MaxContact Wins at the 2025 Megabuyte Emerging Stars Awards
We’re proud to announce that MaxContact has been named the Best Performing Company in Customer Relationship Management at the 2025 Megabuyte Emerging Stars Awards!
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A Significant Achievement
This recognition places us among an elite group of 50 Emerging Stars, selected from an initial pool of over 6,000 companies. With only 825 meeting the strict eligibility criteria in a challenging economic climate, this award reflects our team’s commitment to innovation and excellence.
“Despite experiencing some softness in sectors like energy and longer sales cycles in recent years, MaxContact has maintained c. 30% revenue growth, ahead of most other vendors in the contact centre software market. A key proponent of this is its conversational AI product strategy, with AI-enabled products featuring in 80%+ of deals.”
Moving Forward
This award validates our strategic direction and focus on delivering innovative solutions that address real customer needs. Our investment in conversational AI technology, Spokn AI, continues to drive our success and differentiate us in the market.
We remain committed to supporting our 100+ UK customers across BPO, communications, financial services, utilities, and retail sectors with solutions that enhance their customer engagement capabilities.
We’d like to thank our dedicated team, partners and valued customers for their ongoing support and confidence in MaxContact.
About Megabuyte
Megabuyte supports UK scale-up and mid-market software & ICT Services companies to develop robust growth strategies, understand their competitive landscape and customer sentiment, benchmark their financial performance and valuation, and identify and track M&A targets. They provide proprietary insights and data through their subscription research service, offer packaged consulting services, and give access to their network of some 500 tech sector CEOs through events and their expert network.
About the Emerging Stars Awards
The Emerging Stars awards are part of the Megabuyte100 award series which collectively celebrate the 100 best-performing technology companies in the UK. The awards identify the UK’s best-performing technology scale-ups as defined by Megabuyte’s proprietary Scorecard methodology, complemented by expert qualitative insights from their analysts. Evaluation criteria encompass factors such as size, growth, and margins, highlighting the top 50 best-performing scale-up companies in the UK.
Learn More
For further information about the 2025 Megabuyte Emerging Stars Awards and to see the complete list of winners, click here to access the full Megabuyte report.
Here’s to continued success and innovation throughout 2025!
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Are we at the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning? As far as Covid-19 is concerned, nobody seems entirely sure. The vaccination rollout promises an eventual release from lockdown, but scientists remain cagey about when everyday life might properly resume.
In the meantime, many of your sales and customer service staff are getting used to working from home. They may be there for a while yet, at least until a combination of the vaccine rollout and better summer weather allows for a cautious return to the office.
Even then, not every business will be forcing staff back into work full time. Social distancing rules are likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future, limiting the number of employees in the same space at the same time.
There’s also growing speculation that many companies will never return to pre-Covid work practices, and that some form of flexible working will become standard practice. A recent Call Centre Helper poll showed that just 7% of contact centres planned to return to the office as normal2, and ONS reported a 47% increase in demand for home working amongst call centre staff1. The data’s there to see, hybrid working, where employees spend some of the week in the office and some working from home, will become far more widespread once the pandemic ends.
The hybrid model of work
There are certainly benefits to it. According to research from Slack, most knowledge workers want a hybrid remote-office model in future. Hardly any want to return to the office full time. Those results are mirrored across sectors and industries, inferring that companies who want to attract the best talent may have to offer hybrid working as a benefit.
Even among businesses with large sales and customer service teams, the benefits of hybrid working may outweigh inevitable misgivings. Many businesses believe they can cut post-pandemic costs by reducing office estates and moving to smaller premises that only have to accommodate a proportion of a firm’s total workforce at any one time.
Put it all together, and it means remote working probably isn’t going anywhere, even after Covid. And even businesses that remain determined to return en masse to the office eventually have no real idea of when that time might be.
So, we’re trying to balance all of this, with changing consumer contact habits – increased adoption of new channels and differing contact patterns – as well as a globally reported increase in contact centre demand, with support firm ZenDesk seeing a steady 16 per cent increase in support contact requests above pre-pandemic levels3.
Productivity challenges
So instead of holding on to pre-pandemic processes, businesses might be better asking how they can adapt more effectively to the ‘normal’ of today while also preparing for whatever tomorrow might throw at them.
Or to put it simply, how do you equip your remote staff with the tools they need to work as productively away from the office as they can in it? How do you train and mentor your teams remotely? How do you continue to delight customers and drive sales when most of your team is working from home? When your workforce returns to a socially distanced office, or splits its time between the office and home, how do you maintain a consistent customer experience?
