I am currently optimizing our predictive dialer settings. We are seeing a high rate of ‘Agent Request Timeouts’ during our morning shifts. This happens when the dialer finds a live customer but cannot find an available agent within the configured ‘Agent Request Timeout’ period. I have tried increasing the timeout to ten seconds, but this causes a poor customer experience as they are left in silence. Is there a way to prioritize agent assignment for outbound calls over inbound calls during specific campaign windows?
Hey Ste22. I handle the voice quality for our remote agents and I have seen these timeouts cause a lot of ‘Ghost Calls’. You should not just increase the timeout. Instead, you should look at your ‘Agent Utilization’ settings. If your agents are set to handle both inbound and outbound calls, you should reduce their ‘Inbound’ capacity during your critical campaign windows. This ensures that more agents are sitting idle and ready to take the dialer’s requests immediately.
I agree with Che75. From a strategic perspective, you should also consider using ‘Agent Skill’ weights. You can assign a higher weight to the ‘Outbound’ skill for a specific group of agents during your morning shift. This tells the routing engine to prioritize those agents for the dialer, even if there are inbound calls waiting. It is a much more elegant solution than just making the customers wait longer on the line.