Dial Method and Call Count

[dspaan]

I often notice we have to manage the Dial Method for predictive outbound campaigns because agents are either waiting to long for a call or the opposite, there are too many drops.

In those cases we either change the Maximum Adapt Dial Level or we change from ADAPT to RATIO.

But i have noticed this virtually always has to do with the quality of the leads. If there are leads in the hopper with a +10 call count for instance the wait time increases and we have to modify the dialer settings.

So my idea is this, why not make the leads call count setting a factor that is used by the ADAPT algorithms?

Concrete:

-The average call count of the leads loaded into the hopper is calculated
-Add a field to the campaign detail settings (green section) called Average Call Count Threshold
-Add a field called Maximum <CC Adapt Dial Level (means this is the dial level when the average call count in the hopper is below the defined threshold)
-Add a field called Maximum >CC Adapt Dial Level (means this is the dial level when the average call count in the hopper is above the defined threshold)

This way if you lead new leads or do something else with your lists you won't get an instant wave of drops or the opposite.
Thoughts?

[williamconley]

This could be handled easier at present as an external script. Have it run every 1-10 minutes (depending on your preference) and make the adjustment based on the average call count and change the value of the adapt dial level accordingly. If you wanted this to be different for each campaign, you would store the value in one of the campaign settings or in a table outside vicidial.

However, if this change is necessary, then your campaign settings are probably not well-designed for an adapt campaign. After all, it will adjust to any qualify of call on-the-fly based on drop call percentage (that's what adapt is designed to do). So you may want to look at your other settings. The max adapt shouldn't be a factor in a well-designed system after initial startup.

[SlavaE]

I run a script to remove numbers that were called over 13 times and every time status was 'NA'. Well I don't actually remove them, but mark them as disconnected status, because that's what 90% of them are.
13-15 runs seem to be very accurate in my experience to determine a number being disconnected, and it does help with wait times a lot.

[williamconley]

Newer version of Vicidial seems to identify DC (actually "ADC") quite well. And it has a campaign setting to ignore leads which have been called over XX times (admittedly, this is not limited to NA, but honestly if you've called someone 13 times and the result is "B" it's still not good to keep calling!).

[SlavaE]

Thx william. Can't wait to try that new feature!

[dspaan]

We have also been doing that since a long time. We used the call count setting combined with an SQL trigger to change leads which reach the call count to MAX status. Good to know it's part of vicidial now.

However, i think my feature suggestion is still a good one. I don't think campaigns can be designed around this problem because in the scenario you said William, what would happen is that a fresh bunch of leads is loaded, we get a lot of drops (so those valuable leads can't be called again until after the drop lockout time) and then the drop limit is reached which brings the dialer to a dial ratio of 1:1 which is then again way to slow. In my opinion a predictive algorithm should be able to predict if it's going to hit the drop limit and do something to prevent that from happening. Therefore call count is a factor.

But yeah, i guess an external script works too.