Most dialer horror stories are not “the AI was too smart.” They are feedback loops.
The death spiral
- Abandon or AHT spikes → supervisors push agents harder.
- Pressure & recovery (PAR) systems soft-reserve agents so they can breathe.
- Effective capacity drops.
- A naïve predictive engine sees fewer free agents and raises dial ratio to “keep dials up.”
- More live answers miss agents → abandon worsens → more recovery → capacity falls again.
Left alone, the algorithm accelerates the burnout it was meant to offset.
The rule that must never break
Capacity loss caused by recovery must never authorize a dial-ratio increase.
Ratio increases should require healthy or improving abandon telemetry — not a thinner ready pool. VoxLink’s floor-capacity signals explicitly detect circular pressure feedback (recovery↑ + capacity↓ + ratio↑) and block it.
What good looks like on a live wallboard
- Recovery seats visible, not hidden as “Ready.”
- Dial ratio flat or falling while recovery is elevated.
- Abandon cooling before any aggressive step-up.
- Inbound reserve protected so ASA does not become the next casualty.
Why this belongs in your vendor RFP
Ask vendors to explain what happens to dial ratio when 20% of the floor enters recovery after a rough hour. If the answer is “the model will compensate with more lines,” you have found the burnout engine. If the answer is “ratio increases are gated on abandon health and anti-feedback checks,” you have found an operations partner.
That distinction is one of the clearest technical advantages modern platforms can offer — and one of the rare ones that shows up in agent attrition numbers within a month.