Overdial Algorithm

Imagine that once the agents have got into their stride at the start of a campaign, average talk times for right party calls decrease by 30%. What impact would you expect that to have on the overdial rate?

If the overdial algorithm is tracking average talk times (and their distributions), then this should have the impact of pushing the overdial rate up. If you were a user monitoring average wait times for your agents, you might spot little change in them, in response to this change in talk times alone.

But consider all the other changes that will be taking place simultaneously, for example in variables such as wrap times, ring times, detection times, call outcome distributions. and agent numbers. A well-engineered dialer should be constantly adjusting its overdial rate in response to changes in all these variables, in order to achieve optimum dialing conditions, and that is precisely what Softdial CallGem™ does. The effect is to keep the overdial rate as high as possible, in order to minimise wait times between calls, for the particular abandoned target set by the user.

If there are sudden swings in the values of the variables that Softdial CallGem™ is tracking, then depending on the movement that has occurred, Softdial CallGem™ will either adjust its overdial rate downwards in order to avoid any unwanted incidence of abandoned calls, or it will increase the overdial rate to compensate, for example, for a reduction in the percentage of connects being achieved.

Sometimes Softdial CallGem™ may have to reduce its overdial rate quickly to limit abandoned calls within the target set, and this can push up wait times. To reduce the possibility of this occurring, users should always sort their calling lists. Consider the following:

See Example

Imagine that you are targeting a local community during the day, and it's snowing. The business folk and their families have all managed to get to work, school and so on, but the retired folk have all stayed in. Sounds reasonable? OK. Now let's assume that the retired folk live mainly in small groups and apartment blocks within the community. If your calling list was compiled by street address, and left unsorted, then you can spot what's going to happen. Overall you might have 50% live calls, but in fact you will have swings between zero response and 100% answers.

Softdial CallGem™ can cope with this, but you'll get lower wait times if you sort this kind of calling list to ensure a more even connect rate.

So the rule in all cases, is to sort calling lists where practicable, to eliminate obvious sources of distortion. For more information please see Algorithm Adjustment during a campaign.

Before opening a campaign, users may want to set some values for the overdial algorithm to work with. See Dialing Rules for an understanding of what these values are. These values are set in the Overdial Tuning [OT] message .

Although these values may be reset at any time during a campaign, we recommend that once a campaign is underway, you should resist the temptation to do so. Apart from these values, e.g. abandoned call target, there is no provision at all for supervisors to change the pace of the overdial algorithm. The whole point of a good predictive dialer is that the dialing algorithms should know best how to optimise the dialing rate to minimise wait times.