Businesses have been asking similar questions since last March, of course. But many now realise that the sticking-plaster solutions hastily implemented then are no longer enough, especially when it comes to customer contact. Communications platforms need to give employees the tools they need today, while future-proofing businesses for whatever next month, next year or even the next decade might bring.
Is cloud-first the answer?
It’s for that reason that businesses of all kinds are turning to cloud-based solutions. When your contact centre solution lives in the cloud, your agents can access it from anywhere, on any device, onboarding new starters and completing system training remotely is easier. And, with solutions like MaxContact, new features and functionality are consistently introduced as market trends and business needs change.
But there’s more to a future-proof solution than simply the convenience of cloud. It has to be highly reliable, flexible and secure, while giving you the data you need to measure performance and implement change.
MaxContact is cloud-native for that reason. You get the assurances with the combination of a fully equipped contact centre solution that fulfils all these requirements combined with a resilient uptime guarantee of 99.999% so dropouts and downtime won’t affect sales and customer service. Whilst real-time dashboards and custom reporting give managers full transparency over their teams’ efficiency, wherever they happen to be located.
reduction in training, the issue of training a workforce in the contact centre fast and easily remotely has been of major benefit
This valuable data can eventually be used to inform decision making around post-pandemic working models, giving a real insight into the benefits and challenges of remote working models based on your specific circumstances for every campaign and every call centre agent. This data becomes invaluable in a world were presenteeism in some form has been part of most of our everyday lives for the past 12 months.
Security concerns
Working from home has meant that the companies networks – that were once a secure perimeter – have expanded to every employee home and the plethora of devices they use. There’s now an increasing need to deploy communications solutions with network and data centre security baked in. But we go further. Granular permissions mean you can limit the data your home working teams have access to and remove restrictions at the click of a mouse on those days when they are working from the office.
In fact, MaxContact gives you that kind of agility throughout your contact centre operation. You can add and remove users in minutes, and equip new sites in just a couple of days. MaxContact lets you calculate your staffing requirements using statistical analysis so that, wherever your workforce is based, you always have the right staff with the right skills in place.
In other words, powerful contact centre solutions like MaxContact don’t just solve the temporary challenges of remote working. They equip your business for an uncertain future.
Use our powerful cloud platform to create an agile, secure and streamlined contact centre that not only adapts to the unpredictable challenges of the post-pandemic world.
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Staying ahead of the competition is no longer just about having a talented team and a great product. Outbound sales teams can’t rely on instinct alone. Today’s successful sales operations are built on a foundation of data-driven decisions, cutting-edge technology, and continuous improvement.
But what does it really mean to be “data-driven” in outbound sales?
MaxContact’s 2024 KPI Benchmarking Report provides valuable context for the state of outbound sales. With an average of 65.55 daily calls per agent and a mean success rate of 6.74%, it’s clear that volume alone doesn’t guarantee success. The question is: how can you use this type of data to drive meaningful improvements in your team’s performance?
Embrace Advanced Dialling Technology
One of the most impactful ways to make your outbound sales team more data-driven is by implementing advanced dialling technology. Predictive dialling solutions use real-time data to optimise call pacing, ensuring agents spend more time talking to prospects and less time waiting between calls.
Our benchmarking report reveals that top-performing teams handle between 31 and 60 calls per agent per day. By leveraging predictive dialling, you can help your team reach or exceed this benchmark efficiently. MaxContact’s ‘undroppable’ feature and ‘degrade to progressive’ setting use data to balance aggressive outreach with compliance requirements, addressing the industry-wide challenge of maintaining high contact rates while avoiding regulatory penalties.
Implement Intelligent Lead Prioritisation
Not all leads are created equal, and a truly data-driven team recognises this fact. The benchmark report shows that the average first-call close rate is 27.81%, with nearly 30% of teams achieving 20 to 29%. To improve these figures, move beyond simple “first in, first out” approaches to lead management.
Consider implementing custom data fetching and prioritisation tools that allow you to rank leads based on criteria such as potential deal size, recent interactions, or historical conversion rates. This approach ensures your team is always focusing on the most promising opportunities, significantly increasing the chances of success.
