Tag Archives: answering machine

Dec 10

outbound contact centers – answering machine detection

do you have answering machine enabled on your phone? especially cell phone? i do have, both at my cell phone as well as my home phone, not the kind of answering machine provided by service provider, but the application, that will answer the call after certain seconds of ringing then it will read out the message i have recorded and then starts recording the message you might leave for me. then i can listen to the message and decide who called and why they have called, depending on that i can decide to call again or ignore or other options, sounds very simple rite? no rocket science.

 

but many among us, don’t have the habit of leaving the message at the answering machine, they will simply hung up, this is major annoyance, especially if the call is from new number(number you never saved) and you dont know what they have called about, it is even more annoying you are expecting some important call. there are many other annoyance and benefits with answering machine, let us restrict our views with the answering machine encounter at the outbound contact centers – dialers.

 

with respect to dialers, we have two known behaviors when we get answering machine as the outcome.

  1. dialer drops the call when answer machine is detected
  2. without positive voice detection we still dial and patch with the agent.

 

first is very much counter productive in my opinion, why.

  • assume customer is very much interested to buy what you are selling, unfortunately he did not answer and answering machine answered the call, if you just hung up you never conveyed the message to the customer at all, and he never will call back, if you leave the proper message with the contact details and product information, there is very good chance customer will call back
  • another condition is your message will be saved in customers answering machine, he will be calling you back when he really need to buy your product.
  • customer at least want to know who has just called, that is the basic etiquette rite?

second is counter productive too, why?

 

  • first of all agent time is wasted on a customer who is not available right now
  • it is completely upto agent if he leaves the message or not

what we can do about it?

 

the auto detection of answering machine should still happen, instead of dropping the call, we should be able to record the message to the customers answering machine, with the pre-recorded message by the agent himself.

 

benefit?

  • agents time is saved
  • customer is notified
  • the money spent on the call is fully utilized

i am not sure if this feature is available in any of the dialers currently, if you know any please let me know.

Nov 28

voice drop – outbound dialer campaigns

 

nobody would love the random call at the random time, esp., when you answer the call is a over excited machine voice, “hey… the offer ends today, go to nearest store today” i remember such annoy call reach my cell when i am at my close family funeral, there is nothing wrong with those IVR campaigns, the company has uploaded the contact numbers and asked the dialer to dial those numbers and “burst-out” the message to the customer, no matter if the customer willing to listen now or not.

 

since we have someone as our customer we cannot take their time, contact details for granted, many times these ivr campaigns are counter productive, i wont really feel cared when i receive those ivr calls, many times i have gone against the brand and said negative comments about the brand at least for next 5 minutes since the call arrived.

ivr campaign should be used very carefully, it would become annoying and counter productive when not used properly. in my opinion ivr campaigns should be very short, and in neutral tone not too excited or not too boring, preferably reminder kind of messages.

 

i will explore the ivr campaign applications by industry in detail in coming days to come, for now. ivr campaigns are used effectively by credit cards and banks for payment reminders, long ago i even received a call from a car service center to remind me about the due date for my car service etc.