 | It’s Sytel’s turn again this month. This time we offer a tip asking ‘the price of predictive’. |
We come across a lot of people who worry about the issues involved in upgrading from progressive to predictive dialing. Some is due to concerns about nuisance and abandoned calls. Some is due to price. We have written a lot about the first of these issues (see our Resources page), now let’s look at price.
The place to start is by considering how much extra talk time per hour you can expect to gain, compared with say progressive dialing. An issue that is usually shrouded in fog and marketing hyperbole. If you are a new hand at the predictive game, then look for some hard facts, for example another site that has been through a similar upgrade. Or run your numbers through Oceanic®, Sytel’s outbound planning tool.
If you are running a call center with large campaigns of say 50 agents, the news is good. If you have an efficient dialer then may you get as much as an extra 10 minutes talk time per hour. What about campaigns with 10 agents? If your live call rate is as low as 20% you may get as much as an extra 5-6 minutes extra talk time from an efficient predictive dialer, but at high live call rates, many users will be lucky to get more than several minutes improvement. If you are a user and you reckon you are doing way better than this, then you will probably be operating outside the guidelines for predictive dialing that are now being developed by national marketing associations (again, see our Resources page).
In the example that follows we are going to assume that a move to predictive brings a modest 4 minutes of extra talk time per hour.
| Working days per year | 250 |
| Working hours per day | 4 |
| Working hours per year | 1000 |
| Extra talk time per hour in mins | 4 |
| Extra talk time per year in hours | 67 |
| Additional revenue per hour | $45 |
| Additional revenue per year | $3000 |
For many users an upgrade to predictive dialing from progressive dialing, should involve little more than the cost of plugging in the required predictive algorithms. So having borne that cost, any additional revenue will go straight to the bottom line. This calculation suggests you can afford to pay as much as $3000 ($6000) per agent in a one (two) year payback. OK if you want to ‘value price’, which is how the industry used to operate, but times have changed.
We don’t monitor the prices that our business partners resell at, but expect a highly competitive deal. OK, it’s an unashamed plug, but we think a very fair one!