Match the Right Agent to the Right Lead
Data can play a crucial role in ensuring each lead is handled by the most suitable agent. MaxContact’s benchmark report indicates that the mean average revenue per call is £197.60, but nearly a quarter of teams generate much less, averaging £30 to £59 per call. This disparity suggests that proper lead-agent matching could significantly impact revenue.
Implementing a dialler with outbound skill-based routing that automatically matches leads with agents based on factors such as product knowledge, industry experience, or past performance with similar leads. This data-driven approach to call routing can dramatically improve conversion rates and average revenue per call.
Leverage Real-Time Analytics for Agile Decision Making
The world of sales is volatile, and simply waiting for end-of-day or weekly reports in this market just isn’t going to cut it. Empower your team leaders with real-time analytics dashboards that allow them to monitor performance as it happens and make immediate adjustments.
Real-time dashboards enable managers to spot trends or issues as they emerge, allowing for rapid response. This could mean reallocating resources, adjusting scripts, or providing on-the-spot coaching to underperforming agents. According to a study by McKinsey, companies that use customer analytics comprehensively report exceed their competition in terms of profit almost twice as often as companies that do not.
Utilise AI-Powered Speech Analytics for Deeper Insights
To truly understand what’s happening in your sales conversations, consider implementing AI-powered speech analytics. Tools like Spokn AI can analyse 100% of your customer interactions, providing insights that would be impossible to gather manually.
Speech analytics has emerged as a game-changing tool for outbound sales teams, transforming customer conversations into a goldmine of actionable insights. This technology analyses audio from customer calls, identifying key topics and detecting customer sentiment.
Key benefits for outbound sales teams include:
Enhanced Agent Training: Identify successful techniques and areas for improvement, allowing for targeted training programmes.
Customer Sentiment Analysis: Detect changes in tone and emotion, helping agents adapt their approach in real-time.
Quality Assurance at Scale: Analyse every call, ensuring comprehensive QA and quick identification of compliance issues.
Identifying Sales Opportunities: Recognise patterns in successful calls to refine sales scripts and strategies.
Competitor Intelligence: Flag mentions of competitors, providing valuable market insights.
Trend Identification: Quickly spot emerging trends in customer behaviour or common objections.
By implementing speech analytics, outbound sales teams can gain data-driven insights that lead to more effective strategies, improved customer experiences, and better business outcomes. Use these insights to identify common objections, spot successful sales techniques, and provide targeted coaching to your team. A recent study by Forrester found that companies using AI-driven speech analytics saw a 10% increase in customer satisfaction scores and a 15% improvement in first-call resolution rates.
With speech analytics, you’re not just collecting more data – you’re gaining the ability to understand and act on the nuances of every customer interaction, transforming your outbound sales operation into a truly data-driven powerhouse.
Foster a Culture of Continuous, Data-Driven Improvement
Creating a data-driven outbound sales team goes beyond implementing new technologies—it’s about fostering a culture where data informs every decision. This shift requires a multi-faceted approach that engages every level of your organisation.
Set clear, data-backed goals using industry benchmarks and your historical data. Aim to exceed average performance metrics, such as the 6.74% success per call rate revealed in our benchmark report. Make these goals visible and track progress regularly, ensuring everyone understands how their efforts contribute to team objectives.
Invest in data literacy across your team. Provide training programmes that help staff understand and interpret key metrics. This empowers them to make data-driven decisions in their daily work, whether it’s analysing call data or interpreting conversion rates.
Implement regular data review meetings. Use this time to discuss trends, celebrate successes, and collaboratively identify areas for improvement. Encourage team members to share insights they’ve gained from their own data analysis, fostering a culture of shared learning.
Use data to personalise coaching and development plans for each agent. This tailored approach not only leads to more effective improvements but also demonstrates the practical value of data in personal growth and career progression.
The Path to Data-Driven Success
Transforming your outbound sales team into a data-driven powerhouse is a journey, not a destination. It requires a commitment to continuous improvement, investment in the right tools, and a willingness to let data challenge assumptions and drive decision-making.
Implementing these strategies and leveraging advanced solutions can unlock the full potential of your outbound sales team. You’ll be able to optimise processes in real-time, provide more personalised experiences to prospects, and continuously refine your strategies based on concrete insights.
Remember, the goal isn’t just to collect data – it’s to use that data to drive meaningful improvements in performance, efficiency, and ultimately, sales success. With the right approach and tools, you can not only meet but exceed the benchmarks set by top-performing teams in the industry.
