Business services, which may be outsourced, help companies engaged in telemarketing, customer support, and marketing research do their work faster. Technology helps these business service providers automate most of their systems, particularly telephony, to ensure faster delivery of a contracted service. An outbound calling system works in tandem with a live agent, predicting the availability of a human agent who will process and finish the call.

Processing Outbound Calls 

Automatic dialing for an outbound calling system is similar to the functions of a robodialer or autodialer. However, there is still a difference. A predictive dialer, which the automatic outbound calling system is called, waits for the connection to be established before it passes the call to a human agent.

The predictive dialer has several features that distinguish it from other systems. It virtually eliminates voicemails, disconnected numbers, no-answers, and busy signals. A predictive dialer utilizes call metrics, and it is this feature that allows the system to predict the availability of a live agent to continue the call.

When the call center is busy, and most of the agents are engaged, the predictive dialer either slows down or stops temporarily until the system detects that the agents are close to ending their calls. The dialer is likewise capable of dialing multiple numbers at once. This ensures that it can connect to the right number of leads to maximize the utilization of agents.

It has been 30 years since the introduction of predictive dialers, which started as a debt collection solution for the banking industry. While they began as a hardware solution, many firms now have cloud-based predictive dialer software. Many companies prefer hosted dialers because it lowers their initial capital expenses and, at the same time, reduces their IT expenses.

How Does the System Work?

As the name implies, a predictive dialer is capable of predicting when live agents are available to take the incoming call. The automatic dialer does the dialing on behalf of the agent. It works in parallel with the agent, and its algorithms allow the system to identify the time that an agent is likely to take in order to finish their current call and automatically makes another on their behalf. With the system, agent downtime is effectively minimized.  

A predictive dialer is a time-saver. Manual dialing takes about 30 seconds, and in the manual dialing mode, there is always the possibility of only one call connecting out of three or four called numbers. A predictive dialer calculates the average number of dials and the average length of a call it will make to establish a connection. With these features, the predictive dialer optimizes the dialing option to enable agents to handle most calls.  

Companies That Will Benefit from Predictive Dialers

Predictive dialers are developed to support phone utilization and agent productivity.

Call centers that handle debt collection, market research, customer service follow-ups, and telemarketing all benefit significantly from using predictive dialers, as they can maximize the time their agents spend engaged on a call, and circumvent the need for downtime between each one.