Amcat praises customer’s decision to abandon AMD (Answer
Machine Detect)
Excell Contact Centres highlights the benefits of better customer
service management and 100% compliance Amcat, a global leader in customer
care & interaction solutions, is behind steps taken by existing outsource
customer, Excell Contact Centres to turn off AMD (Answer Machine Detect)
functionality on ALL its outbound campaigns. Based in Irvine, Scotland, Excell
has reported no loss in productivity (an argument the industry has typically
used against rejecting the use of AMD), and also reports how it has improved
customer service and gives 100% guarantee of eradicating silent calls.
Excell Contact Centres’ General Manager of IT & Telecoms, Charles Vincent
said, “I admit that initially we had doubts when Amcat suggested we turn off
AMD as we thought it would have a detrimental effect on the volume of
successful contacts made. However, this has not been the case, as it’s had a
positive effect on performance and it also means that the customer will never
experience the annoyance of a silent call due to AMD false positives.”
He explains, “The average consumer is becoming more savvy when it comes
to recognising the delay that sometimes occurs before speaking to a live
person and associating it with a sales call. At this stage, when the customer
puts the phone down, it is frustrating and demoralising for contact centre staff
as they have lost a potential sale before the conversation has even begun.
Not only that, when the person being called has to wait to be spoken to, the
agent often needs to work harder to compensate for a call that starts off on
the wrong foot. We have found that it’s simply counter-productive to focus
simply on the volume of calls being made, and although it’s fair to say that
numbers of connected calls per hour has declined without AMD, the success
of those calls is proportionately much higher.”
Amcat’s Managing Director Phil Hagen commented, “We fully support Excell’s
actions and are working with other customers to ensure that compliance and
customer service is high on their agendas. Since Ofcom brought out its
regulations last year it was clear that the minimum drop rate was 3%, our
recommendation has been NOT to use AMD and to reap the additional
benefits this creates in other areas such as improved conversion rates and
long-term customer loyalty. Abandoning AMD also puts compliance beyond
question because there will be no silent call breaches. We expect other major
outbound customers to follow Excell’s lead over the next few months.”
Amcat has produced a white paper on ‘Building a compliant organisation’ that
can be downloaded from their website
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