Are you ready to take your outbound sales to the next level? Get in touch with the team today and explore how MaxContact can help your sales become truly data-driven.
Blog
5 min read
How to Remove Guesswork from Contact Strategies with Conversation Analytics
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Contact centres are under pressure. Rising costs, increased competition, and shifting customer expectations mean teams are being asked to do more with less. The challenge? Making decisions based on incomplete data or small samples that don't represent the full picture.
In our recent webinar, we explored how conversation analytics helps contact centres move beyond guesswork and make data-driven decisions that improve performance, reduce costs, and deliver better customer experiences.
Four Forces Reshaping Contact Strategies
Contact centres face a perfect storm of challenges:
Rising costs and increasing competition The barrier to entry has lowered across most sectors, meaning competition can move with agility and quickly challenge established players. Every interaction is getting more expensive, whilst high attrition rates mean teams are working harder just to stand still.
Stagnating effectiveness Sales conversions and first call resolutions are trending downwards for many businesses. Conversations are becoming more complex and harder to resolve on the first attempt.
Growing commercial risk of poor CX Customers switch providers faster when service falls short. There's no loyalty in those first few minutes of an interaction. Many organisations struggle to route customers accurately, creating inconsistency and avoidable friction for both consumers and agents.
Shifting consumer behaviour AI call screening, digital buying journeys, and social search are making people harder to reach and changing where and how they want to engage with organisations.
t's not just one challenge – it's the combination of these forces that means traditional contact strategies need to evolve.
52% of contact centres report increased agent workloads this year – a 10-point rise since last year
Average agent churn rate sits at 31% – a costly cycle of recruitment and retraining
Agents are handling more conversations with more complexity and pressure than before
This level of attrition creates both financial costs and operational challenges, impacting team performance and customer experience.
The Sampling Problem
Many contact centres still rely on sampling to understand what's happening in their conversations. The traditional approach might involve listening to 2-3 calls per agent per month – a tiny fraction of overall activity.
When you're handling thousands or tens of thousands of conversations, sampling simply doesn't give you the full picture. You might miss critical trends, coaching opportunities, or compliance issues that only become visible when you analyse conversations at scale.
How Conversation Analytics Works
MaxContact's conversation analytics platform uses AI to analyse 100% of your conversations, not just a sample. Here's what that makes possible:
AI-powered call summaries Every conversation is automatically summarised, capturing key points, outcomes, and next steps. This saves hours of manual note-taking and makes it easy to understand what happened on any call at a glance.
Sentiment analysis Track customer and agent sentiment throughout conversations. Identify where interactions go well and where frustration builds, helping you understand the emotional journey of your customers.
Objection tracking Automatically identify common objections across all conversations. See which objections come up most frequently, how often they're successfully handled, and spot patterns that point to process improvements or product issues.
Custom saved views Create filtered views that surface the conversations that matter most to your team. Whether you're looking for calls with specific outcomes, objections, sentiment patterns, or compliance markers, saved views let you quickly find what you need without manually searching through thousands of recordings.
AI assistant prompts Ask questions of your conversation data in natural language. For example, "Show me calls where customers mentioned pricing concerns" or "Find conversations where agents successfully overcame objections." The AI assistant helps you explore your data and uncover insights without needing technical skills.
Real-World Use Cases
Coaching and development Identify specific coaching opportunities by finding conversations where agents struggle with particular objections or where sentiment deteriorates. Move from generic training to targeted coaching based on actual performance data.
Process improvements When you see patterns across hundreds of conversations – repeated objections, common confusion points, or friction in specific processes – you have clear evidence to drive process changes and improvements.
Compliance monitoring Analyse 100% of calls for compliance markers, not just a small sample. Identify potential issues quickly and address them before they become serious problems.
Understanding what drives success Compare conversations that result in positive outcomes with those that don't. What do successful agents do differently? What patterns emerge in conversations that lead to sales, resolved issues, or satisfied customers?
From Reactive to Proactive
The shift from sampling to comprehensive analysis changes how contact centres operate. Instead of reacting to issues after they've escalated or basing decisions on limited data, conversation analytics gives you:
Complete visibility into what's happening across all conversations
Early warning signals when trends start to emerge
Evidence-based decisions supported by comprehensive data
Measurable improvements that you can track over time
Getting Started with Conversation Analytics
Implementation includes working with MaxContact's product team to define success criteria and create custom views that align with your specific goals. Many organisations start with core use cases – coaching, compliance, objection handling – and then expand as they see the value and discover new applications for the platform.
