AMD Settings for B2B outbound calling

[aabraham]

Hi All,

We are currently using vicidial version 2.9 - 441A.
One of our main challenges when making outbound "predictive" calls is that our current AMD setting is not correctly dispositioning AA calls.

We usually only make calls to businesses using the predictive dialing strategy, and considering almost 60-70% of all businesses have IVR's, these calls to businesses that have IVR's are currently being dispositioned as AA's.

This issue is causing us a great deal of pain, as we are wasting a lot of good leads using this strategy.

Can someone please give us the best AMD settings to call business's, where we use the AMD setting to improve contact rates, but also to ensure we get those business's that currently use IVR's.

Thank you.

[williamconley]

Primary Answer: IVR is an Answering Machine. By definition. It's not a Human Response, it's a machine. And it ... answered.

Secondary Answer: Please always post your installer with version in addition to the FULL version of Vicidial (which must include the BUILD).

Tertiary: Dude! Upgrade! That's a very very old version of Vicidial.

[aabraham]

Thank you William!

Is there a way for the dialer to identify a voice mail vs an ivr? I would like the calls that have IVR's to go to an agent, and the calls that are actual VM's etc to continue being dispositioned as AA's.

[williamconley]

Nope.

But on the lighter side, you CAN allow ALL calls to go to agents and then have the agents push "VM" in the transfer-conf screen for voicemails (if you want to leave a message) and set the "wait for silence" option to the stock settings so the agent does not need to wait for silence. This allow the brain of your agents to decide immediately, and without delay notable to the call recipient, whether this is a good machine (ivr) or a bad machine (vm) or a human and act accordingly. Agents just push the VM button and are immediately available for their next call.

We strongly advise against using AMD at all. It depresses your success statistics by broadcasting (loudly) "this was an autodialed call" due to the 2 second delay required to detect AMD vs Voice. This is something that pisses off the general public and "sets the tone" of the rest of the call. Test it if you're not sure, but be sure not to test it with agents who have been using the crutch of the AMD already, that would affect the outcome of your test. We've seen many rooms have to fire everyone and start over after using the AMD crutch. Test it cleanly and form your own opinion.

[aabraham]

Thanks again William. I've taken all your suggestions onboard and will make changes accordingly.