Part 2: Dialer campaigns

Who should read this article: Administrators, Supervisors

This is part 2 of the How to run a Dialer campaign use case.

Create a new Dialer campaign

To create a new Dialer Campaign, select Outbound > Dialer campaigns from the navigation bar to open the Dialer campaigns interface. This page lists all the campaigns that have been created in your contact center. It displays the status of each campaign and enables you to start, pause, and stop campaigns.

To add a new campaign, click Add new campaign.

The Add campaign page includes the following sections that you configure to set up your campaign:

The following sections step through the basics of adding a new campaign to your contact center. After completing the campaign configuration, click Save at the bottom of the Add campaign page.

General settings

The General settings enable you to tune the campaign to suit your contact center resources.

Campaign name

Give your campaign a unique name that will enable you to quickly identify it or find it using Search in the Dialer campaigns list.

Strategy

Voiso offers different dialing strategies, dependent on your needs: Progressive (Progressive Dialer), Predictive (Predictive Dialer, and AI Powered Predictive).

If you use the Progressive Dialer strategy, you can adjust the Dial level and the number of calls dialed per each available agent (logged in) in the campaign.

The number of calls dialed = the number of active agents x the Dial level. For example, if you have 4 active agents and you set the dial level to 2, the campaign simultaneously makes 8 calls. You can specify fractions for the Dial level, such as 2.5. In that scenario, if you have 4 active agents, the campaign simultaneously makes 10 calls.

This mode also lets you specify how many calls should be initiated per user, if there's a smaller amount of agents currently using the campaign (in "If agents less than" section).

To handle the condition where there is only a small number of active agents, select if agents less than option, specify the limited number of agents, then specify a lower dial level.

If you use the AI-powered Predictive strategy, Voiso uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically choose the optimum Dial level based on your campaign's metrics and on the analysis of campaign calls made in the past.

The AI-powered Predictive analyzes the Abandonment Ratio (the percentage of extra calls made by the campaign when all agents are already in a conversation), the answer ratio, the agent waiting time, the average call duration, and more to automatically tune the optimal dial level. The Predictive strategy (Predictive Dialer) is easier to work with than Progressive (Progressive Dialer), as you won't have to adjust the campaign parameters manually while it is in progress.

Max Dial Time

Use the Max Dial Time parameter to specify how long the system should wait for a contact to answer the call or other response. The default time is 60 seconds; however, to increase dialing efficiency, Voiso recommends that you set it to between 30 and 40 seconds. This setting enables the system to make more calls per minute, thus increasing campaign efficiency. There are no strict limitations for Max Dial Time, but to ensure that a contact has enough time to pick up the call, it shouldn't be lower than 15 seconds.

Max Wait Time

Max Wait Time defines how long you are willing to let a contact wait after they pick up a call for an agent to answer the call in the event that all agents are busy. The default wait time is 5 seconds, which means the call is terminated if an agent does not answer within 5 seconds.

Max Dial Attempts

Use the Max Dial Attempts parameter to specify the number of calls made to an individual contact number if they aren't responding. Set this value according to the goals of your campaign. For example, if the campaign aim is to find new clients by calling through a list as rapidly as possible, set the value to 1 to eliminate the possibility of callbacks. If the campaign aim is to reach as many customers as possible, try setting Max Dial Attempts to 5 or higher.

You must specify redial rules for different incomplete call scenarios for Max Dial Attempts to apply. Max Dial Attempts constrains the total number of times a number may be redialed.

Voice message

To set a voice message that is played to a contact if all the agents are busy, use the menu to select an audio file from your media library. If no media is specified, contacts do not hear anything while waiting to connect to an agent.

Answering Machine Detection

Answering Machine Detection (AMD) is a Voiso technology that analyzes the first 3.5 seconds of every answered call to determine whether the call is answered by a person or an answering machine. Voiso automatically ends calls answered by machine but routes live calls to an agent. This feature means that agents do not waste time on calls that are answered by an answering machine.

Live campaign

The Live campaign feature allows comapaigns to run endlessly by periodically retrieving leads from a CRM, API, or through a Zapier integration.

Contact's local time

Use the Contact's local time feature to specify when each contact in the campaign may be called. Voiso knows the locale of each phone number in the campaign and ensures that contacts are called only during the days and times that you select. This feature ensures that contacts are not called at hours that are inconvenient, such as during the night, at dinner time, and so on.

