Is waiting for a call paid time? Counting dialer hours fairly

Yes. On our floors, an agent who is logged in and waiting for the next call is being paid, and the client is being billed.

That answer surprises people who haven't watched a predictive dialer work, so here is what a shift on one looks like, with our own numbers.

A shift is mostly waiting

We measured two of our predictive campaigns. An agent's time goes like this, over and over:

• about 19 seconds ready, waiting for the dialer to connect someone,
• about 12 seconds talking,
• about 6 seconds of wrap-up, logging what happened.

Then it starts again. That's around 1,800 changes of status per agent per day. When we first saw that number we assumed something was broken. It wasn't. That is simply what the job is: a long stream of short connects, most of them a voicemail, a wrong number or a quick no, with the occasional real conversation.

Look at the proportions. Talking is about a third of the cycle. If you pay only for talk time, you're paying for a third of the shift you asked someone to sit through. They'll work it out by the second payslip, and the good ones will leave.

What we count

For an hourly campaign we treat ready, talking and wrap-up as working time. All three are paid to the agent and billed to the client. Breaks, lunch and personal time are not.

It's written into each campaign, status by status, so it isn't a judgment call on payday. A client who wants a different deal, such as paying per appointment instead of per hour, gets a different agreement. Then hours are our cost to manage and this whole question goes away.

"Ready" doesn't mean someone is there

Here's the catch. "Ready" tells you an agent is logged in to the dialer. It doesn't tell you they're at the desk.

We don't take screenshots and we don't log keystrokes. We think both cost more in trust than they return. What we do look at is two plain facts.

The first is idle time. If a computer hasn't been touched for a long stretch while the status says ready, that's worth a question. Maybe the list ran dry. Maybe the person went to make lunch. If it goes on long enough, the system checks them out so the clock doesn't run on an empty chair.

The second is a status that stops changing. With 1,800 changes a day, an hour in a single status stands out. Usually it means the dialer has stopped reporting, not that the agent has stopped working.

When the dialer goes quiet

That second one is worth a closer look, because it's the kind of error nobody sees. The connection drops, the last status the system heard was "ready", and it keeps counting that agent as ready. If they go on break during that stretch, you pay and bill it as work. If they're on calls the whole time, the record says otherwise.

So a stalled link is marked from the moment it stalls, on the live board and later on the timesheet. A manager looks at that stretch and decides. It's a small thing and it's the difference between hours you can defend and hours you hope are right.

Breaks

We don't time breaks with a stopwatch. People take them when they need them, and the day's total shows what was taken. A manager only looks when a day stands out.

Counting every minute tells people you don't trust them, and they hear it.

Two days a year that go wrong

If your agents are in one country and your client is in another, be careful with the two nights a year when clocks change. One working day is 23 hours long and one is 25. We had a version of our own code that assumed every day has 24, and it put hours on the wrong date. Nobody notices until someone's Sunday overtime shows up as a short Monday.

What we use

Each campaign in MyVA has its own statuses, each marked paid or unpaid (time tracking). The status is read from the dialer as it changes. Days that look wrong are flagged, and a manager accepts, excuses, adjusts or rejects them, with the reason kept (performance).

One caution: what counts as paid time is also a legal question, and the answer depends on the country and on whether someone is an employee or a contractor. This is how we run it. Check your own rules.