Call Centres have become very common internationally and many businesses outsource their operations to different countries in an effort to minimize costs. A difficult issue with this process is Contact Centre Quality. It is clearly no use outsourcing to save money if in doing so you give your customers to such poor service that they go to your competitors.

Lousy service in call centres is typcially a management or training problem but there are also some clever phone technologies available today, like predictive dialers, that can improve the maximum operational capacity of a call centre and thus free up financial resources to fund top quality agent training.

Dialers use a mixture of software and hardware technology to predict spare agent availability so as to allow the agents themselves are utilised at high capacity. After all, a contact centre agent occupying desk space but not on the phone to a customer is simply increasing overheads and not earning any revenue.

As with any complex operation with many parallel independent components, economies of scale are there to be seized, especially if the utilisation of individual elements – agents – are not interdependent. Dynamic, real time analysis of agent call times, agent availability together with work flows can often show up extra capacity in existing systems. In the Contact Center environment, predictive dialers can deliver generous cost savings without acutally costing a fortune to introduce.

Outbound dialers not only schedule calls and allocate them to available agents, they do this in a way that successfully balances the maximum possible agent utilisation rates with the lowest levels of silent calls in order to keep in line with individual country’s guidelines.

Technology is getting smarter