Proactively calling patrons can be an extremely effective way for companies and organizations to build relationships and generate revenue. And we even know that the vast majority of consumers—as many as 87%—actually want to be contacted proactively, according to a 2013 online study commissioned by NICE CXone and conducted by Harris Interactive.
But there’s always been a hitch with outbound predictive dialing: An awkward silence that precedes the connection—a pause that keeps agents waiting and causes many annoyed customers to simply hang up.
That’s why at NICE CXone, we knew it was time for a brand new technology model that embodies revolutionary—not evolutionary—change. Our Personal Connection dialing solution is a whole new paradigm: It completely eliminates these empty pauses by connecting calls to agents just as the patron is answering. Because call progress analysis (CPA) is running continuously, every call is immediately directed to an agent, rather than waiting to first detect whether or not a human being answers on the other end.
Previous technology created very obvious and annoying pauses during the detection process, forwarding a call only after a live person answered and terminating the call otherwise. Personal Connection still terminates calls when “live” connects are not detected (e.g., calls are instead answered by voice mail)—but only after any connected call has been seamlessly forwarded to, and answered by, an agent.
Personal Connection is proving to be a game-changer. Predictive dialing users report huge drops in customer hang-ups, often by 50 percent or more, along with significant increases in agent productivity. Higher-quality calls—and especially the ability to initiate calls without annoying pauses—also mean that users can better use predictive dialing to build and enhance their relationships with patrons, while achieving their objectives more cost efficiently and with less waste.
