Overview of Findings - Predictive Dialler Survey

One important finding was that most sites have fairly good technology and feel themselves to be reasonably (if not exceptionally) well managed, using reasonable analytics. On the more technical side, for most organisations poor phone numbers are not the number one problem in gaining good dialler effectiveness, nor for most is getting reasonable connect rates daytime and evening.

To summarise the results of the survey, we produced two overall charts. One was our assessment of how well equipped and how well managed each site appears to be from its response.

For systems – how well implemented, how good the system, how good the automated management information;
For management – how well the queues and the calling are structured, how well staff are managed and incentivised, and how technically capable the organisation is in managing the dialler programmes and optimising connect rates.

This first positioning chart showed most respondents in the upper part of the chart with strong clustering in the centre and top right sections– most organisations had a good foundation in systems and technology, and reasonable analytical management. This clustering was unsurprising - the respondees were mainly large and reasonably well-equipped organisations. The strong systems / installation bias was also unsurprising - many of the respondees were on their second generation of dialler capabilities. Beyond the main clustering, four organisations stood out on the chart as being ‘best ranking’ both for systems and in good analytic management.

We expected to see all of this carried through to the second chart which showed actual positioning by quantative measures (daily success in working through the download volumes, and also collector cost efficiency). Unlike the first chart, this second was entirely objective, from calculations based on hard data from detailed responses (including calls per hour, right party contacts, daily spin rate and connect rates).

But this second chart, but the actual ‘hard achievement’ results did not show the same picture as the first chart, with its four apparent strong players. Only two of these four performed at the top end. Most operations were running well below these leaders. As in the first chart there was clustering, but now it was in the bottom left hand quadrant, suggesting that for many organisations “action needs to be taken”. Additionally there were some distinctive ‘outlying’ organisations with individual difficulties or unusual set-ups.

The yellow boxes attempt to summarise the overall position of organisations in each sector.

Actual Dialler Performance (showing movement after 18 months)

Some further observations:

When measured in hard results terms, only two of the four were best - these two were in fact very far ahead of the general mass of organisations

The two with the best objective results had only average or poor phone numbers.

The two best performers on these hard measurements were not mass-market ‘cards only’ players – and both were only medium-sized dialler sites.

Those who slipped behind were less analytic & detailed in the way they run the dialler at a technical level.

The “evenings only” approach can yield quite reasonable overall results if staffing permits.

Low volumes do not mean that you are constrained to high-end or low-end performance – we saw both in the outliers.

In the detailed responses we saw many more organisations leaving messages than we would have expected (80%) given the often-acceptable quality of phone numbers.