The platform includes templates to get started quickly, but the real power comes from tailoring the analysis to your specific needs and challenges.
The Bottom Line
Contact centres can't afford to make decisions based on guesswork or small samples. When you're handling thousands of conversations, you need to understand what's happening at scale.
Conversation analytics removes the guesswork, giving you the insights you need to improve coaching, enhance processes, ensure compliance, and ultimately deliver better outcomes for both your team and your customers.
The 2025 UK Budget brings a series of labour-market, tax and business-rate shifts that directly affect contact centres - a sector powered by people and tight margins. Rising wage floors, frozen employer NIC thresholds, and new skills programmes will reshape workforce planning. Meanwhile, changes to business rates and investment incentives could reduce cost pressures for some operators.
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Budget 2025 - What Contact Centres Need to Know
The 2025 UK Budget brings a series of labour-market, tax and business-rate shifts that directly affect contact centres - a sector powered by people and tight margins. Rising wage floors, frozen employer NIC thresholds, and new skills programmes will reshape workforce planning.
Meanwhile, changes to business rates and investment incentives could reduce cost pressures for some operators.
For contact centres, the challenge is clear: absorb higher employment costs while accelerating efficiency, automation and employee development.
MaxContact’s view? This Budget reinforces what we already know - the most resilient contact centres will be those that invest in workforce experience, smarter technology, and data-led decision-making.
What the Budget Means for Contact Centres
If contact centres feel like they’re being asked to do more with less, Budget 2025 cements that reality. While many measures aim to ‘make work pay’, several place direct cost pressure on people-intensive industries - including ours. But with the right technology and operating model, these shifts can be turned into opportunities.
1. Wage Costs Are Rising - Again
From 1 April 2026, the National Living Wage (NLW) increases 4.1% to £12.71/hour (Budget clause - 4.22).
Minimum wage bands for younger workers rise even faster.
For contact centres - where large portions of the frontline workforce sit on or near the NLW - this is the single biggest cost impact.
What this means
Expect a higher annual wage bill, particularly for large multi-site operations.
Increased wage competition could make talent attraction harder.
Inefficient processes will become more expensive every year.
What to do
Use workforce optimisation and automation to reduce low-value tasks.
Improve agent experience to protect retention (reducing recruitment cost spikes).
Reforecast now - 2026 isn’t far away in budgeting terms.
2. Employer NIC Freeze = Higher Costs Hidden in Plain Sight
One detail in this year’s Budget that doesn’t make headlines - but really matters - is the freeze on the Employer National Insurance threshold until 2031 (Budget clause - 4.112)
Here’s what that means in simple terms:
The point at which employers start paying NIC for their staff will not increase for six years.
But wages will increase - especially with the higher National Living Wage coming in 2026.
So even though the NIC rate isn’t changing, employers will still pay more NIC each year as more of each salary is pushed above the frozen threshold.
For people-intensive sectors like contact centres, that’s a direct and unavoidable cost increase built into the system.
When labour costs rise automatically every year, efficiency becomes mission-critical.
Small improvements in forecasting, scheduling, and automation can deliver real financial impact at scale.
This is exactly where modern WFM, AI-assisted routing, and intelligent automation help organisations stay ahead of cost pressure.
3. Youth Guarantee Could Ease Recruitment Challenges
Government funding includes £1.5bn for skills and employment support, including paid six-month placements for 18–21-year-olds (Budget clause - 4.23–4.24 ).
Why it matters:
Contact centres can tap into subsidised entry-level talent.
It may become a strong pipeline for customer-facing roles with the right development pathways.
Build apprenticeship and early-careers programmes aligned to these schemes.
4. Business Rates Reset in 2026
Business rates multipliers drop in 2026-27 due to evaluation (Budget clause - 4.26 ). Transitional Relief and new multipliers offer further support.
For operators in office estates, this may bring modest cost relief - though location-specific impacts vary.
Review your estate profile. Many centres could achieve meaningful savings with the right appeals or optimisation.
5. Salary Sacrifice Tightening (from 2029)
NIC relief on pension-related salary sacrifice will be capped at £2,000 per year (Budget clause - 4.120).
For contact centres offering enhanced pension schemes, this could erode part of their employee-value proposition or increase employer costs.
6. Compliance and Employment Rights Focus Will Intensify
The Budget funds a new Fair Work Agency team targeting illegal working and employment-rights breaches from April 2026 (Budget clause - 4.103).
