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Answering machines are still very popular items for households that have landlines. But what sales managers have come to realize is that these particular household staples are landmines to sales operations, costing money on several fronts. This is why many have started looking for answering machine detection systems in predictive dialers, and those that haven't started should.

When a predictive dialer is used, it can, in turn, pass what it believes to be a contact to a live agent. When that contact is actually an answering machine, not only are the costs involved in running the dialer lost, but so too are the costs associated with the agent actually handling that particular call. That kind of double-dip on the loss side of things doesn't help any business, so bringing in an AMD (News - Alert)--Answering Machine Detection--system can help prevent these losses.

An AMD system looks to stem the losses involved by primarily keeping agents talking to real people as much as possible. While no system is ever one hundred percent accurate, allowing the dialer program to make contact with an answering machine is much less expensive overall--not only in terms of costs related but also in terms of lost opportunity by having an agent talk to an answering machine when a pre-recorded message would do the job instead.

Typically, even an older AMD system could detect an answering machine message by listening for audio artifacts, like clicks and pauses in a tape sample, but with newer answering machines that don't use tape recording but rather use digital recording, different methods were required, and these were brought in with newer, more advanced AMD systems. However, some AMD systems posed a risk of losing the caller, simply by taking too long to process and make the distinction between an answering machine and a human.

Improvements are in the works that will narrow the gap further, and in turn, reduce the amount of time live agents spend talking to machines, letting the machines handle that function instead and putting the best chance to make a sale or resolve an issue on the live agents. Adhering to a principle of the best tool for the best job generally produces the best bottom line results, so keeping the answering machine detection rates as high as possible is a good step toward doing just that.