Calling List Preparation

A calling list (of records to contact, a.k.a. call list, campaign table) managed by the CRM application may contain many thousands of client records, each containing a contact number or media address. When a campaign is started up the CRM application will usually have sorted these records into a sequence for contacting.

Sorting

Careful preparation (sorting and filtering) of list data can have a significant impact on performance and success rates, especially on Predictive campaigns.

Unsorted lists can lead to congestion of the contact channel e.g. if the campaign encounters a batch of very low connect rate data with consecutive records requiring contact attempts through the same communication channel or network, this can lead to the channel being overloaded. This can be a particular issue when making voice calls on a Predictive campaign.

The sorted contact sequence might be

alphabetic, or
based on some identifier in the record which measures the likelihood of getting a positive response from the called party e.g. for a fund raising campaign. This might be the amount contributed when contact was last made, or
if the CRM application knows what the rate of call throughput is likely to be, it may have sorted the numbers by a field indicating best time to call.

For Predictive campaigns, see the comments under Managing Uncertainty in Overdial Algorithm.