Situation
As part of delivering its core business of contact center outsourcing, Advanced Call Center Technologies (ACT) uses automated dialers to contact customers. The company was looking to reduce internal operating costs, especially as new call centers were being opened in new locations. The use of predictive dialers increases productivity in call centers, since agents spend more time talking to people, rather than manually dialing numbers, waiting for calls to go through, or hanging up on busy signals and answering machines.

Solution
Using VBVoice, ACT developed Dialocity, a hosted predictive dialer that automatically places outbound calls and transfers them to an agent when a human responds. The product proved so compelling that a separate company, Internet Contact Systems, was spun off to capitalize on its potential.

Standard predictive dialers require agents to be connected to the dialer via a LAN, which binds them to the same geographic locations as the dialer. Dialocity, by comparison, is an Internet enabled predictive dialer service that allows agents to connect to the dialer from any desktop with an Internet connection, offering the flexibility to locate agents in almost any geographical location.

Regardless of the location of the customer service representatives, Dialocity launches all calls from a central hosting facility with extensive voice and data connectivity, located in Atlanta, Georgia. Dialocity users are billed for the usage of the dialer on an hourly basis, plus long distance charges. The hourly service fee is based on the number of hours a company's customer service representatives spend logged on to the system each month.

"We have had previous experience with VBVoice, and were very pleased with its capabilities and performance. Using it to develop Dialocity was only natural", said Ty Ginac, President of Internet Contact Systems. "In addition, we had already made large investments in telephony hardware and needed a tool that was compatible with Aculab's Prosody cards. VBVoice's compatibility with Aculab was an important factor for us."

ACT had chosen Aculab's telephony card for their reliability and extensive functionality, along with their switching speed and ease of integration. "From a technical perspective, the best thing about Aculab is that you can develop any type of application with just one card," commented Jeff Rondeau, Chief Technical Officer at Internet Contact Systems. According to Jeff Rondeau, Aculab also offers superior technical support. "I've always felt that our support contact at Aculab has gone above and beyond his call of duty to help with an array of different research and development projects."

Benefits
Using VBVoice, the organization was able to develop a customer contact solution. "Although it took us over a year to develop the entire predictive dialer system, it only took us a few days to incorporate VBVoice into the application", said Ty Ginac.

While predictive dialers offer attractive productivity benefits, they represent major investments in resources, and are cost prohibitive for smaller organizations. According to Ty Ginac, "Dialocity offers two distinctive advantages over traditional predictive dialers: affordability and accessibility. It eliminates the need to purchase equipment and make up front capital investments, making it affordable for smaller organizations to take advantage of predictive dialing technologies. And since it can be accessed over the Internet, customer service representatives can work from practically anywhere."

Dialocity offers call centers and organizations the flexibility to open new offices in various locations without having to purchase a new dialer. Companies can also easily scale their customer contact operations to quickly handle seasonal demands and other short term needs by purchasing additional seats on the dialer.

Although the service has been introduced only recently, Internet Contact System's list of customers is rapidly growing. "Companies, especially smaller organizations, cannot afford to make large investments in equipment that will not return the desirable ROI. We provide a practical and attractive alternative to the in-house predictive dialer infrastructure," commented Ty.