Special Considerations for Outbound Call Trees

If necessary, review the section on Inbound vs. Outbound Call Trees.

There is no distinguishing feature that marks a Call Tree as designed for inbound or outbound use. Any Call Tree can be used for either inbound or outbound dialing. The simulator can be used to test either type of Call Tree. Many users have found that the Call Ending VBScript Macro is extremely useful for outbound Call Trees as it allows a convenient way to update call completion status.

A few topics must be considered when designing Call Trees for outbound dialing purposes:

Voice Modems Do Not Provide Answer Detection

Most voice modems (and some telephony cards) can't tell when a dialed party has actually answered the line. There are two ways to address this shortcoming:

1. Start the Call Tree with a repeating prompt that says "Please press 1 to continue, Please press 1 to continue, Please press 1 to continue...". Presumably a user would press "1" when dialed and the Call Tree could continue under the assumption a live person was on the call.
2. Use Active Call Center's software-based answer detection features. Enabling answer detection will cause Active Call Center to listen for an answer before starting the Call Tree. This can create a wonderful user experience the timing works out correctly. This topic is discussed further in the section on Using Software Based Answer Detection.

Answering Machines

Answering machines pose a particularly unique problem. In many cases they sound virtually identical to a human answering the phone, but they can provide no feedback. Even worse, Active Call Center cannot detect when an answering machine will start recording a message, so timing interaction with an answering machine is virtually impossible.

The only technique we know to detect answering machines is patented by another manufacturer. Therefore, Active Call Center users must resort to other methods. A full discussion addressing this topic appears in the Answering Machines section.

No Answers and Busy Signals

A number of outbound dialing applications will require re-trying calls that were not answered or numbers that were busy. Determining which calls were not successfully completed with any degree of accuracy requires analysis of the Call History. In a later section, we discuss how to identify no answers and busy signals.