This signals tougher scrutiny on employment practices and contractor models common in outsourced service environments.
Ensure scheduling accuracy, break compliance and HR documentation are watertight - technology can remove risk here.
Key Takeaways
1. Cost pressures will rise - but predictable pressures are manageable.
Wage floors and frozen NIC thresholds mean labour cost inflation is here to stay. Smart forecasting, WFM, and automation will be essential.
2. Talent pipelines are evolving - seize the opportunity.
Government-backed youth placements and skills funding offer a low-cost hiring route if built into recruitment strategies early.
3. Compliance is tightening - operational visibility matters.
Clear audit trails, documented processes and accurate time-tracking will pay dividends as enforcement grows.
4. Estate costs may fall - review your footprint.
Business rates changes could offer relief for some operators, but only with proactive assessment.
Blog
5 min read
AI Call Screening: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How MaxContact Helps You Stay Ahead
Outbound contact teams are facing a new reality. The calls that used to connect are now being intercepted - not by answerphones, but by AI.
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The Challenge: Are Connect Rates Under Pressure?
Outbound contact teams are facing a new reality. The calls that used to connect are now being intercepted - not by answerphones, but by AI.
According to our latest research, 42.8% is the average connect rate for UK contact centres, with 38% of respondents reporting connect rates between 40-59% [Source: MaxContact KPI Benchmark Report 2025-26].
These numbers tell only part of the story. Behind them lies a fundamental shift in how customers interact with incoming calls, and outbound teams need to understand what's happening - and more importantly, how to adapt.
What Is AI Call Screening?
AI call screening is smartphone technology that uses avirtual assistant to answer calls from unknown numbers. When an incoming call arrives, the AI asks the caller for their name and purpose, then transcribes the response in real-time on the user's screen. The user can then decide whether to answer, decline, send a text reply, or report the call as junk.
How It Works for End Users
iOS Devices: When a call from an unknown number arrives, users see a "Screen Call" option. Tapping it triggers an automated voice that asks the caller for their name and reason for calling. The user doesn't hear the audio initially - instead, they see a live, on-screen transcript of the caller's response. Based on this transcript, they can accept, decline, reply via text, or report as junk. Users can configure their iPhone settings to automatically screen all unknown callers, send them directly to voicemail, or allow calls toring through normally. If they've spoken to that number before or have it saved, the call isn't classified as unknown and by passes.
On Android (Google Pixel) Devices: Users can manually tap a "Screen call" button or set the feature to automatically screen calls from spam, first-time callers, or all unknown numbers. When automatic screening is enabled, the phone may not even ring - a transcript of the screened call appears later in the call history. The Google Assistant informs the caller they're using a screening service, asks for their name and purpose,and can even ask clarifying questions like "Is it urgent?" on the user's behalf.
The Impact on Outbound Contact Strategies
Research on our customer base shows that currently, less than 0.37% of outbound calls are hitting iOS call screening services. While this figure suggests relatively low adoption now, industry analysts expect it to compound over time as the technology becomes embedded in everyday life.
Answer Machine to Call Screen Detection.
MaxContact use Answering Machine Detection (AMD) technology to identify when calls reach voicemail. AMD often identifies AI call screening as a standard answering machine.
When using automated dialling modes - predictive orprogressive dialling with AMD enabled - calls are flagged as "Answer Machine" and routed to the IVR plan for answering machines. If a contact answers the call while the IVR message is playing, they won't be connected to an agent. Instead, they'll see a transcript on their phone showing who called, as stated in the recorded message.
While AMD technology catches many screened calls, it isn't foolproof - a number of these calls may still get through to agents. If answer machine detection isn't enabled, agents will be connected to AI call screening when activated.
What This Means for Your Connect Rates
AI screening tools are acting as gatekeepers, allowing customers to decide whether calls are worth their time. For outbound teams, this might mean:
Reduced agent connection rates – More calls being intercepted before reaching the intended person
Wasted agent time – Agents speaking to AI screening services instead of real customers
Missed opportunities – Prospects receiving incomplete messages or no context about why you're calling
Brand perception risks – Silence, dropped calls, or robotic IVR messages creating negative first impressions
According to our benchmark data, the average contact rate (percentage of connected calls that reach the intended person) is 43.2%,with 39% of respondents reporting rates between 40-59%. As AI call screening adoption grows, maintaining these rates will require strategic adaptation.
