To those of you who've never heard of one of these, it's a system that automatically calls people and then connects the call to a call centre agent.
If you think every call you make may not be a live person, but also might be an answerphone, engaged or a bad-number. The IT world came up with the technology that could detect the call outcome and only pass through “live” people.
A “predictive” dialler also understands that making these calls and filtering out non-live contacts is a time-consuming task. So rather than wait for an agent in the call centre to become available and waiting for a call, it tries to “predict” when someone will be available for a call.
As with any form of prediction it sometimes gets things wrong and may have a customer on the phone but no-one to handle the call. When this happens the system will “drop” the call. This is also known as a “Silent Call”.
Si
lent calls have been illegal in the UK since March 2006. Calls which cannot be connected through to a live agent must now play a recorded message informing them of who called them and how they can opt-out of further communication. The purpose of the call does not need to be given in this message and it can not be used as a means of telemarketing.