What is predictive pairing in outbound sales?

Where it comes from

Contact centers have been answering "who takes this one?" for decades, and each answer used a little more information.

• The next free agent. Automatic call distributors sent each call to the agent who had been idle longest. Round robin does the same for lead lists. Simple and fair, but blind to who is good at what.
• Skills routing. Leads went to a group with the right skill: a licence, a language, a product, a region. That is still the right first cut, and it stays in place under predictive pairing.
• Predictive pairing in the enterprise. Afiniti made this category, building predictive pairing for very large contact centers, mostly inbound, and measuring it against control groups. How BestPair differs.
• Predictive pairing on outbound floors. The team behind BestPair has applied it to outbound floors, collection campaigns among them, since 2011.

Outbound sales floors dial out, work lead lists and are measured in sales. That makes them a natural place for it: every lead is a decision about who calls, made before the call.

Why it works

• Every agent has a strong suit. Each agent closes better on some kinds of leads than others. One leaderboard hides that; splitting results by type of lead shows it. Why agents close differently.
• The pair is what matters. When the sale depends on the agent and the lead together, sorting well beats ranking. Why the best agents should not get every lead.
• Work spread across the floor. Each agent’s volume stays where you set it.
• Checked against a control group. A prediction can be wrong, so the result is checked against a control group of leads routed the usual way over the same weeks. How to prove it.

When it works

• History tied to agents. Calls and sales linked to the agent who worked each lead, by your floor’s own definition of a sale.
• A choice of agent. Agent-owned lists on a preview or manual dialer, segments in the skills-based router on a predictive dialer, a mix on a progressive or power dialer. A purely inbound floor that sends each call to the next free agent leaves nothing to choose.
• Enough agents. Several agents working each kind of lead, with enough history to tell skill from luck.
• Agents who differ. If they close at about the same rate on the same kinds of leads, there is nothing to match. Often nobody knows until the data is read.
• Details on each lead. Whatever your floor records about a lead before the call.

The model is updated about once a month, and weekly in the first couple of weeks. New agents are treated as floor average, with a normal mix of leads, until their own record builds. Matching with high turnover.

Where it pays most

In our experience:

• Low conversion. When most contacts end without a sale, the conversation decides the outcome, and who has it matters most. What contact-to-sale conversion is.
• Calls that need persuading. Cold or aged leads, cross-sell and upgrade calls, products with a decision to think through.
• Many similar leads every day, which give both the choice of agent and the history to learn from.
• Sales that show quickly, so results can be measured quickly.

It pays least on leads that have already decided to buy, because those tend to close with whoever answers.