For example, if you specify 11 am (11:00) to 3 pm (15:00), contacts are called only during those hours for their local time zone, not the time zone of your agents or contact center. If no destinations are available while the campaign is running, the campaign pauses automatically.

Calling list

Voiso supports two methods for bringing contacts into a campaign: by importing a comma-separated values (CSV) file or directly from your CRM.

CSV

Before using this method, collect the phone numbers and other information about the contacts to be called and add them to a file saved in CSV or CSV UTF-8 format. In this format, each line contains two columns of data for a contact. The first column is the contact's phone number, and the second column is the optional contact information for your agents. Additional contact information might include the contact's name, details, and location. Each line is separated by a carriage return line feed. Each column is separated by a comma. For example:

16321450333,Alice Cook alice.cook@mail.com Manchester
11757509511
11734505466,Kevin Cooke kev.cooke@mail.com Liverpool

In a spreadsheet, a CSV looks like this:

To use a CSV for your calling list, from the Method menu, select CSV, then click Import calling list (.csv) to navigate to a CSV file on your computer or network.

CRM

To use contacts from your CRM for your calling list, from the Method menu select the name of your CRM, then enter the information in the fields according to the details of your CRM.

Omitting destinations

After you save your campaign, Voiso determines the list of destinations (countries and regions) from your calling list and adds the Contact sources and countries section to the campaign settings. To omit certain destinations from your contact list, click the name of the campaign from the Dialer campaigns table to open the Edit campaign page. Scroll down to the Contact sources and countries section to view the destination list.

Deselect any countries or regions that should not be called for the campaign. Click Save to modify the campaign settings.

Caller ID sets

You must specify at least one number from which your contacts will be called from in your campaign. Typically a campaign contains multiple Caller IDs, known as Caller ID sets.

To add a Caller ID set, click Add set. A text field is displayed labeled as Set 2. Each subsequent group that you create is number 3, 4, 5, and so on. Include additional sets so that a different selection of caller IDs can be used for redialing (callbacks).

Manually enter numbers in the set field by typing them or pasting a selection of numbers. Caller ID numbers must be separated by a comma or entered separately on different lines.

The numbers in the Caller ID sets are used in rotation for each call. You can run multiple campaigns simultaneously and use either the same or different numbers for each one.

Local CallerID

If your campaign is calling multiple countries or regions, you can call each contact using a Caller ID that matches their country or region. Select Use local Caller ID to select Caller IDs based on the destination of the call. If you add multiple numbers for the same destination, they are used in rotation for local calls. If there are no local numbers for a certain destination, one of the numbers from the list is used randomly.

For example, for a European campaign, if you have multiple numbers for Germany and France, but none for Italy, then the German numbers are cycled through for all calls to Germany, the French numbers as cycled through for all calls to France, and all the numbers are cycled through for calls to Italy.

Voiso recommends that you have at least 1 number for each 1000 to 1500 contacts on your calling list to ensure calls are processed efficiently. For example, for 6000 contacts, you should have 4 to 6 numbers.

Redial Rules

Redial rules enable you to specify what the campaign should do for different scenarios when a call is not completed. The total number of redial attempts (callbacks) is constrained by the Max Dial Attempts setting. You can specify rules for the following scenarios:

To add a redial rule for one of the scenarios, click Add Rule next to the rule type.

For each rule, you can specify multiple redial attempts with different Wait parameters. Wait is the number of seconds, minutes, or hours to wait until a redial attempt should be made for each scenario type. For example, you might want to wait longer if there is no answer than if the line was busy.

When the maximum number of attempts is reached for any individual rule, the system no longer attempts to redial the number. However, if a number is first answered by a machine, then later there was no answer, and finally it was busy, that count as three redial attempts, so the system keeps redialing until either Max Dial Attempts is reached or all the attempts specified by an individual rule are completed.

To avoid multiple calls from the same Caller ID, select Switch Caller ID set next to the rule. If Use local Caller ID is enabled, the new set inherits this rule.

Agents

Before you add agents to a campaign, make sure you create users, teams, and skills.

Voiso provides a lot of flexibility for adding agents to campaigns. You can add them either as part of a team or individually. You can also choose to add all teams or all agents. If you select a team, you can choose to remove agents from the campaign without removing them from the team by expanding the entry for the team and deselecting one or more team members.

To add all teams, select Teams. To add individual teams, select the team name. Click the expand icon to open a team and select or deselect individual agents to add or remove them from the campaign.

To add all agents, select Agents. To add individual agents, select the agent's name. To remove one or more agents from the campaign when all agents are selected, deselect the agent.