an agent, even if he/she is on a call. Ideally, the predictive dialer should stop dialing when an agent is on another line otherwise it would lead to an increase in the call drop rate.
Both average wait time and call drop rate are important KPI’s to the running of an efficient outbound call center. By using an efficient intelligent call center solution, one can ensure the enhanced productivity of the call center.
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