Enterprise Campaign Management - Basic Outbound Dialing

Basic Outbound Dialing

Not all predictive dialer solutions require customer data (usually referred to as 'call records') in order for them to work. At the most basic sense, these call records are simply a list of phone numbers to dial, however in practice companies will also provide with those phone numbers information such as the customer name, address, account number, and other information about why an individual may be being called. This data has two basic uses:

1. The dialer uses the phone number(s) provided to make the actual calls

2. to populate the 'screen pop' that is displayed to the agent when the call is connected (so that the agent knows who they are talking to and what about)

In addition to this the data that is contained in these customer records can also be used by the dialer for;

• Filtering: Most predictive dialers allow you to selectively filter which records to dial by using the data supplied in the customer record as select criteria (e.g. only dial customers over 50 that owe more than £100 - naturally, in order to do this type of filtering the appropriate data such as 'age', and 'money owed' must be part of the customer record supplied to the dialer).

• Desktop Automation/Scripting: Information in the screen pop can be used to automate processing on the agents screen. For example, as part of the screen pop the customer account number can be used as a primary key to bring up the correct record in the customer database.

• Store results: Dialer will typically add extra information to each customer record that is dialed. This usually consists of the name/user ID of the agent who handled the call, the date/time(s) the customer was serviced, result code(s) etc.

For most users of dialing solutions a basic call table will provide all that they need to run a successful dialing campaign. Most companies, in order to feed their dialer with the data it needs will usually (on a nightly or regular basis) run a small program which will search their customer database for a list of records to dial. This list is then usually extracted as a basic text file which is then sent to the dialer for dialing. Once the dialing has completed the results can then be extracted back from the dialer so that the customer database can be updated with the results.