Answer Geek: Phone Centers

-- Q U E S T I O N: I work in a call center and would like to know how phone trees work.

— Susannah

A N S W E R: Ah, that scourge of modern life, the call center. Who hasn't known the aggravation of the dinner-interrupting phone call from someone like Susannah — nothing personal, of course, Susannah — urging you to change your long distance phone service, repair the ding in your windshield that you don't actually have, or make a donation to some rather dubious-sounding charitable organization? These days, telemarketing is a big business. According to one telemarketing industry organization study, there are more than 70,000 call centers in this country, where more than 7 million people earn a living.

Of course not every one of those call center employees — the usual job title is "agent" — is engaged full-time in the task of ringing you up to sell you something. A great many handle what are called "inbound calls" in industry jargon — things like calls to airline reservation numbers and customer services lines.

Those who are selling goods and services or soliciting donations are in the "outbound" end of the business. Lately, sophisticated call center management software has also given rise to something called "blended calling," which is a call center where agents get to deal with both incoming and outgoing calls.

In any case, because telemarketing is omnipresent, this seems like a good opportunity to discuss a few call center technology basics, starting with Susannah's question about phone trees. We'll also talk about predictive dialing, the more recent technology that has transformed telemarketing from a simple annoyance into something approaching a true nuisance.

On Creating Phone Trees

For the most part, phone trees are pretty straightforward. You dial into a call center and hear a menu of options — something along the lines of "if you'd like to wait for a really long time for someone who probably can't help you, please press one; if you'd like to wait even longer for someone who not only can't help, but will be rude, press two; if you'd like to wait so long that you'll finally hang up, press three." Once you make your choice, switching equipment sends you off to the proper extension, or, more likely, another menu of options. And so on. And on. And on.

The advantage of phone trees is that it lets software do much of the job of screening and sorting calls, cutting down on the amount of human intervention required. The reason? Compared to people, software is cheap: you don't have to train it, it doesn't need to take a lunch break, it won't go on strike over inadequate health-care benefits, and it never asks for a raise.

Predictive Dialing Ups the Volume

More insidious is predictive dialing. Sometime in the 1980s, most call centers switched over to automated dialing, which involved letting some combination of hardware and software take over the task of pulling names out of a database and doing the actual dialing for an agent. The result: more calls per hour. Predictive dialing is the next great leap forward in call center, and it has meant many, many more calls per hour.

How many more? Just as an example, Call Center magazine (yes, there is such a publication) reports that one financial services company was able to increase its call volume by 600 percent thanks to predictive dialing. That company has 120 workstations for agents and handles an astonishing total of more than 400,000 outgoing calls per month. How's that for progress?

The components of a predictive dialing system include a database of names held in a network server that is connected to the work stations where calling agents handle calls. The server connects to a dialing engine, which is a piece of software tied to a link to the public phone system.

The dialing engine actually dials (or, more properly, inputs) telephone numbers. It also does a couple of other things.

First, it monitors a pretty complex set of factors, including the number of agents, the number of available phone lines, the results of each call (the percentage that reaches a live person versus the percent that reaches an answering machine or a busy signal, for example), the average length of time of a call, and more.

All that information is run through algorithms that let the dialer decide how quickly to dial new numbers. The goal is to cut the length of time between calls for each agent down as close to zero as possible. Predictive dialing engines also use software that analyzes the sound at the other end of the line to try and figure out what whether a live person has picked up the phone, or an answering machine.

Why There’s No One There

Suppose the dialer has called your number. If the phone rings for a set amount of time and no one answers — about 12 seconds is pretty typical — the dialer will terminate the call. If the line is answered within 12 seconds, the sound analysis software checks to see if it's you or your answering machine. If the software decides that it's reached a real person, the call is kicked over to an agent. At the same time, your record — the information that the database has about you — pops up on the agent's screen.

At least, that is what is supposed to happen. But in order to squeeze in as many calls per hour per agent as possible, the rate of numbers dialed usually exceeds the number of available agents. The result is something the telemarketing industry likes to refer to as an "abandoned call."

Odds are that the call you get at dinner time where you pick up the line and there is no one on the other end is an abandoned call. To the telemarketing industry, that is just part of the doing business. Most of the rest of us consider that to be something between a nuisance and an outrage. (For that matter, most of us consider having our dinner interrupted by someone with a great new credit card offer or a chance to buy into a time share condo is pretty close to an outrage, too.)

The Direct Marketing Association, the telemarketing industry's trade and lobbying organization, urges its member to keep the abandoned calls below 5 percent of the total number dialed. Is that a reasonable goal?

Let's use numbers provided by Call Center magazine again. The publication recently reported that with predictive dialing you can make "a large number of calls in a short amount of time — often as many as 100 calls in a 90-minute period."

Let's suppose we have a call center staged with 100 agents, a nice average size. At 100 calls every 90 minutes, that's about 530 numbers dialed per agent in an eight-hour day, or 53,000 called for all 100 agents. Five percent of that number works out to some 2,650 abandoned calls per work shift, for a single call center.

Call me a stickler, but that seems like a pretty big number, especially when you consider the thousands of call centers madly dialing phone number each and every day.

Todd Campbell is a writer and Internet consultant living in Seattle. The Answer Geek appears weekly, usually on Thursdays.