“RAZOR PREDICTIVE DIALER SOFTWARE’S FIRST HELLO TECHNOLOGY”
Answering machine reduction is used to allow predictive dialer agents to hear the customer say the first “hello”, while greatly reducing the number of answering machines your agents get passed to them.
When you receive a phone call at home and there is nobody there for the first few seconds, it is usually a give away that a telemarketer is calling you. When most people notice the “dead air”, they usually get a little frustrated and know that they are receiving a call from a telemarketer. This makes the first impression your company makes with potential customers a bad impression. This “dead air” is usually caused by the telemarketing company using answering machine detection which samples the first word the customer says to try and decide if it is a real person who answered the phone or an answering machine.
Most phone dialers use answering machine detection, but the Razor predictive dialer system can also offer answering machine reduction. Answering machine reduction can screen out most answering machines by using a method of time pacing. It allows you to hear the customer say the first word “hello” while still screening out most answering machines. This allows the telemarketer to greet the prospect and say “hello” naturally, as if they actually hand-dialed the phone number.
For example, if you are calling Mr. John Brown and you hear the first words the customer speaks, it can tell you quite a bit about the person. If a child picks up the phone you can say something like “Is your Dad home?”. If a middle-aged man answers the phone, then you can assume that it is Mr. Brown and say: “Hello, Mr. Brown, how are you this evening?”. If you don’t hear anything, all you can pretty much say is: “Hello, may I please speak with Mr. Brown?”. Most likely, they will hear the silence if answering machine detection is turned on, and along with the generic greeting, you will be spotted as a telemarketer and greeted accordingly.
Call centers have seen as much as a 25% increase in productivity per lead using a predictive dialer system with first hello detection versus using a predictive dialer system, where you don’t hear your customer say the first hello. Answering machine reduction is a very simple technology that will allow your predictive dialer to stay on the line until right before most answering machines pick up the phone on the 4th ring.