Comms Consult - Predictive Diallers doubling in popularity amongst contact centres

Bolton-based independent telecoms company, Comms Consult, is reporting a 50% increase in enquiries for its Predictive Dialler services from call centres looking to treble their staff’s talk time and increase profitability.

As call centres continue to seek cost-efficiencies in line with tightening budgets, Predictive Diallers are becoming increasingly popular – allowing companies to increase productivity and efficiency without additional cost outlay such as recruitment, training and salaries.

Traditionally, manual-led call centres would expect agents to produce an average of between 15-20 minutes of talk time per hour however, with a Predictive Dialler, this can increase to between 45-55 minutes per hour, proving popular amongst those call centres wishing to increase sales without the expense of honouring more wages.

The largest influx of interest has come from business-to-consumer call centres and in particular, the legal industry, claims management and debt management sectors.

Matt Tomkin, managing director at Comms Consult, comments: “In the current financial climate, we are seeing businesses increasingly turning to technology to provide improvements to current working practices and financial expenditure to profit ratios.

“In terms of call centres, the biggest cost is staff so it is unsurprising that companies are seeking methods which best utilise current staff by reducing down time, and therefore increasing productivity and sales. We can’t control the amount of time an agent spends on the phone but what we can do is reduce the amount of time between calls.”

As Predictive Dialler services continue to grow in popularity, Comms Consult expects the wrap around services to be the big advancement area over the next few years. Matt explains: “These services are all about making the job of running a call centre easier and more profitable. One wrap around service we are currently investigating is a dialling platform which records and listens to calls in real time. This will alert supervisors when key phrases such as ‘sorry, we can’t help you this time’ are spoken, enabling that customer, and sale, to potentially be saved.”

Predictive Diallers are used to vastly increase the amount of contacts made to a call centre’s database. The solution means that agents spend more time on the telephone and less time between calls and is proving most popular with business-to-consumer call centres.