In short: most dead air on predictive dialers comes from slow or wrong answering machine detection. Fix the decision and you fix most of the silence.
What causes dead air?
Dead air is the silence a person hears after answering an outbound call, before anyone speaks. On predictive dialers it comes from four places: AMD that listens too long, AMD that wrongly routes a person down the voicemail path, too few free agents for the calls being answered, and slow answer signalling or one-way audio on the trunk.
What is a ghost call?
A ghost call is an outbound call where someone answers and nobody is there. The dialer dropped it, AMD hung up, or the call reached a queue with no free agent. Each one teaches the person that your number is spam — and they rarely pick up again.
What does dead air cost?
Lost conversations, first of all: people hang up during the silence. Then reputation: carrier analytics weigh short silent calls and complaints, which pushes numbers toward “Spam Likely” labels. Finally compliance: rules such as the US Telemarketing Sales Rule cap abandoned calls, and the UK has similar rules for silent calls. Check what applies to you with your own counsel.
How do you fix it?
Decide faster, so there is less silence to begin with. Stop hanging up on live people, so fewer of them hear a drop or a voicemail message. Drop machines early, so agents are free for the next real answer. Then tune your dial level against your drop rate and check your trunks for slow answer supervision.
Five things to check this week.
- How long is your AMD analysis window today?
- What share of AMD-dropped calls were actually people?
- Is your drop rate inside your compliance limit?
- Are calls waiting in queue with no agent free?
- Do any trunks show slow or false answer supervision?