Almost every telephony and dialler system offers some flavour of Answer Machine Detection. In the call centre world, a properly working AMD system can seem like gold dust – especially if yours is less than stellar!
In a world packed with mobile phone subscribers and diminishing land line usage – call centres have to handle lots of answering machines on a daily basis.
If only there was a magic bullet that could solve all these issues…
So how does answer machine detection work?
The first thing to understand about answer machine detection, is that there’s no system in the world that’s 100% effective. Sure, many companies get incredibly close – including our boffins at Blue Telecoms. Even so, you’ll never find 100% of them.
With this in mind, let’s take an average answer machine message and discover how AMD works in action.
“Hi, you’ve reached the home of Lucy and James. We are out for the moment, so please leave a message after the beep”.
After this short message, the answering machine will then wait.
Answer machine detection works by attempting to find telephone numbers that are answered with a lengthy message, followed by silence. Most human beings, tend to answer the phone with a short “Hello” or occasionally the number eg: “Hello 456789”.
The AMD algorithm tries to detect answerphone messages that match these longer parameters, assigning them the status of Answer Phone. This is great; however, there are many things that throw this algorithm off course:
– Country specific systems (USA AMD won’t play well in the UK and vice versa).
– Different mobile/landline networks deal with answerphones in different ways.
– Call quality can have an impact too.
– Some answerphones have quite short greetings.
Detection time
The next problem for AMD, is that the algorithm has to listen to the customers greeting before deciding what to do. This means that when a customer answers, the agent will miss the first few seconds of the call.
Thankfully, AMD systems like the one we offer at Blue Telecoms have minimised this wait to a second or two; however, not all AMD systems are as good as this.
If your detection system is taking too long to detect answer phones, bring this up with your tech support team!
What are the alternatives
– Try an alternative AMD system.
If you’re not getting great results with your current dialler, it’s always worth trialling another product for a short period. At Blue Telecoms, we offer free trials for anyone who’s suffering from dialler woes!
– Don’t use AMD
If you really want to make 100% use of your data, it’s worth switching AMD off to see what mileage your agents get. This is even more important when you’re paying per individual lead – such as internet marketing and hot key leads.
It’s also possible to try and gauge when your target audience will be home to answer the phone. This minimises the amount of answer machines your agents will have to deal with.
Whatever you decide, give our tech team a call on 0333 444 555 8 – even if you’re not a current client!