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As political season is almost here, you can bet your bottom dollar that predictive dialers are being readied to deliver individual candidate’s messages in hopes of claiming the highest honor you can attain within the United States of America—president. This robust dialer is perfect for any sized call center but can still cater to small verticals such as insurance agents who only have one or two sales people. In addition, other companies such as home remodeling, lawn services, and industries that have extremely small outbound dialing needs can leverage this dialer solution to reduce costs while simultaneously increasing efficiency.

SpitFire is a major company in this space whose dialer boasts both predictive and preview dialing capabilities, so customers can select which mode best fits their needs.

“It not only increases their call volume, it also gives them a great way to track their calling, rework lists, tie in with their favorite CRM applications, and much more. It blows away manual dialing on so many levels, even for the smallest number of agents,” Steve Browning, sales account representative, SpitFire commented.

However, ways to interact with a large group of people in a short period of time powered by predictive dialers weren’t always as simple. Getting in our time machine and going back 25 years to a time where I was just beginning to walk, we see that in the ‘80s the DECtalk single-line system was all the rage. Well, besides teased hair and spandex. This box offered users access to text-to-speech technology, had a single phone jack and could successfully make phone calls while simultaneously interacting with the called party via touch tones. In fact, the company behind this first of its kind dialer, IAT, used DECtalk to send out SmartTalk broadcast messages.

A downside of this product was that it had no “answer detection.” According to a recent article, the system would dial, wait 10-15 seconds and then proceed to start saying the intended message whether or not a live person was on the other end. When the SmartBox was released for detecting a ringing phone, the industry again was revolutionized.

In later years, a multi-line DECtalk cabinet was launched, with the functionality need to call up to eight phone lines at the same time. This was the first step towards IAT’s SmartDial product being able to connect agents directly to consumers and the official start of the wide world of predictive dialing.

Pushing forward into the now, innovative dialers offer countless advantages for on-premise compared to hosted solutions. First, there is a much higher level of security within the database, keeping your most important confidential material safe at all times; the flexibility to use and save LD cost with all types of phone lines including SIP, Ti, PRI and Analog; complete control of all aspects of your predictive dialer such as system settings, dial ratios, drop rate control, access to the do not call registry and reporting; and the ability to interface with any CRM or vertical market solution.