Answering Machine Detection: How Speed and Accuracy Boost Contact Rates for Call Centers

As an outbound call center manager, you rely on your team of sales and lead gen agents getting into a rhythm. Your predictive dialer is set up to keep your team in a steady flow of conversations.

But your agents keep getting voicemails. Now, your agents’ efficiency and morale are dropping fast. Sound familiar?

At many outbound call centers, this scenario is an all too common experience for agents and managers—and one that repeats itself as part of a debilitating cycle of wasted payroll, one of the biggest costs for a call center.

When your company is making hundreds or thousands of calls day in and day out, every second counts. The additional disposition time that follows a call means time lost to answering machines and increased costs, all while your agents deal with the frustration of fruitless calls. If your agents are using a preview mode to dial, you can add in lost dialing time.

The cost of this lost time adds up quickly. Let’s say you have 10 agents, and each agent makes 100 calls per day.* With a disposition time of 10 seconds per call and 30% of calls reaching voicemail, if your agents make $15 per hour, you’re wasting $3,125 per year on unnecessary voicemail handling. *Assuming 250 workdays per year.

Diego C., Call Center Operations Manager at Digital Market Media, shared his experience with reduced disposition time after implementing Convoso’s AMD technology: “We had a drop in the wait time from around 1.5 minutes to between 15 to 20 seconds. That's a big impact for us. It means our agents have more people to talk to and better opportunities for them to make that sale.”

Whether your call center is currently using answering machine detection (AMD) or not, the key to regaining agent efficiency and driving more revenue is finding a dialer with AMD technology that provides both accuracy and speed.

Answering Machine Detection automates the lead filtering process, ensuring agents spend their time on the most fruitful conversations, increasing contact rates and creating a more conversion-friendly environment.

The technology works alongside call center auto-dialer software to determine when a voicemail is reached and take appropriate action, whether that means leaving a customized message or adding it to your workflow for redialing.

By filtering out these calls, voicemail detection tools can greatly increase the number of live conversations your agents have. When contact rates go up, so do your conversion opportunities. Good AMD does wonders for your ROI.

Here’s an example to illustrate how AMD impacts ROI: If 10 agents make 100 calls per day at a 20% contact rate, they make 20 contacts each day each. If you have a 10% conversion rate at $100 per conversion, that's $500,000 annually. If high-quality AMD increases your contact rate by just 10%, you’d bring in an extra $250,000 per year.

This 10% increase in contact rates is a conservative example. With Convoso, Medigap Life saw contact rates increase up to 80% with 40% fewer voicemails. Senior Healthcare Advisors also saw a tremendous transformation. Before using Convoso’s AMD, agents had to disposition as many as 100,000 voicemails every day.

After implementing our voicemail detection, contact rates doubled and agents reached 100 times fewer voicemails. Ariel Ayalon, Operational Manager at Senior Healthcare Advisors told us, “One thing above all else is your answering machine detection is superior...All my agents are now actually connecting to people.”

While AMD’s ability to increase contact rates has enormous potential to increase revenue, it's equally as important in terms of agent morale.

“When we introduced the AMD feature, you could hear it internally. The representatives were visibly much happier. They were sharper, and they were much more engaged, upbeat, and in the zone. Coupled with the right amount of data and a dialing system doing things properly, AMD creates a world of efficiency,” says David Zamani, Managing Partner at Get Health-e.

Voicemail detection tools filter out calls routed to an answering machine by picking up on the most common cues found in voicemail recordings. For example, they might detect the kind of background noise that’s usually present in voicemail messages. Or, they might identify common phrases that lead those messages, like “Hello, I’m unavailable to take your call right now…”

Meanwhile, AMD tools are also able to classify other types of call responses, including faxes, SIT tones or disconnections, carrier recordings, and, of course, live customers.

The best answering machine detection solutions can be customized to detect the presence of a voicemail message, or classify the call and take action, down to the millisecond. That quick determination means better efficiency for your leads and your agents.

Why is speed a crucial factor to consider when choosing an AMD solution for your own call center?  Because every second—or even millisecond—saved adds up to cumulative savings and increased productivity for your team.

It’s not just the speed of voicemail detection technology that matters, of course. Your call center also needs to deploy a solution that’s as accurate as possible.

Answering machine detection accuracy rates vary across the market, and the truth is that there is no AMD technology that will be able to deliver 100% accurate voicemail detection. Even the very best AMD tools will lead to false positives and false negatives.

