Your reports are only as good as your dispositions
Dispositions are the least glamorous thing on a floor and the foundation of everything you measure. Why they rot, what a good list looks like, and why making them mandatory is worth one unpopular week.
The short answer
Every report you run is built from what agents recorded at the end of each call. If those outcomes are rushed or skipped, the reports are confident and wrong. Keep the list short and make the outcome required.
Ask a floor manager what they measure and you will hear about connect rates, talk time and conversions. Ask where those numbers come from and the answer is always the same. They come from what the agent clicked at the end of the call.
That click is the disposition. It is the least interesting part of the job and it decides whether anything you measure is true.
How the data goes bad
Dispositions rot in a predictable way, and it is rarely because anyone is careless.
An agent finishes a call. Another one is waiting. The disposition list has twenty-six options and four of them could apply. Picking the right one takes a few seconds of thought. Picking the first one takes none.
Do that a hundred times a day, across a team, for a month. Your reports now show a large pile of whatever sits at the top of the list. Nobody lied. The system just made the wrong thing easy.
The tell
If one disposition accounts for a suspiciously large share of your outcomes, look at where it sits in the list before you conclude anything about your market. Position in a dropdown is a real force.
What a good list looks like
The instinct is to add options so the data is richer. It backfires. A long list is slower to use, so it gets used worse, so the data gets poorer. Fewer, clearer options beat more, finer ones every time.
- Keep it short. Roughly eight to twelve options suits most campaigns.
- Make each one obviously different. If two could apply to the same call, merge them.
- Use the agent's words, not the reporting team's.
- Separate what happened on the call from what should happen next.
- Review the list every few months and delete what nobody picks.
That fourth point is worth dwelling on. Sold and call back Tuesday are different kinds of fact. One describes the outcome, the other schedules an action. Mixing them into one list is how you end up unable to answer either question cleanly.
A disposition list is a survey you make your agents fill in a hundred times a day. Design it like one.
Why we make it mandatory
TelVox requires an outcome before the next call arrives. Agents do not love this in week one. It is still the right design, for a simple reason.
An optional field gets skipped when things are busy. Busy days are the days with the most calls, the most sales and the most complaints. They are the days you most need the data. Optional dispositions mean your record is thinnest exactly where it matters most.
After a week or so the objection disappears, because the pause is short and the payoff shows up in the first report anyone trusts.
What good dispositions unlock
Once outcomes are reliable, several things start working that were previously guesswork.
Retry rules can key off them, so a callback comes back at the right time and a wrong number retires instead of being dialled again. Coaching gets specific, because you can see which agent hits which outcome and listen to those calls. And list buying becomes measurable: you can tell which source produced conversations rather than just numbers.
None of that is a feature you switch on. It is the return you get from a few seconds of accuracy, repeated a hundred times a day, by everyone.
Common questions
- What is a call disposition?
- The outcome an agent records at the end of a call: sold, callback, not interested, wrong number, and whatever else your process needs. It is how the system knows what happened, and it feeds reports and retry rules.
- How many dispositions should a campaign have?
- Few enough that an agent can choose without reading. Around eight to twelve works for most floors. Long lists get filled with whichever option sits at the top.
- Should recording a disposition be mandatory?
- Yes. If it is optional it gets skipped on busy days, which are exactly the days you most want data about. TelVox requires an outcome before the next call arrives.
See the real thing