Puzzling decline in contact rate for outbound campaign

[saturn12]

This may turn out to be more of a campaign strategy question, but we're really at a loss here and could really use some advice from you smart folks.
We are running an outbound campaign targeting small business owners. Our owner contact percentage has been steadily dwindling from about 15% at the start of our campaign four months ago to 4% now and we can't figure out why. This doesn't seem to be a result of a used-up list because we've manually called back a bunch of customers who said the owner wasn't available and we confirmed that this was really true (I blocked my number and pretended I was calling from a shipping company about a package). To me, this shows we are dialing fewer businesses with owners around, even though our list hasn't changed.

Our campaign details:
- Our list has 100,000 records.
- Nearly every status is being called again by the campaign (accounting for 99% of the leads).
- We are not using AMD.
- We cycle through dozens of different caller ID numbers from different sources.

At this point we would truly appreciate any ideas for explaining the decline in our contact rate or ways of improving it.

Asterisk 1.4.44
Version: 2.8b0.5
SVN Version: 2039
DB Schema Version: 1359
DB Schema Update Date: 2013-10-24 10:51:31

Best regards,
Mike

[williamconley]

1) You're obviously trying very hard, so I won't hit you with my full standard newbie post. BUT: please post your installation method with version (ie: full ISO name and/or link to the instructions used if manual installation). And put the word "Vicidial" next to your "Version 2.8 ..." below.

2) Your contact percentage is dwindling because you have "trained" these people to avoid answering calls from random callerids. Pavlov. (OK, it's an assertion, but I'd be willing to bet a Pepsi on it ....) How can you test this? Try a sample company. Learn something about them. Be a customer who has a REASON to talk to the person in question. Then call as the company (with one of your many generic callerids) and NOT get through. Wait 5 minutes. Call back again (new voice) with your "customer's known callerid" to talk to the same person. If you get through ... call back again AS SOON AS YOU HANG UP with the "generic callerid" from your vicidial system again ... and see if you fail again. Knowing you just got off the phone with your target. Not perfect, but all I got.

Happy Hunting.