A false negative occurs when the system detects a human on the line that is actually a voicemail. False negatives contribute to wasted agent time as they’re forced to code for an answering machine before moving to their next call. Repeated false negatives can be a huge drag on agent morale and productivity.

On the other hand, false positives occur when the AMD system determines that there’s a voicemail on the line when a person has answered and disconnects the call. That potentially results in a lost lead.

Contact centers may want to prioritize either false negatives or false positives based on the lead type. The ability to customize this feature on a sliding scale can be critical for the success of dialing campaigns.

For high-intent or expensive leads, it may be worth allowing more false negatives to occur to ensure as many leads reach an agent as possible. The strategy here is to minimize the risk of losing valuable data.

Alternatively, it may be worth prioritizing false positives for lower-value leads. Regardless, a great answering machine detection solution will help you minimize both, even if you want to prioritize one over the other.

Both lost time and lost leads hurt a company’s bottom line in a big way. But AMD accuracy is only a part of the solution to improving contact rates.

Look for a dialer that approaches the issue holistically – a solution that goes beyond simply catching voicemails. Better contact rates are possible when you also have the tools and strategy to effectively manage leads, and the reporting insights to understand lead and agent performance with real-time data analytics.

Some call center managers and agents are skeptical of the value of their AMD technology because they think they’re losing good leads due to false positives. But with an accurate and flexible system and the right lead management capabilities, most false positives can still be turned into future opportunities.

Sometimes it’s not the quality of your leads that impact contact rates, but the dialing strategy. Dialing and dialing and dialing is not an effective strategy for converting leads. Review how you’re recycling your leads and how your dialer is set up.

In a webinar on next-generation lead gen call centers, Convoso CEO Nima Hakimi said, "You need to look at the data. If you’re continuously getting a voicemail, stop calling that lead. Your system should have the ability to automatically make adjustments, like moving the lead to another list if it hits a voicemail more than X number of times. Without this, you're just going to burn the agent out because they hate getting voicemails. It kills their productivity and their momentum."

Use your dialer's workflow automation to set up a cadence that follows up and redials leads that originally went to voicemail. A strong contact center platform should provide you with options to try again in 30 days, then perhaps again in 60 days.

You can have the best available answering machine detection system, but if you're not managing your leads efficiently or analyzing your data, the AMD won't improve ROI. To make your leads more efficient, look at your reporting to evaluate what percentage of those leads pick up the phone.

Ask yourself, how many of them were transferred? Did you get revenue from those leads? Do you have a contact center platform that can make that data readily available?

It's real-time reporting you need to track. That way, you can see on an hourly basis which agents are producing and how much it costs to convert those leads. How are you measuring the conversion rate of these leads? What systems and reporting do you have in place? These are questions you need to ask to guide strategic decision making.

Leaving voicemail messages can still be an effective method for getting callbacks. To do this, you want to use smart voicemail drops to deliver a personalized customer experience in an automated workflow cadence so that agents don’t have to leave messages.

Nima Hakimi describes the best approach to smart voicemail drops: "You want to leave personalized messages. You don’t want to leave the same message each time or even leave a message on every single attempt."

Instead, set up messages that vary over time, perhaps one message at first voicemail, then a different one on the fourth voicemail encounter, and so on.

Convoso's advanced answering machine detection, which was carefully engineered after analyzing billions of calls, delivers up to 97% accuracy.

Jesse Daniels of One Health Direct, an enterprise-scale outbound call center, said that, before working with Convoso’s dialer software, “Our agents were spending about 70% of their day coding for answering machines.”

Not only was this an extremely unproductive use of payroll, but it was also leading to widespread discouragement among the organization’s commission-driven staff. Looking for an alternative to their existing software, Daniels and his executive team trialed two other leading dialers, but the problems didn’t end there.

After learning about Convoso, One Health Direct decided to run a side-by-side trial with their current dialer. The result? An astonishing 70% increase in answering machine detection.

Showing just how big of an impact that fast and accurate AMD technology can have, within a month of switching to Convoso, the company had increased sales by 30% and doubled their commissions—the kinds of results that don’t just bolster the bottom line but help build morale and lower turnover.

Ultimately, Convoso’s gold-standard answering machine detection is just one piece of the outbound puzzle. Learn how our omnichannel contact center software includes a full suite of tools and solutions to equip your operation with what you need to increase contact rates, support compliance, and deliver a strong ROI.

Ready to see the results for yourself? Test out our advanced answering machine detection and the complete Convoso platform by scheduling a demo today. Request a demo.