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Predictive Dialing on Asterisk PBX
(FREDERICTON, NB) (6 March 2006): Predictive Dialers are used by outbound call centers to keep their agents talking on the phone. A good predictive dialer will provide a live connect within 10 to 15 seconds from the time an agent has wrapped up the previous call. To achieve this, a predictive dialer has to dial more phone numbers than the anticipated number of agents available to answer the calls, should the calls be picked up. Generally when a call is picked up and there are no available agents to answer the call, it gets dropped and the person on the other end does not hear an agent. The FCC in United States and the CRTC in Canada have strict guidelines governing dropped calls. A predictive dialer should not drop more than 3% of the total number of calls connected, excluding answering machines. The PBX running the predictive dialer should also play a recorded message announcing the dropped call with details on the caller.
To be more precise, a predictive dialer is a sub-component in the telephony and CRM of an outbound contact center. In essence, Predictive Dialers are computer algorithms that decide how many phone numbers should the PBX dial out for a given number of agents. The optimization in the predictive dialing algorithm tries to determine the number of connects at any given time. These parameters are generally a function of the quality of leads and the time of day and a function of the immediate statistical past.
Asterisk PBX is a full featured open source Enterprise PBX software. Asterisk dramatically reduces the cost of building any large call center using its wonderful telephony platform. Predictive Dialers with tone detection to identify Busy, No-Answer and other call terminations do not have high degree of accuracy in identifying call termination. Asterisk provides TDM and VoIP options for terminations. These options are essential for a reliable and fast connection. Asterisk provides a TCP based Manager interface which can be used for both call initiation and event progress. A good session manager for call center software should take this information and pass it on as input to the Predictive Dialer. As we can see, all the essential ingredients for developing good call center software is inherent in Asterisk and at little cost. The Digium
and Sangoma PRI boards provide good quality TDM interface at bargain price. There is no doubt that Asterisk PBX will dominate the contact center industry in years to come.
Indosoft Inc. has many successful deployment of its predictive dialers in contact centers.
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