Required Number of Lines for Predictive Dialing

Hi. I have 6 telemarketing agents that work from home. Each of them are required to call 300 businesess per day. I am interested in purchasing the predictive dialer system. I believe that I am required to purchase the Enterprise edition but my question is, how many lines should I purchase? Thank you.

The required number of lines (line to agent ratio) depends on a few factors. We can give some general guidelines here.

The line to agent ratio depends largely on your campaign. If you are calling business, and most calls are answered by live person, you need a low line to agent ratio, such as 1.5. If most calls reach answering machines, you need more lines.

The goal of predictive dialing is to keep all agents busy. For each phone call, you need count the following time:

1). dial the number by the computer (2-3 second)
2). connect the call by the phone company (3-4 rings 15 -20 seconds)
3). detect answering machine vs live human pickup (2-3 seconds)
4). agent talk on the phone
5). disconnect and free the line (2-5 seconds)

So normally you have 30 seconds overhead per call per line. To keep agent busy instead of waiting on the line, you use more lines to dial out. For example, if you have 2 lines for an agent, you can use the seconds line to dial while the agent is talking on one line. Normally, the more line you have, the less time your agents will waste.

However, the problem of using more lines is that you increase the drop rate – when an agent is talking on the phone, the live answer from another line is dropped. One common question is that since Voicent predictive dialing will stop calling new numbers if all agents are busy, why there are still dropped calls? The answer is that some calls may already be started. For example, when one agent is available, and 2 lines are available to dial, the system will dial out on two lines. And if line-1 reaches a live person, the call will be connected to the agent. If line-2 reaches an answering machine, the call is disconnected. And since there is no available agent, the system will not dial another number on line-2. No call is dropped. However, if line-2 also reaches a live person, and since the agent is busy on line-1, the call will be dropped.

You could also use predictive call control to slow down the dialing. By default, the system will dial as soon as possible – whenever a line is free and there is available agent, the system dials the next number. With call control, you can slow down and dialing by setting the overall dialing speed, e.g., 20 calls every 10 minutes on a 8 line system.