Outbound Predictive Dialer Featured Articles

With so much happening in technology in general – and the call center space in particular – these days, it’s tough to keep up. Do you ever find yourself nodding in agreement when someone talks about a particular technology, but secretly hoping you’re not asked about it? Relax, we all do; it’s all changing and growing faster than anyone ever imagined it would.

For example, one area getting a lot of looks these days is “Outbound Predictive Dialers.” Here’s a quick tutorial so you can understand what this is all about; just in case someone asks.

According to TechTarget.com, “A predictive dialer is a telephone control system that automatically calls a list of telephone numbers in sequence, screening out no-answers, busy signals, answering machines and disconnected numbers while predicting at what point a human caller will be able to handle the next call. Predictive dialers are commonly used for telemarketing, surveys, appointment confirmation, payment collection and service follow-ups. Sellers of predictive dialer systems claim that they greatly increase caller productivity. The phone calls you receive from ‘no one there’ are often predictive dialer calls in which a manual caller isn't ready yet.”

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Fortunately, cloud contact center software company inContact has updated this technology, enabling a predictive dialer to know immediately when someone picks up, so the caller can engage the prospective customer right away, thereby lessening the chance of a hang-up.

“With our predictive dialer system, you maximize agent productivity by placing multiple calls per agent,” inContact says. “The dialing pace is carefully balanced by considering the number of agents, list characteristics and legal regulations. Progressive dialing is particularly good for business to business campaigns and offers great agent productivity without the risk of abandoning. Preview dialing combines automated dialing benefits with the chance for agent to preview contact information before accepting or declining the call.”

In short, a predictive dialer is programmed to predict when a human caller is available to pick up a call. Predictive dialers can also measure the number of available agents, available lines, and other factors to adjust outbound calls accordingly, which in turn deliver a high level of mathematically efficiency to use in call centers.