Interactive Data/Castel Announce Skip Tracing Partnership

Interactive Data, a provider of integrated contact center solutions and Castel, Inc., a leading supplier of dialing solutions, today announced the signing of a co-marketing agreement. Under terms of the agreement, Interactive Data will offer the call center marketplace a predictive dialing solution based on Castel Connects® that also features a seamlessly integrated real time skip tracing capability to automatically replace not-in-service telephone numbers in an outbound calling list with accurate ones.

“Combined with the ability of Castel Connects to validate a 300,000 number database in 10 minutes, the skip tracing capabilities of the integrated Interactive Data solution will translate into an unprecedented ability to get outbound dialing campaigns fully up and running in minutes rather than days,” said John Schaeffer, President of Interactive Data. “With other dialing solutions, initial validation processes are much slower than with Castel Connects, and skip tracing is a time-intensive task that often requires five to seven days before updated numbers are available for processing. As a result, campaigns and results are delayed. But with the combined Castel/Interactive Data solution, dialing databases are completely updated in real time.”

The Castel Connects predictive dialer leverages its patent-pending ISDN technology to determine if telephone numbers in a database are current, in a process called scrubbing. As part of this process, numbers that are not-in-service are segmented into a separate file which is then automatically compared against a master list of millions of accurate telephone numbers. In minutes, “bad” numbers are replaced with “good” ones, and the file routed back to Castel Connects where they are seamlessly integrated with the original scrubbed outbound dialing list.

“Castel has partnered with Interactive Data to ensure that our joint customers have ready access to the predictive dialing solutions that meet the need for high performance and accuracy,” said Nick Kimball, Castel’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “The Castel-based solution offered by Interactive Data empowers call centers to get the accurate telephone numbers needed to complete effective outbound dialing campaigns in record time, and to ensure that campaigns are as responsive as possible to changing market demands.”