Abandon Rate Management
From V10.6.211 - improved pacing engine response during changes in data quality. See below.
Improved pacing engine response
From V10.6.211 - In order to help Softdial users protect themselves from the consequences of unexpected data quality changes, Softdial Campaign Manager™ has been enhanced such that it advises the Softdial CallGem™ pacing engine of likely fluctuation in list behaviour so that dialing can be throttled until the pacing engine has captured enough results to be able to pace accurately against the new conditions.
Under normal conditions the dialing rate will be closely controlled by the pacing engine to maintain the lowest possible agent wait time. To achieve this the pacing engine monitors a wide range of parameters that affect both dialing performance and abandons, such as connect rate, talk time, agents entering or leaving the dialling pool, trunk availability and many others.
The steady state pacing condition can be disturbed by campaign or user initiated events such as a change in the list quality (usually associated with loading new data), data runout, entering a period which has been selected for callbacks or any other condition that has the effect of throttling or accelerating the list consumption.
The enhancement introduced in V10.6.211 detects events which are known to cause this kind of disturbance and minimises the possibility of a resultant abandon rate overshoot by re-initialising the pacing engine.
Certain data management conditions in the contact center can lead to the Softdial CallGem™ pacing engine overshooting its abandon target and having to damp the dialing rate. A simple example of this problem is:
- What happens if the campaign runs out of numbers to dial, and is then reloaded with fresh data because the supervisor notices all agents are waiting for calls?
Up to this point Softdial CallGem™ will be pacing against a mix of fresh and retry data, likely with low connect rates.
An emergency data refresh may lead to a large unexpected increase in connect rate, combined with Softdial CallGem™ having to dial for the entire waiting team at the same time. This scenario can lead to a spike in abandoned calls that any pacing engine is simply unable to predict.
If this were to happen mid campaign, Softdial CallGem™ would quickly adjust its pacing engine to bring the abandon rate back within limits. However, if this happened at the end of a campaign, there may not be sufficient time for the abandon rate to be recovered.
In territories with strict regulatory compliance regimes (notably the UK), this type of data management issue has the potential to cause a compliance breach.
Re-initialising the campaign
Internally, this is done by Softdial Campaign Manager™ issuing a Reset Vectors [RV] message to Softdial CallGem™ in the following circumstances:
- when the primary cache for the campaign is empty for longer than the configured period (indicating list runout)
- for a campaign, if no Call Request [CR] messages are received from Softdial CallGem™ for an extended period (indicating that the agents are not active on the campaign, possibly as a result of blending)
- if a list load is requested by the user
- if a list autoload is initiated due to database runout
- if a load is initiated due to a campaign filter configuration being changed
- when a load is retried after a failure
When the Reset Vectors [RV] message is sent to Softdial CallGem™, a Notify Event [NE] message is generated which appears as an alert message in Alert Monitor. In order to prevent a flood of these messages they will only be generated if they occur within a configured period.
In some countries or for some types of business (e.g. debt collection), the local abandon rate regulations may be relaxed or may be non existent making the this precaution unnecessary. In this case the Reset Vectors process may be suppressed by setting a configuration parameter (described below).
Re-initialising by using registry keys
The conditions which prompt a Reset Vectors [RV] message can also be configured using the Softdial Campaign Manager™ registry keys listed in the table below.
From V10.6.252 - further improvements were made to specifically handle the situation where linked campaigns are in use. In this case, the checks for cache empty and sustained absence of Call Request [CR] messages are only made for the master campaign.
On user-initiated reload or auto-reload list runout, the Reset Vectors [RV] message is sent only if the campaign being reloaded accounts for more than 25% of the feed to the main campaign. The registry key ApportionPercentToSendRVToDialer has been added to facilitate this feature.
From V10.6.442 - the keys below are dynamic.
All keys are of type REG_DWORD.
| Key name | |
|---|---|
| Default Value | Description |
| SendRVToDialer | |
| 1 | In order to comply with government regulations for abandoned call rates, this should be set to 1 (default). When set to 0, no Reset Vectors [RV] message will ever be sent to Softdial CallGem™. |
| CacheEmptyPeriodInSecondsBeforeSendingRVToDialer | |
| 30 | For an open campaign, if the primary database cache is empty for this period, a Reset Vectors [RV] message will be sent to Softdial CallGem™. |
| SecondsBeforeSendingNotifyEventWhenRVMessageSentToDialer | |
| 600 | For a particular campaign, if a Reset Vectors [RV] message is repeatedly sent to Softdial CallGem™. Notify Event [NE] messages will not be issued more often than once in this configured period. |
| NoCRmessagesReceivedFromDialerPeriodBeforeSendingRVToDialer | |
| 120 | For an open campaign, if no Call Request [CR] message is received from Softdial CallGem™ for this period, a Reset Vectors [RV] message will be sent to Softdial CallGem™. |
| ApportionPercentToSendRVToDialer | |
| 25 | For linked campaigns, if the campaign being reloaded accounts for more than 25% of the feed to the main campaign, a Reset Vectors [RV] message will be sent to Softdial CallGem™. |
For those not using Softdial Campaign Manager™ to feed list data into Softdial CallGem™ (notably those in Market Research who have complex data sampling applications):
In order to mitigate data-related compliance issues for this type of project, we strongly recommend that System Integrators contact Sytel support for a detailed discussion about how to prevent breaches.