VoIP Predictive Dialer and Gateway from Interactive Intelligence

Sep 26,2006. Interactive Intelligence Inc., released Interaction Dialer®, a new VoIP-enabled version of  campaign management software,  designed for contact centers, tele-services firms and collections operations. This new VoIP predictive dialer is based on the SIP standard so it can operate in an all-software, all-VoIP environment to help reduce costs and simplify management. The release includes an all new SIP gateway called Interaction Gateway™ — an appliance connecting legacy telephone trunks (T1s) to VoIP networks. Interaction Gateway works with Interaction Dialer to give high-volume outbound contact centers accurate predictive call analysis capabilities.
 

Yankee Group senior analyst, Ken Landoline:

Interaction Gateway is unique because it provides advanced outbound call analysis — such as distinction between answering machines versus live speakers, and wrong numbers versus network issues — while taking full advantage of the open SIP standard….

….Combined, these enhancements result in more effective dialing campaigns, simplified deployment and configuration, lower cost, better redundancy, and unbeatable flexibility compared to traditional outbound dialing solutions.

According to Interactive Intelligence, the new VoIP predictive dialer system can lower costs by between 10 and 50 percent compared to traditional TDM-based dialers by reducing hardware requirements. The company says Interaction Dialer, VoIP based predictive dialer system, can reduce costs further using Interaction Gateway at strategic locations to ensure it uses the most cost-effective call routing.

About Predictive Dialer:

An automatic telephone dialing system that dials from a list of numbers and turns the call over to an agent when a human responds. It increases productivity in a call center, because the agents can spend their time talking rather than waiting for calls to go through as well as hanging up on busy signals and answering machines. The couple of seconds of pause you often hear when you answer a call from a telemarketer is the time it takes for the system to determine that you are a live person… (from answer.com)

Predictive dialer systems are commonly used by telemarketing organisations involved in B2C (business to consumer) calling as it allows their sales representatives to have much more customer contact time. Predictive dialers may also be used by market survey companies and debt collection services who need to contact and personally speak to a lot of people by telephone. More commonly predictive dialers are now being used as a quick and easy way to automate all sorts of calls which would otherwise be made manually by a call center, such as welcome calls for new customers, customer service call backs, appointment confirmations, or even for the automation of large numbers of ad hoc calls that might need to take place (such as by a taxi company, or parcel delivery service etc.) (from wikipedia.org)

Predictive dialing systems use algorithms to control the ratio of calls to agents. Because a dialer cannot know what proportion of its calls will connect until it has made them, it will alter its dialing rate depending on how many connections it manages to achieve. Occasionally the system will get more live parties on call attempts than there are agents available take those calls. Consequently, the dialer will disconnect or delay distribution of calls that cannot be distributed to an agent. This is known as a silent call or a nuisance call. The called party hears only silence when the predictive dialer does not at least play a recorded message. (from wikipedia.org)

To illustrate, in a typical configuration, ISDN PRI trunks from the public phone network are connected to Interaction Gateway. After that point, the entire configuration is voice over IP. This provides unmatched geographic independence. For example, the Interaction Dialer and Gateway servers can be in the U.S., while agents are in India.
 

Chris Adomaitis, president of network and telecom services for Dialogue Marketing:

As an outsourced provider of CRM services, our clients drive our technology requirements, and a key requirement across the board is to offer highly customizable services at an affordable price…

…Interaction Dialer’s new Gateway option lets us do just that by using a pure soft-switch, thus dramatically reducing costs associated with hardware.

Other enhancements of this VoIP predictive dialer system  include improvements to its patented pacing algorithm, which maintains the optimum balance between low abandon rates and maximum agent utilization; a single "Health View" interface that enables supervisors to monitor and analyze Dialer statistics from campaigns, workflows, and outbound calls.

A single Interaction Dialer system, along with Interaction Gateway’s "rack and stack" architecture, can support up to 1,000 outbound agents — more when deploying multiple systems — while giving multi-site organizations maximum load-balance and fault tolerance capabilities.
 

Availavility:

This new VoIP predictive dialer system will be available immediately, and is offered through the Interactive Intelligence channel.

About Interactive Intelligence

Interactive Intelligence Inc. (Nasdaq: ININ) is a global developer of unified communications software for contact center automation and enterprise IP telephony. The company was founded in 1994 and has more than 2,000 customers worldwide. Recent awards include the 2006 Network World 200, CRM Magazine’s 2006 Rising Star Excellence Award, Network Computing Magazine’s 2006 Well-Connected Award, Software Magazine’s 2005 Top 500 Global Software and Services Companies, Miercom’s 2005 Best Integrated Multimedia IP Contact Center product award, and Frost & Sullivan’s 2005 Excellence in Technology of the Year Award. Interactive Intelligence employs more than 400 people and is headquartered in Indianapolis. Website:http://www.inin.com.
 

Main source: Interactive Intelligence