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The earliest predictive dialers, primarily located in banks, were extremely primitive standalone systems that were used tor telemarketing or collections. These dialers required contact centers to go through the painstaking process of loading tloppy disks containing the names and contact information for the people they wanted to call. Groups of agents would physically sit next to the dialers in tour-hour shifts.
The initial dialers didn't allow for updates and weren't integrated with any other systems. As a result, sometimes during their four-hour stints at the dialers, telemarketing agents would call customers who already owned the products or services they were trying to sell, or collections agents would contact customers who had already made payments on their debt. Companies quickly realized that agents were wasting a lot of time on unproductive activities, and that customers became agitated when they received these unnecessary phone calls.
At that time, Davox was manufacturing and supplying terminals with telephones. Our clients included a number of financial services companies and, one day, a large bank approached us about the possibility of bringing their predictive dialing systems online. As this has always been a part of our history - helping our customers achieve their specific objectives - this was a challenge we gladly accepted because we felt we could help our customer fill this technological void. In retrospect, we see the impact that this decision made on the contact center, particularly in the sales and collections markets, which makes us proud.
Davox first approached Melita, a company that at the time was making big strides in the development of the predictive dialer, and told them that we wanted to partner to develop a full predictive dialing solution. We provided Melita with product specifications, and they subsequently became the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for our design. .
A few years later, in 1987, Davox bought TBS, the leading dialer company at the time, and together we launched Unison, a new, high-powered predictive dialer. Unison helped ensure that agents...