Calltrol Customer Success-Calling Solutions
Predicting The Future of Predictive Dialers - Call Center Magazine
By Lee Hollman.

Of predictive dialing, Mike Pryor, VP of information systems at Calling Solutions, says, “Agents like it because their calls come quickly. Idle time varies with each calling list, but there’s been less of it with all of our campaigns.”

Founded in 1981, Calling Solutions is a leading provider of customized, customer relationship management solutions for Fortune 50 companies. Headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, with over 1600 employees and multiple locations, Calling Solutions' clients include telecommunications, financial, hospitality and technology companies. Calling Solutions makes more than a million outbound calls and receives between 1,500 to 20,000 inbound calls a day.

Since 1987 Calling Solutions has been using Calltrol’s Object Telephony Server (OTS™) to dial and route outbound calls in conjunction with their Nortel Meridian ACD which handles inbound calls. Pryor plans to connect inbound agents to OTS™ soon to take full advantage of it’s call blending capabilities. He estimates that between 10% and 50% of inbound agents at the center will use predictive dialing by next year.

Our inbound operations manager loves the blending feature because he doesn’t have to place agents in specific call groups,” he says. “We can set inbound calls at different skill levels so that agents receive only the calls that they’ve been trained to handle.”

Companies with large call centers such as Calling Solutions often select a Telephony Server type of predictive dialing system. They appreciate the power, scalability and flexibility that these systems offer. If you’re seeking a predictive dialer that can accommodate a high volume of calls and give you complete control over your scripts, databases, reports and other surrounding technologies, a Telephony Server like Calltrol’s OTS™ may offer the right combination of “off the shelf” performance, ease of implementation, cost effectiveness and internal MIS control.

Calltrol offers OTS™ as software only or installs it on an industrial PC with call processing hardware (mostly Dialogic) appropriate for a customer’s needs. OTS™ provides your center with a robust platform for call routing, call blending and predictive dialing. The predictive dialer runs an algorithm that reviews 20 different factors before it places a call and has yielded performance exceeding some of the most well known competitors in the industry year after year. OTS™ also supports advanced contact center telephony functions internally such as agent monitoring, coaching, conversation recording, conference calling, intelligent and skill based call routing. The system supports thousands of ports whether T1, E1, ISDN, Analog or VoIP and dynamically allocates lines for outbound calls, inbound and agent connections.

Calling Solutions evolved from an inbound telemarketing service bureau to a large-scale provider of outbound, inbound and web collaborative services. Key to their success has been consistent and high quality response to clients. They provide customized solutions on an individual basis rather than modifying campaigns to conform to established formats. The flexibility of OTS™ has been instrumental in this success.

Calling Solutions has maintained the following principles for success: Leveraging leading edge technologies - effecting the lowest cost of goods; maintain efficient operations supervised by veteran managers and incentive pay; create robust client response suites with customized programming; provide rapid and accurate turn-around on client requests; offer multilingual services; develop focused agents through initial training and concurrent instruction

Rapid turn around on complex campaign criteria and scripting that cannot even be done with other telephony systems has made Calling Solutions loyal to Calltrol’s OTS™. When it comes to supporting Fortune 50 companies, many of which are in highly regulated industries like Telecommunications and Insurance this is critical. Calling Solutions custom develops all of it’s inbound and outbound user interfaces & scripts in Visual Basic. This eliminates scripting, data access and call handling limitations of other contact center solutions.

Calling Solutions typically records both an agent’s pitch and customer acceptance, does internal quality control and uses off premises independent verifiers. These types of campaigns entail complex coordination of conference calling, conversation recording, and supervisory monitoring, all coordinated with logically branched scripts that can often exceed 100 screens. The unified structure and flexible nature of OTS™ permits Pryor to customize these types of scripts at will and deploy changes to agents in the form of a single, simple, Visual Basic application at the desktop. The company plans to switch development environments in the future so that all campaign scripts can reside on a web server. In any event, the OTS™ system doesn’t require modification to address campaign specific needs. It is a true server that runs with the Calling Solutions custom client applications.

Calling Solutions supports a large number of outsource client campaigns that are constantly changing. Visual Basic, SQL and OTS™ provide a virtually limitless environment for customization. Client scripts can exceed 80 screens.

For more information on Calling Solution’s Calltrol implementation see:
Predicting The Future of Predictive Dialers - Call Center Magazine, December 1999, By Lee Hollman.