How a predictive dialer works

This article is for people who are setting up a new contact centre for their Sales / Support teams. In this article we try to understand How Predictive Auto Dialling works, and whether it is actually suitable for your setup or not.

What is Predictive Dialling ? In many call (or call Center like setups), automated is used for dialing to customers, where a computer has a list of prospects or customers and it dials to that number and hands over to the call Center agent.

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Myths about predictive dialer:

1. Predictive dialing can be used for incoming calls also.
2. Predictive dialing is final solution for increasing Agent efficiency.
3. Customer experience will increase, if we use Predictive dialing

Nothing can be more ignorant. In a call Center human resource is the most costliest resource, and best utilisation of human resource ensures profitability. So management tries to make sure that no one is sitting idle, or he gets a call as soon as he is free. Now if the team is small this monitoring can be done manually also, but this cannot be true for larger teams (having more than 200 agents). Predictive dialling is the best solution in this situation. Let us examine how predictive dialing works and what are its requirements, advantages and disadvantages.

How Predictive dialer works:

• There is a computer (dialer-server) which has a list of prospective customers.
• Now the dialer dials to those people one by one, and if they receive call, it is transferred to the agent who is free.
• There is a predetermined algorithm based on which dialer server determines, at what frequency the server should dial out the numbers.
• So that customers don’t have to wait and Users are not free, or sitting idle
• The agent is already online (always), receives the call directly, remember he does not hear the ring, when he receives the call, the customer is already live on other side.

Requirements for predictive dialer:

• First (and most important) requirement is that you will require a trained and qualified System Administrator, because managing Predictive Dialler server is too complicated.
• Second requirement is that our staff has to be trained to behave like a call Center agent, he does not hear the ring, he has to extremely alert to receive the call and start talking.
• How does server determine the frequency of the calls to be made, so that resource utilisation is optimised. which depends on many parameters like durations of call, time taken for after call work ACW, Quality of leads etc
• This calculation becomes very important, because if server dials too quickly and if agents are not free to receive the call, then customer gets annoyed, and if server dials out too slowly, then our agents are sitting idle and we make losses.

Disadvantage for smaller call Center if they use predictive dialer.

1. Predictive dialing system works on law of averages, which works out correctly only when there is large number of user agents.
2. Calculating the frequency of calls to be made cannot be determined easily, it requires very detailed analysis and deep experience of the process. This is some times very very costly.
3. Cost of predictive dialing software is too high to be absorbed by a very small team.
4. Also smaller teams are generally not very well trained to handle call centre operations, and for predictive dialing environment, you need well trained team, and a very efficient floor manager.

So, if predictive dialing is not the solution, then how do you make sure that you get optimum output from your team. The solution is – don’t try to get the results in real time, instead try to get results twice or thrice a day and measure productivity.

In summary, you require predictive dialer only if

• You have an outbound calling. (remember for inbound calling you don’t required any kind of dialing)
• You have a fairly large team (more than 200 agents)
• Your process is extremely well defined, and backed by a very easy to use and sophisticated software to help user agents handle the calls.
• You are ready to spend that extra large amount for predictive dialing software.

For smaller setups, Enjay synapse is the best solutions, as it can also integrate with many CRM software.