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Stages and Stage Sets

To reduce abandonment rates and increase customer satisfaction, Interaction Dialer's stage-based prediction feature accurately paces and predicts each agent's script transitions with a staging algorithm—so innovative it's backed by a U.S. Patent.

  • Dialer offers a patented method of optimizing dialing predictions, implemented using Stage Sets

  • Staging breaks a call down into stages based on agent transition through script or other user interface

  • Stages are configurable per campaign and are automatically tracked per agent and per campaign

What is a Stage?

A stage categorizes a general task that agents perform while talking to a contact. Each stage is a discrete part of a campaign phone call, such as pitching a product or service, or collecting order information. Stages can be thought of as completing actions performed by agents to process a call. A Stage can be specified for each page of a base or custom script. Consider, for example, a telemarketing campaign designed to sell newspaper subscriptions. Campaign calls could be broken down into four general script pages:

  1. Sales Pitch: On this page, the agent asks the customer to buy the newspaper subscription. Every agent performs this action as the first step of each call. At the end of the Sales Pitch page, the agent transitions to another page, based upon the customer's response to the Sales Pitch.

    This page represents that Call Connected, or default stage, of the call. The first stage of the call is Stage 0 by default. Stage 0 cannot be deleted.

  2. Callback: If the customer requests to be called back at another time, the script moves to the Callback page. Likewise, this would represent the Callback stage of the script. During this stage, the agent logs the date and time when the customer would like to be contacted again, and hangs up.

  3. Failure:If the customer does not wish to subscribe, the script flows into a Failure page, represented by a Failure page in Dialer, so that a wrap-up code can be recorded to explain why the customer was not interested.

    Since wrap-up codes are campaign-specific, the agent might log "doesn't read a newspaper", "subscribes to a different newspaper", or something similar. The agent would then terminate the call. Even if the customer hangs up without giving a reason, the script flows through this page so that the agent can log that.

  4. Wrap-up: If the customer wishes to subscribe, the call transitions to a wrap-up stage, so that the agent can log the customer's address, method of payment, and other details, before hanging up.

    Things to notice:

    The script actually contains 5 pages. However, the Call Waiting page is only displayed when the agent is not connected to a contact. Its sole purpose is to show that the agent is logged in and available, but not speaking to a customer at the moment. Therefore, it is not a stage of the call.

    Three pages represent the end of the script. After the Failure, wrap-up, or Callback pages, the call completes and the agent is returned to the Call Waiting page. Because we know that the call will end during these stages of the call, we call them terminating stages.

    The amount of time that an agent is on a particular page of a script varies for each page. The tasks on those pages simply take different amounts of time to complete. Knowing which stage each agent is in would certainly help Dialer's predictive algorithm accurately predict when a call will end.

Stage Transitions

Stage transitions occur as agents navigate through scripts. Scripts present text for agents to read to the party called, and may prompt the agent to collect information. Scripts always provide visual controls that agents can use to disposition a call, or navigate from screen to screen.

Transitions occur when an agent navigates to a page that belongs to a different stage. The script assigns the appropriate stage number to that segment of the call. Scripts should be designed such that no special action on the agent's part is required to manage stage transitions. Different calls may transition to different stages. For a given call, some stages may not be entered. For example, not everyone will want to subscribe to a newspaper so the Wrap Up stage won't be entered for every call.

Whenever a Stage Set is assigned to a campaign, its script should have the same set of stage numbers.

Benefits of using Stages

Configuring a campaign to use stages offers important advantages:

  • Improved performance from Dialer's predictive algorithm. If Interaction Dialer can use a stage near the end of a call, rather than the entire duration of a call, it can more accurately predict when agents will become available for another call. Stages provide this granularity.
    By making predictions based on only the terminating stages of each script, predictive dialing uses more pertinent information to make predictions resulting in a more productive call center. For this reason, it is important to implement stages for all predictive campaigns.

  • The Agent Overview view, provides agents' real-time stages status so that supervisors can observe the current stage for each agent.