Ultracomms new solution improves agent productivity, reduces administration and ensures Ofcom compliance
Ultracomms, Europe’s first cloud-based contact centre solution provider, today announced the launch of AMD+, a patent-pending cloud-based innovation in answering machine detection (AMD). Ultracomms’ AMD+ is designed to increase contact centre agent productivity, with an average of nine per cent improvement identified in the company’s own research.
AMD+ is also the first AMD technology to reduce the call centre administration required in monitoring abandoned outbound calls, helping to simplify Ofcom compliance and reduce the risk of significant fines for companies breaching acceptable levels of abandoned or silent calls.
The new Ultracomms solution improves contact centre productivity by using advanced algorithms to exclude outbound calls when it recognises that an answering machine is present and unlike traditional AMD technology, it is completely undetectable by agents and consumers.
Customer trials
Trials carried out with live customer contact centres found that customers are typically experiencing:
– 8.8 per cent gain in agent productive time (in terms of talk time and ‘wrap up’)
– 28 per cent reduction in answering machines presented to agents
– System accuracy in excess of 99.99 % (based on a sample set of over one million phone calls)
In addition to increased agent productivity, indications show that the implementation of AMD+ has potential to improve agent morale, since a higher percentage of call recipients are reached first time.
Limitations of traditional AMD solutions
Traditional AMD solutions are based on terminating a phone call only when the system detects that there is no human response after the call has been answered. No matter how efficiently a supplier fine tunes its solution, there is inevitably a delay of a few of seconds at the beginning of every call – including calls answered by humans – while the technology is making its assessment. Once the call is presented to the agent, the delay forces the customer to repeat his or her greeting to the connected agent, decreasing efficiency and the opportunity for a positive outcome on the call. Given the popularity of answer machines, the loss in agent productivity accumulates across the working week.
As these traditional AMD solutions are not even close to 100% accurate, significant monitoring and administration is needed to ensure companies are within the levels of abandoned calls from ‘false positive’ detection deemed acceptable by Ofcom, who can now issue fines of up to £2 million to companies in breach of these rules. As a result, many contact centres rejected previous AMD technologies as counter-productive in terms of the administration required to use them versus the benefits gained.
How AMD+ works
With AMD+, Ultracomms has tackled the problem of answer machine detection with an innovative new approach. Rather than attempting to remove all answerphones with an accepted level of inaccuracy, it only removes calls from being presented to agents when it is 100% confident of the answerphone outcome. In addition, the solution is designed to be undetectable to the agents and customers. The company has developed a unique set of data-mining algorithms, which, in combination with accuracy testing against historical data covering over one million calls, enables AMD+ to automatically identify and prevent calls where an answer machine is detected as being presented to agents. The solution is purely ‘machine-to-machine’, with no manual intervention required.
AMD+ is available now at no additional cost to all Ultracomms cloud customers.
Additional Information
Ultracomms was founded over a decade ago as Europe’s first ever cloud-based contact centre solution provider. Today, the company is positioned as one of the UK’s most innovative contact centre solution providers, with services designed to help clients achieve better customer engagement, real-time responsiveness, cost-optimisation, compliance and visibility of contact centre performance.
