Call centers have been around for decades. They have been most helpful for telemarketing, customer care, etc. Call centers are vastly known for cloud calling which involves a lot of outbound phone calls.
Agents are constantly making calls to prospects in an effort to turn them into real customers. Agents have to manually dial phone numbers repeatedly in order to make as many calls as possible but such a process is exhausting and irritating because there is no guarantee that all prospects will pick up the calls.
But things changed with the introduction of automatic dialing systems. Most cloud-based call center software has a feature called predictive dialer which is a game-changer for the cold calling process.
The main purpose of a predictive dialer is to keep the flow of outbound phone calls steady by dialing phone numbers automatically for the next appropriate agent who is available to handle the call.
With this automated process, agents don’t have to manually dial numbers which directly impacts agents’ performance & productivity.
Most call centers have seen a rise in the productivity of agents and an increase in the number of calls made every day.
A Predictive dialer in a call center is an intelligent feature that uses powerful algorithms to calculate the availability of agents using the historical stats of each agent. It assigns a call to an agent on the basis of call session time, call drop ratio, call wait time, etc.
It uses an algorithm and previous call statistics to predict the time it will take each agent to complete a call and the agent’s availability and then dials the following number accordingly. Your agents will only receive live calls from your clients as the predictive dialer system recognizes answering machines, dropped calls, and unanswered calls.
The predictive dialer connects you with only successful interviewers, meaning that you are required to take a few moments off from your routine activities. You can edit the maximum number of simultaneous calls and the dial level from the dialer dashboard.
A predictive dialer works based on its pacing algorithm. The dialer uses a pacing algorithm to determine how many calls to place based on how many agents are available.
An agent should be connected to the next call as soon as they finish the previous one. You must avoid having your contacts wait on the other end of the line to speak to the agent. A predictive dialer uses pacing algorithms to ensure they are dialing at the correct rate and make sure contacts are quickly connected to a live agent.
In other words, it tries to strike a balance between how many free agents you have available and how many outbound calls to place.
Customers usually lose their patience after a few seconds, so you only have a few seconds to earn them back. The best way to maximize the efficiency of your calling process is to keep the abandonment rate as low as possible. Each abandoned call results from a failed dialing setup, and your predictive dialer should automatically handle this.
The whole purpose of predictive dialers is to save you time and money. A predictive dialer allows agents to spend more time speaking with prospects by automatically dialing through numbers until it reaches a live call.
Predictive Dialers respond quickly to pick-ups by directing the call to a free agent as soon as they are picked up. It can predict the best time of day to route calls through to your agents by feeding back abandoned call rates, which reduces the possibility of abandoned calls happening.
Predictive dialers are most beneficial to call centers with high call volumes. It is necessary to have a large number of agents available to run the pacing algorithm effectively. It works better with more agents available.
The system can handle the calls on its own, but it must be informed when a certain number of agents are available. These dialers require precise information due to their ability to perform activities down to fractions of a second.
Generally, a dialer automatically dials a phone number or a set of phone numbers to make outbound calls and then routes each call to a call center representative. Most call centers use dialers as a part of their outbound marketing strategy to grow their customer base.As we already know, a predictive dialer is a most commonly used dialer in call centers but it is not the only one. Different cloud-based phone systems have introduced different types of dialers over the years. The following are the two popular dialers that rival predictive dialers:
Power Dialer
A power dialer is a call center solution that automatically dials a phone number after agents complete their previous call. When an agent is finished with a phone call, it grabs the next phone number on the list and makes the call.
Agents get an option to drop a pre-recorded voicemail if the outbound call is answered. If any dialed phone number is busy, unanswered, or disconnected then the power dialer drops those calls and moves to the next phone number.
Auto Dialer
As you can guess from the name itself, an auto dialer is a call center solution that automatically dials the phone number from a given contact list. It dials the numbers in sequential order.
It automatically drops a pre-recorded voicemail when an answering machine is detected. This dialer is suitable for small teams or remote working teams of a company.
It is essential to promptly place calls and reach out to prospective customers, especially in our fast-paced modern world.
With Vital PBX cloud-hosted, predictive dialing solutions, not only will your agents spend less time putting in calls, but they will be able to place and answer calls from anywhere in the world.