Kunnect Nation,

I often get asked the question about “what settings should I have to cut down agent wait time?” That is a multi-loaded question. There isn’t one simple answer to this question. Here are the factors to consider:

1. Number of agents in that calling profile
2. Time of day
3. Age of the list
4. Nature of the campaign

Certainly it has been said for many years now that dialing predictively only gets better and more efficient, when you have more agents in the calling profile. Personally, I feel that having less than 5 agents dialing predictively in a profile makes it close to impossible to be efficient (low drop ratio) and have a short average wait time between calls (i.e. 20 seconds). I’d say, stick to 10 agents or more.

The time of day you are calling can greatly influence your live contact rate. If you keep working a list during weekday afternoons, it is obvious you wil have difficulty getting a high connect rate. Try calling on your newer leads during the day, and attempting older leads in the evening (or alternating from day to day). One can assume that if someone is not home during the day, they might be working. Calling in the evening will increase your likelihood of a connect.

Old, beat up lists that have been called on for more than 20 attempts can be hard to convert into sales. Try mixing some new and old lists together so that you are not having peaks and valleys in your production.

Lastly, the nature of the campaign can have a critical impact. If the list of numbers you are calling is cold, then you may need a little more dialing power (4-5 lines per agent), whereas a list of previous customers would indicate to me that it will have a greater likelihood of connecting, thus using less lines. You would not want to overdial this group of leads for the fear of alienating them.

Kunnect is proud to say that it has an FTC compliant mode for its hosted predictive dialer, that dials very efficently (average wait times between 20-30 seconds) all the while maintaining a drop ratio of 3% or less. Try it out!

Fred Cote