Is The Dialer Doomed? The Short Duration Call Panic of 2009
April 23, 2009
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Telecommunications carriers make their move against the telemarketing industry’s auto-dialers.
You may have noticed that you aren’t receiving as many unwanted calls during the dinner hour lately. It has nothing to do with a sudden sense of morality by telemarketers or even the National Do Not Call List. This time around, it is a simple matter of economics.
Most telemarketing companies use specialized high volume outbound dialing equipment (auto-dialers or predictive-dialers) which make a flood of outbound call attempts in order to connect just a few through to an agent. Some centers dial 10 or more calls before getting a customer on the line. But what happens to all those calls which never make it to an agent in the Call Center? They are terminated after just a few seconds or, in many cases, the call is disconnected before it is ever connected.
That’s a great deal for the telemarketer. Make thousands of free or nearly free calls in order to keep your agents busy. Busy agents presumably result in more sales. But the telecom carrier is left holding the bag.
Verizon recently noticed an “unprecedented” increase in calls from auto-dialers which have led to network congestion and call blockage. What’s a carrier to do? Well, they could expand their network at great expense. But they aren’t likely to do that for calls which are lasting 6 seconds or less. Rather than build, Verizon has drawn a line in the sand that it doesn’t want customers who make an unreasonably large number of short duration calls. Customers who fall into Verizon’s danger zone, risk being suspended.
Verizon isn’t alone in the war against short duration calls. In the past few months, AT&T, Qwest Communications, Global Crossing, and others have all targeted the unwanted side effects of the auto-dialer: in some cases refusing to accept dialer traffic and in others attempting to force the worst offenders off the network through surcharges and other penalties.
Surcharges can be levied at a rate of a penny or two per call attempt. A penny may not seem like much, but to call centers accustomed to getting free call attempts (when hanging up before an answering machine) or a fraction of a penny on a 6 second or less call, a penny is a huge amount of money: an effective 10 fold rate increase for some customers. Many call centers will face the very real threat of going out of business.
But if so many carriers all push the auto-dialer traffic off of their networks, doesn’t that make a great opportunity for someone? It might. A few smaller carriers and resellers, like AireSpring, are offering products without short duration surcharges, but they aren’t likely to get rich doing so.
Unless the FCC steps in to prevent the move by carriers against short duration call penalties, the pressure will be on the Call Center industry to change. Rather than using auto-dialers which hang up as soon as they detect an answering machine, or even before one can answer, they will have to adopt more customer and carrier friendly dialing practices.
Simply slowing down the number of call attempts per live agent and keeping the line open to leave a voice mail message might be enough to prevent falling onto carrier hit lists. It is also likely to cut into profits and make agents less productive.
Like so many other industries, telecom is in a time of rapid change, fueled in part by the economy and in part by changing technology. This time around, it is forcing another industry into a state of panic and change as well. Smart telemarketers will find ways to adapt. And those who fail to check their phone bills, or who are unable to change, will find themselves on the unproductive side of a dead phone line.
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5 Responses to “Is The Dialer Doomed? The Short Duration Call Panic of 2009”
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This issue really should be a point of concern to Call Centers everywhere. Check your phone bills for surcharges. Ask whether the carrier has imposed short duration call language or is attempting to remove high volume call traffic from the network. Ask for options, and make a backup plan.
There are already reports of customers being suddenly suspended by their carrier without notice due to this issue. It can take months to get big long distance circuits set up -just waiting for a big bill or disconnection is not an option!
Avoid the panic and do a little checking into your Long Distance service right away if you make lots of calls which don’t complete or last only a few seconds.
We have watched dialer calls on our network 1000 fold in the last year. Every day our techs identify originating ANI’s from dialers and block them in our network.
It is a constant battle as the Dialer company just gets new ANI’s from companies like Level 3 and XO. But we catch them daily and block the calls.
The latest scam is this:
A guy with a dialer gets a contract from a CLEC to pass them their local toll free dialed calls.
The large CLEC will pay a fee per minute to another I/CLEC to complete their TF calls.
Example: Customer has a PRI circuit and dials 1-800-Flowers - the PRI owner passes to One Comm. the 1-800 Flowers call and they complete it.
One Comm pays the owner of the PRI circuit .0025 per minute for the call.
One Comm gets to bill the Resporg owner of 1-800 Flowers a fee for the calls.
A thief gets a smart idea to buy a cheap old dialer and start sequentially calling every toll free number under the sun. Then One Comm pays them .0025 per minute.
Trust me it is happening & we block hundreds of originating ANI’s as fraudulent dialer calls to TF numbers.
I’m recently seeing other ‘creative’ constructions like the one Peter mentioned above. This involves a deal between a creative ILEC and the company sending dialer traffic, where the ILEC shares revenues generated by the CNAM lookups with the dialer company where the traffic is originating from…
Afraid this is only going to get worse and worse.
I work for Transcend Products. We invented a new patent-pending dialer with an entirely new paradigm and have seen call center productivity rates increase between 20 and 60 percent. Because agents are talking to more people via natural conversations, short call durations have been reduced dramatically. Our product helps alleviate this issue on both sides!
http://www.productivedialing.com.
Ask for Karl
Already seeing creative solutions for dialer trouble to compensate for extra cost
http://hubpages.com/hub/Wholesale-VoiP–CNAM-dip