Outbound dialing in the call center has undergone a revolutionary change in the past decade. In October of 2004, the Supreme Court of the United States allowed a ruling from a lower court to stand that enabled the FTC Do Not Call regulations. The widespread registration of home phones, along with restrictions on dialing cellphones (and their increasing share of the number of phones outstanding), signaled a massive shift in the way outbound contact centers would operate. Automatic or predictive dialing was not killed off then, but it has been in critical condition since.
These days, outbound dialing campaigns have to be conducted much more conservatively. Quality leads are harder to get, increasing the expense of obtaining and contacting them. Many outbound-oriented call centers are increasingly dialing warm, hot, live or immediate leads. There are several ways of referring to these leads as well as several ways of collecting them. Such leads may be obtained by referral, by client-generated inquiry on a web site or inbound call center, or from a larger set of leads with an applied business logic. In any case, what they share is immediacy; their value is high when called immediately, and in many cases drops quickly with time.
Call center software that handles outbound campaigns must provide a way to insert leads into the queue quickly and often on a next-number-dialed basis. The Q-Suite provides several ways to queue leads immediately, with the next available agent getting the new lead, or being added to the end of the queue so as to be handled in the next little while. It also makes it possible to script business logic, apply time-of-day rules, or integrate with another CRM that provides leads on an agent-driven or CRM driven basis. This flexibility, along with the capability to preview a lead, dial on a one-to-one basis, or even run predictive campaigns, is increasingly important in today’s environment and will be needed even more in the future.