About Predictive Dialers

[DarknessBBB]

Hello!
I've found on wikipedia a very interesting and simple article talking about predictive dialers and how they works. It's very good for newbyes like me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_dialers

I was thinking, how Vicidial can be classified? Soft Dialer?
How large has to be the critical mass of agents to make dropped calls less than a fraction of one percent like they say ?
To adjust the autodial ratio, does it use call connection rates (both current and average for recent past days by hour of the day), average agent connection time, geographic location dialed ?

Will, in future, be a "Smart predictive dialer" ?
Thank you very much!!

[mflorell]

VICIDIAL is pretty much a software dialer since all of it's functions can be completed without requiring any specialized hardware.

As for the drop rate, that is dependant on all sorts of factors:
- agent wait-time
- lead quality
- lines-agent ratio
- agent pitch time
- number of agents

As you can see the number of agents is only one factor, although the more agents you have the better the algorithm works. At one client they were dialing out on a single campaign with 120 agents and had a drop rate of 0.1% with an average time-between-calls of 8 seconds.

VICIDIAL uses all sorts of calculations when it figures out how many lines to dial out, I would suggest reading about it in the PREDICTIVE.txt doc in the docs directory, or looking directly at the AST_VDadapt.pl source code in the bin directory.

As for becoming a SMART predictive dialer, that takes quite a lot of analysis of leads and is beyond the scope of the project for now, but may become an option at some point if we get a client that has the money to let us develop it.