MaxContact's Solution
At MaxContact, we're tackling AI call screening head-on with a comprehensive approach that combines smart automation with agent training. Our strategy ensures you maintain connect rates while delivering consistent, professional brand experiences.
The Automated Strategy
(When AMD Detects the Screener)
For calls that are correctly identified as answering machines by the system, MaxContact enables you to:
Use IVR Routing for Answering Machines Set upspecific IVR routing that plays when the system detects an answering machine. Your IVR should deliver a clear, purposeful message that explains who iscalling, why, and how to get back in touch.
This approach ensures that even when your call hits AIscreening, the person receives a complete, professional message they can reviewin their call transcript. It's transparent, compliant, and positions your brandas respectful of their time.
The Agent-Led Strategy
(When Screened Calls Reach Agents)
For calls that AMD doesn't catch - or if you don't use AMD - MaxContact recommends training agents to recognise and respond effectively:
Train Agents to Identify AI Screening Agents must be trained to recognise the distinct voice of an AI screening assistant, which sounds different from a genuine customer.
Deliver Personalised, Concise Messages When an agent identifies an AI screener, they shouldn't hang up. Instead, they should respond clearly and concisely with a personalised message. For example: "Hi, thisis Sarah from MaxContact. I'm calling for John regarding the information he requested on our website." If the person doesn't pick up, agents should leave details on how to get back in contact.
This gives the person screening the call the clear, concise information they need to decide to accept it.
How MaxContact's Platform Supports Your Outbound Strategy
MaxContact provides the tools you need to implement theabove strategies effectively:
Intelligent Dialling with AMD
Our automated dialling technology (predictive and progressive modes) includes industry-leading Answer Machine Detection. When AMD identifies a screened call, it's automatically routed to your configured IVR plan, ensuring consistent messaging.
Flexible IVR Routing
MaxContact's IVR capabilities let you create specific routing plans for answering machines. You can craft messages that clearly identify your organisation, explain the reason for calling, and provide callback information - all essential for making a positive impression when calls are screened.
Agent Coaching
Our Conversation Analytics features help management identify AI screening and uncover the openers that work best. Train agents on delivering clear, concise messages that maximise the chances of prospects accepting the call.
Comprehensive Reporting
Track how often your calls are hitting answering machines (including AI screening), monitor connect rates and measure the effectiveness of your strategies with MaxContact's reporting suite.
Best Practices: Adapting Your Contact Strategy Today
AI Call Screening is here, here's how to optimise your outbound strategy now:
1. Audit Your IVR Messages
Review the messages played when AMD detects an answering machine. Ensure they clearly state:
Who you are (company name, agent name if possible)
Why you're calling (the value proposition or reason)
How to get back in touch (phone number, website, email)
Recognise the sound and cadence of AI screening assistants
Deliver clear, personalised responses when they identify screening
Leave complete information if the person doesn't pick up
Role-playing exercises can be particularly effective here.
3. Leverage Branded Caller ID
Consider using branded caller ID services that display your company name on incoming calls. This transparency increases the likelihood that prospects will answer or trust the call even when screened.
4. Optimise Contact Timing
Use MaxContact's intelligent targeting to call prospects attimes they're more likely to answer. Our platform allows you to build lists with differing contact windows, reducing the chances of hitting screening technology.
5. Embrace Omnichannel
Don't rely solely on voice. Use MaxContact's omnichannel capabilities to follow up via SMS, WhatsApp, email, or web chat when calls don't connect. Multi-channel strategies significantly improve overall contactrates.
6. Monitor and Measure
Track your connect rates, contact rates, and conversion rates over time. Use MaxContact's reporting suite to identify trends and measure the impact of your AI call screening strategies.
The Bottom Line: Stay Ahead of the Curve
AI call screening isn't going away—if anything, adoption will accelerate. But with the right strategy and technology, your outbound teams can not only maintain performance but improve it.
MaxContact's approach—combining intelligent automation with agent training—gives you the tools to adapt now.
Remember: Successful teams will adapt to AI call screening with transparency, branded caller IDs, and pre-call context, working with AI to increase responsiveness and to maximise every opportunity.
Ready to Future-Proof Your Contact Strategy?
If you're concerned about how AI call screening is affecting your connect rates get in touch with MaxContact today.
Our team of contact centre experts can audit your current strategy, identify opportunities for improvement, and show you how our platformhelps you stay ahead of emerging technologies.
