White Papers

Virtual Telephony Application Grids in Call Centers

Contents: Predictive Dialers Answering Machine Detection (AMD) Traditional Dialers Answering Machine Detection (AMD) 3CLogics Implementation of V-TAG

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Predictive Dialers
A predictive dialer is used for automating the outbound dialing process in a call center. It increases the efficiency of the Call Center by preventing calls with busy signals, answering machines, fax machines, network messages, and no answers, from reaching agents. The predictive behavior results from multiple call attempts made by the dialer on behalf of agents available to handle calls. The number of calls dialed ahead by the dialer is forecast automatically by the dialer based on available agents and the average call handle duration. This process results in an increase in dial rates and agent productivity. The effectiveness of a predictive dialer is measured by its pacing ratio. The pacing ratio is the number of simultaneous calls outstanding per agent. For example, a pacing ratio if 2:1 means that for each available agent, the system will dial two calls. As these calls are made the dialer monitors each call and determines the outcome. The system strips out any unproductive outcomes, such as busy calls (these are usually queued for automatic redial), no answers & invalid numbers and routes only the good calls to available agents. Answering Machine Detection (AMD) Some predictive dialers incorporate answering machine detection, which tries to determine if a live person or answering machine picked up the phone. The system may automatically re-queue calls answered by answering machines or leave a message. If a human is detected, the dialer transfers the call to an available agent. Predictive dialers are usually implemented in specialized machines with extensive hardware. The machines are expensive to acquire and maintain and dont scale easily as more

agents are added in the call center or when it is necessary to increase the pacing ratio. System outages can cause large downtime for the call center. This is typically one of the reasons why most call centers are unable to go beyond a pacing ratio of 2. Another problem is the delay caused when connecting a call to a live agent. The system on which the dialer runs is typically an isolated system which may be deployed in the call center or hosted outside. A call which connects must be transferred to a live agent and this typically results in a delay or clicks heard by the called party. This taints the overall experience of the call as heard by the called party. When answering machine detection is running, this delay can be as much as 4 seconds before the call is transferred to an available agent. Traditional Dialers Most traditional predictive dialers rarely match their advertised performance levels. This is because the peak performance is reached when a lot of conditions are met and this can be hard in practice in a real call center environment. For example, if not enough calls are made ahead, agents will sit idle, whereas if there are too many calls made and there are not enough agents to handle them, then the call is typically dropped. A high level of performance may require a sufficiently large critical mass of agents. Conversely, it may be increasingly difficult to maintain a high talk time percentage with a lower number of agents without increasing dropped calls. A sophisticated system will need to manage calls more appropriately to deal with these situations. It will also need to use many operating characteristics that it learns during the calling process for each campaign. These statistics can be used to make important predictions to minimize agent idle time while controlling

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occurrences of nuisance calls. An advanced predictive dialer should be able to maintain the ratio of nuisance calls to answered calls at less than a fraction of one percent while still dialing ahead.

of client server is an FTP server where the client and server programs are quite distinct, and the clients initiate the download/uploads and the servers react to and satisfy these requests. An important goal in distributed networks is that all clients provide resources, including bandwidth, storage space, and computing power. Thus, as nodes arrive, and demand on the system increases, the total capacity of the system also increases. This is not true of client-server architecture with a fixed set of servers, in which adding more clients could mean slower data transfer for all users. The distributed nature of system or network also increases robustness in case of failures by replicating data over multiple systems by enabling PCs to find the data without relying on a centralized index server. In the latter case, there is no single point of failure in the

Predictive Dialing with Virtual Telephony Application Grid (V-TAG)

A distributed system or network relies primarily on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively low number of servers. A purely distributed network does not have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both clients and servers to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the clientserver model where communication is usually to and from a central server. A typical example

3CLogics VTag Architecture Diagram

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system.

3CLogics Implementation of V-TAG

3CLogic is a distributed solution powered by Virtual Telephony Application grid (V-TAG), which means there are no extra servers required. This not only cuts down extra hardware or technical know-how required to set up the system, but also increases the speed at which new agents can be added to the system. Since there are no centralized points of failure there are fewer causes of downtime in a call center and the system can withstand things like power failure or disk crashes more robustly without disrupting the operation of the whole system. The system performance also remains at peak while agents are dynamically added or removed from campaigns. 3CLogic is also able to maintain very high Pacing ratios (up to 16) scaling it up or down dynamically based on the real-time performance measurement of the call center. The current status of the call center can be viewed on the web from anywhere in the world based on a user id and password registered with the 3CLogic portal. A distributed system also removes the need for call transfer in most cases thereby improving the customer experience and cutting down call handling. Answering machine detection can be done in two seconds in a distributed system thereby cutting down the wait time for the called party by 50%. 3CLogic provides its own dialer database that can be integrated with any CRM system. 3CLogic also provides a programming interface which allows tuning the Call Center application to suit the business process of the individual call center. 3CLogic uses SIP which allows plug-and-play connectivity with a large number of devices and networks.

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