What is a good Outbound Campaign practice?

[k995337]

Greetings dear collogues,

This is my first post, so I would make it brief so I would not tire you.
I would like to hear opinions on what is the best tactic-strategy for an Outbound campaign? Progressive or Predictive (average call waiting time, busy factor, over dial rate) ?

Our goal is to avoid as much as possible the abandoned calls (or short abandoned) !!!
A first guess that something is going wrong wit our PBX is delaying the forwarding of calls to live agents and they get to answer an already hanged-up call...but always it could be something else.. (our outbound group is small)

[cavagnaro]

Well it all depends on the target or type of campaign you are running.
If you want NO abandon calls the do Preview Dialing Mode as is the only way to ensure an agent will be with the call.

If you want little abandon calls do Progressive as the Dialing will be done as soon as an agent put on Ready, however, if he was on Ready and in that moment he puts on NotReady, Logoff, etc, anything that avoids him to be available to receive the call, the call was already triggered and maybe answered by the customer and therefore put on queue (Waiting). So the chance is little but exists.
On this mode agents may take a while to receive a call.

If you want or can handle a bigger number of abandoned calls then use Predictive, the dialing mode will also decide how much the dialing speed will be and how many calls abandon, as more aggresive, more abandon, but more busy agents.

You will also need to check your country laws for those kind of calls as on some countries it is illegal to put a customer on hold for a long time and more if you was the one who called him, the recommendation goes for 2 second queue, however you may extend it up to 10 seconds maybe, again according to your country laws.

Also! Automatic answer on the agent side should be a must, this according to my experience .

[Danny_Jarman]

If you have a small outbound group, with either a high variablity on ACW (After Call Work) times or a high priority on low dropped call volumes then I would always suggest progressive. Auto answer is a must.

[Seb Reeve]

...if you do use progressive then be careful with blending inbound calls to the same agents - this can result in dropped\abandoned calls.

If your PBX is slow to transfer then you may consider CPD Server in ASM mode to ensure speedy agent connects... this does add considerable cost however.

OCS Desktop API does allow logout control for desktops to stop agents logging out before the server has adjusted pacing...

[k995337]

[b]Thank you all for your responses and views.
[/b]
Until now we used a dedicated Outbound [size=8pt](only)[/size] Group of agents along with a blend of predictive and progressive mode...Last 4 days I changed the mode to progressive only.

The abandoned calls (according to Genesys Definition) were limited to a minimum [u][b]BUT[/b][/u] a lot of calls were distributed to Agents already Hanged Up by Customer! I sincerely do not know why or how calls end up dead to Agents...[size=8pt].maybe (as I mentioned in first post) something is wrong with the PBX i do not know if and how to see if that is the problem...[/size] Ow I don't know if the following has something to do with the problem..when the system was build, the Attributes of Protocol in Various elements in Configuration Manager were left in the HTTP value....and not ADDP...

[cavagnaro]

Nothing to do with Genesys.
Maybe the PBX has a bad configuration, maybe not.
Let me explain, however this have been discussed several times before.

There are two kinds of lines: Analog like your house and digital like the PRI your company may have.
Analog have two flavors: With battery inverse and not, what it does is send an electronical signal (a voltage variation) so the public PBX can detect that the call was hanged up and send this message to your PBX. If the analog line on client side doesn't have that facility (will depend on the customer carrier only) if he hangs up it will take about a minute for the public PBX detect that nothing is going on on that line and hang it up.

So this calls that enter to your call center will be those ones that are "null" calls that your agents receive.
You can do some tests, find an analog common house line and call your call center, on your call center PBX capture the entrance of that call, hang up from customer side and see what message your PBX receives.

Again, it is a normal behavior.