BUILDING A BETTER
PREDICTIVE DIALER
Ten Tips for
Operations Managers
Earlier this week, I had an interesting discussion with a
creditor about the strengths of a predictive dialer vs. a manual dialing
process. She was assigning her agencies thousands
of files per month, and they were using a predictive dialer to (what I
believed) to be mediocre results.
Now, I’ve always been a huge fan of a manual collection
strategy, because it can create a sense of urgency, present a consistent
professional image to the debtor, develop expertise in the staff, and generally
receive higher liquidation than a dialer program. However, a manual process requires a great
deal of manpower, man-hours, and does not process a large number of files
quickly.
In my time, I have led a project in building an
Asterisk-based open-source code predictive dialer with extensive back-end SQL
coding to make it tuned to a specific collection strategy. The final product was a dialer program that
made 120,000 calls per day, and along the way, I learned many things that I thought
might be worth sharing.
1. Your Dialer Is Not Intuitive
A predictive dialer is incredibly
powerful. However, it is not intuitive,
and cannot make a myriad of decisions like a human being. Unless programmed otherwise, it will call the
same number over and over and over. However,
you can build a code or script that will allow behavioural changes to your
dialer, whether it is call times, frequency of calls, the output message for
answering machines, and so on. Keep this
code open-ended to change with the inventory, liquidation and staffing levels.
When we built our dialer, I set up
a series of independent sub-campaigns with different behaviours, and routed
files to those campaigns dependant on their call count and status of the last
file. By doing this, I was able to
extract promise payments, call-backs, and other right party contacts from the answering
machines, no answers, and disconnected numbers, and focus the predictive
outbound campaign (and maximize the dialer team’s calls) on those files. While your machine is not inherently smart,
you can build in some decision-making code, and make the best use of your staff’s
time.
2. Do Not Put Your Dialer Into Overdrive
While we set our dialer to rotate our files on a reasonable 2-business
day to 8-business day turnover, depending on the client, previous status of the
call, and call count on the individual file, we continuously heard complaints
from our clients of other agencies calling the same debtor multiple times in
the day, every day. Not only is this
illegal in the majority of provinces and states, it is a colossal waste of
bandwidth and your telecommunications budget.
Just because you CAN call 200,000 files in a day or call back the same
file multiple times in the same day does not mean you should.
To
control our outbound flow, we set up the dialer to make outbound calls at a ratio
of 4-1 or 5-1 per collection agent, but only when those agents were available –
the dialer ramped up and down as collectors were logged into calls. In the late afternoon, when the inbound calls
ramped up, our outbound traffic went down to almost nil, and we avoided dropped
calls. The agents averaged 20 seconds
between calls with this strategy.
3. Manage Your Traffic Carefully.
When
we were making our calls, we generated in the neighbourhood of up to 6000
inbound calls per day – after analysis, these inbound calls proved to have a
higher liquidation ratio than outbound (almost double), and were received by
our team in a specific time window, rather than evenly spread across the
day. Be prepared to change your staffing
plan to field your inbound calls, and minimize or eliminate any inbound dropped
calls, as these could be far more important than keeping your predictive dialer
ramped for outbound calls.
4. Every Client Is Different
When we introduced a new client to
the predictive dialer, we had a base-line set of coding to handle the
files. However, we often altered the
code by client to deal with unique status codes required by the client, small
balance vs. large balance files, higher turnover of high liquidation paper, and
so on.
One US client required a
“Validation of Debt” status for us to request proof of debt from the creditor
and then mail it to the client. We set
up a specific dialer code for this that halted calls until the validation
letter was sent.
5. Be Able To Change Your Pace
If a client is suffering low liquidation on a manual campaign, it’s a
simple matter to redirect staff to the inventory failing to perform – make sure
your predictive dialer can do the same.
Build a high-priority or red-flag list that underperforming files can be
moved to for greater focus, and can be measured closely until the expected
liquidation is met.
6. Be A Debtor.
One
of the best things we did in building our dialer is put the management team
into the dialing list to receive calls. Have
your dialer set up to call a handful of the manager’s cell phones every day –
monitor what the calls sound like, how they are answered by your collection
agents, your answering machine when you don’t pick up, and so on. Measure not only your collection staff’s tone
and quality of call, but the volume, quality of telephone reception, background
noise, time to agent pick up, answering machine detection times, and so on.
7. Train Your Staff To Understand The Machine.
Not only do you need to have staff
who can follow all the collection laws, represent the creditor and collect the
account, you need to have them understand how their predictive dialer behaves,
so they can re-route problem files, properly status escalated calls, or
understand why a file is called when it is called. Have regular training sessions with your staff
and go over the routing and results of your dialer program.
By involving the staff, and
sharing reports, they will give management feedback and suggestions to further
improve liquidation – our staff came up with a targeted response to promise
payment files, and built a troubleshooting team around the collection of those
accounts.
8. Be Creative
We found, through experimentation,
that setting up an escalation inbound group consisting of team leads and the
shift supervisor not only allowed agents who were struggling with uncooperative
debtors an inbound extension to re-route these calls (rather than manually
asking a supervisor for help), we were also able to build a custom outbound
campaign on refusals that was only manned by the team leads and supervisor.
9. Sometimes A Human Being Is Better.
When dealing with calls to places of employment, repeated broken
promises, or programs that are heavily skip-trace files, a dialer can only do
so much. Have a plan on how to pull
files away from the dialer to a manual process if necessary.
Our
predictive dialer team had some enterprising staff who noticed a number of
promise to pays were not liquidating – they asked to form a team that would
work two evenings a week, manually calling these failed promises. Not only did these two collectors liquidate
on these files, we were able to build the code of the predictive dialer to
automatically route files that were promises over ten days without being
worked, or high balances that required skip-tracing. We moved these staff off the dialer to a
manual program that each of them was able to generate 150%-200% of what a
typical predictive staff member was able to do in a month.
10. Sometimes a Machine Is Better
At
my current office, I have built a similar predictive dialer campaign for a
specific program for a client – their program is heavily skip-trace files with
wrong numbers, but large volume. When we
first received their batch of files, after lettering them we performed a brief
initial dialer campaign, and reported back to our collection database the
results of those calls. In turn, we were
able to extract the files with human contact for an initial campaign, and
immediately begin a trace program on the not in service numbers and wrong
numbers, leaping past our client’s lifetime liquidation expectation in two
short months. It wasn’t really a
predictive dialer campaign that collected the files, but it certainly was a
supporting factor.
Conclusion
A predictive dialer, if used properly, is an incredibly
powerful tool – but it is just one tool available to a collection agency or
internal collections team, that can be refined and used in concert with other
resources.
If you have any questions about Asterisk phone systems,
SQL-based predictive dialers, or call campaign strategy, I would be pleased to
offer what advice I have. Feel free to
directly contact me at Kingston Data and Credit.
Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
Kingston Data and Credit
Cambridge, Ontario
226-444-5695
Really nice tips..
ReplyDelete